Supporting Caroline Harris (RHUL)

The AWW-STRUCK virtual day seminar on 21 May 2021 focused on Cute Studies in the Arts and Humanities, aiming to develop interdisciplinary and intercollegiate discussions and establish the collaborating institutions (Royal Holloway and the University of Birmingham) as a hub for this growing field. The seminar hosted three panels and a film screening, with papers from international professors, ECRs and PGR students based in the UK, Japan, Nigeria, Sweden, Canada and the USA, including four from Royal Holloway. 

The event was co-organised by Caroline Harris (RHUL) and Dr Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham), with a linked online exhibition curated by RHUL graduate Astra Papachristodoulou. The day was introduced by Professor Redell Olsen (Poetics Research Centre, RHUL) and Dr Megan Cavell (Animal Studies Reading Group, University of Birmingham) and began with papers from Professor Joshua Paul Dale, co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and Professor Lesley Millar, who introduced her exhibition ‘Kawaii: Curating the Japanese Culture of Cute’. A recording of the second panel is available on the AWW-STRUCK website.

The online exhibition features work by 20 visual poets and includes pieces by three Royal Holloway PGRs. The exhibition is available to view on Poem Atlas, while these poetic pieces, alongside critical and creative texts by the seminar contributors, are collected in the AWW-STRUCK book.    

The event was enthusiastically received, with highly positive feedback on its breadth and importance for attendees’ research. One commented: ‘I loved hearing from both academics and poets/artists. The cross-conversation was very stimulating.’ Another said: ‘‘The atmosphere was really brilliant; participants were genuinely excited to be there, engage, and get into conversation, and the speakers were so passionate about each other’s work as well as their own…’ 

For more information see the AWW-STRUCT website:

https://awwstruckseminar.wordpress.com/

Organisers: Ruth Cruickshank (LLC), Judith Hawley (English), Andrew Jotischky (History), Stella Moss (History), Erica Rowan (Classics)

Wednesday 19^th and Thursday 20^th May 2021 on MS Teams

This HARI-funded online symposium explored constructs of the inedible, indigestible and unpalatable across historical periods and contemporary cultures, across the School of Humanities and across College. It explored the value judgements, power relations and cultural and economic imperatives that fuel perceptions of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable, raising questions of sustainability, integration, conflict and competition.

By addressing the objectives of the College’s Sustainable and Thriving Communities catalyst, the symposium acted both as a scoping exercise and as a showcase for current and prospective research, bringing together, celebrating and cross-fertilising intersecting research interests across the Royal Holloway community. The Keynote address was made by Professor Klaus Dodds (Geography), College Lead on the Sustainability and Thriving Communities catalyst.

supporting The Institute for Modern Languages Research in London

The Mediated Memories of Responsibility seminar series brought together scholars working on the cultural representation of the violent past of the twentieth century across a variety of media and cultures. The seminars examined the contribution of cultural products to exposing the crimes of perpetrators and disseminating a sense of responsibility for the past in relation to events such as colonialism, wars, and dictatorships. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series explored the construction of the idea of responsibility for past wrongdoings across textual and visual media while addressing ethical questions stemming from the study of past atrocities. Bringing together scholars working across the disciplines, the event aimed to foster a cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches in Modern Languages, History, and Memory Studies.

Programme of the series:

Session 1: 18 November 2020 3.00 pm

Max Silverman (University of Leeds): Impure Memory

Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku): Non-Subsumptive Memory and Jenny Erpenbeck’s «Gehen, ging, gegangen»

Donald Bloxham (University of Edinburgh): Beyond Neutrality: Historianship and Moral Judgement

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 2: 20 January 2021, 3.00 pm

Claire Gorrara (University of Cardiff): Family Legacies: Taking intergenerational responsibility for the crimes and losses of the Second World War in the graphic novel

Emiliano Perra (University of Winchester): End of Empire (Channel 4, 1985) and public memory of decolonisation in Britain

Stephanie Bird (UCL): ‘A tacit agreement’: Responsibility and perpetration in the work of Imre Kertész

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 3: 10 March 2021, 3.00 pm

Uilleam Blacker (UCL): ‘The colonisers decided everything’: Responsibility, victimhood and the Holocaust in Ukrainian memory culture

Federica Mazzara (University of Westminster): Mediating memory of migration: The role of art and activism

Damien Short (School of Advance Study UoL): Culture, genocide and (in)justice in Australia

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 4: 19 May 2021, 3.00 pm

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (University of Warwick): Developing a Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War: Public History and Memory

Diana Popa (Tallin University): Spectacular provocations: Spectatorship and Responsibility in Radu Jude’s Historical Films

Charles Burdett (IMLR) and Gianmarco Mancosu (University of Cagliari): Ghosts of Empire: Transnational legacies of Italy’s colonial past

Click here to watch the recording!

supporting The Centre for the GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway

The Centre for the GeoHumanities was delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham) to give the 5th Denis Cosgrove Lecture.

Geography and Vision are key words in the works of Denis Cosgrove, together the title of his Inaugural Lecture at Royal Holloway in 1996 and that of a career framing collection of essays published in 2008.  This lecture explored meetings of material and imaginative worlds in the works of painter and poet William Blake (1757-1827), and their implications for landscape as a field of vision. It addressed Blake’s representation of London and its environs in the early nineteenth century as it was transformed into a major imperial city, as well as images of cottages, cornfields and cathedrals.  Visionary Geography located Blake’s work in relation to wider currents of book and image making in his own time, including topography and cartography, and in terms of its long standing influence, for envisioning English landscape and its possible worlds.          

The lecture was supported by the RHUL Department of Geography, The Humanities and Arts Research Institute and the Leverhulme Trust. 

Supporting Agnieszka Studzinska & Edward Brookes in the Departments of English and Geography

In an exploration of urban politics and city spaces, ‘In the Absence of Visible Walls’ discussed urban regeneration through the lens of ‘the wall’. The wall is visceral and fundamental element of architecture, a 3D representation of the line. It demarcates, it is a boundary, it is architecture making a mark, a point of transition, a division. The wall creates space, it creates community, it is a device of control and power. We therefore position the wall as an architectural device that can be used to explore how we engage in notions of memory, loss, homes, demolition and boundaries. The project aimed to bring together the historical narratives of erasure, destruction and gentrification of ‘Robin Hood Gardens’, a housing estate in East London and the space of ‘Manufaktura’ and the boundaries of Litzmannstadt Ghetto in the city of Lodz in Poland (a ghetto that was created by the Germans during the Second World War in the Old Town and Baluty districts of Lodz) through the notion of ‘the wall’. It fused a dialogue between cultural geography and creative writing, text, film and image in an attempt to highlight the stories of sites, areas/spaces that have undergone and/or are currently undergoing change.

Supporting Victoria Mapplebeck in the Department of Media Arts

The Waiting Room is a VR Journey which tells the story of a breast cancer diagnosis (from the perspective of patient and film-maker) from treatment to recovery. 

In 2017, Victoria Mapplebeck was diagnosed with breast cancer. As part of her research project, she gained access to her tumour samples. Looking though the microscope at her own cancer cells inspired her to create a film and VR project which would challenge the language of illness and the cultural myths that surround this disease.

Using 360 video, real time audio and CGI, the audience experienced the emotions of a cancer diagnosis from the outside in. 360 sequences capture waiting rooms, operating theatres and chemo bays. The Waiting Room explored illness and mortality from a patient’s POV, putting under the microscope what we can and what we can’t control when our bodies fail us.

Victoria Mapplebeck is a Professor in Digital Arts. Her research explores how multi-platform documentary has evolved since the late 1990s, from online interactive narratives to the immersive experiences offered by non fiction VR. Over recent years,  Victoria has begun to specialise in smartphone production and making short form online video with impact. 

Supporting Media Arts

18 June 2019, Senate House, London

Organiser: Prof Olga Goriunova

A Day with Rosi Braidotti brought together Royal Holloway researchers, both established and junior, who engage with Braidotti's work, followed by response by Braidotti herself. 

Rosi Braidotti emerged in the early 1980s as one of the strongest voices in feminism, philosophy, cultural politics, epistemology and ethics. Her book Nomadic Subjects established the project of nomadism that reformulated the notions of identity and subjectivity and engaged with transformative politics. Feminist nomadism critiqued the unitary subject, Euro-centrism, and acted to reactivate the dynamics between empowerment and entrapment through engaging with different levels of power and desire. The philosophical project of nomadism, further developed in Metamorphoses and Transpositions to engage with cultural politics and ethics connected to further work in eco-feminism and science and technology studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Her cartography of the human condition in the times of advanced capitalism evolved into her contribution to the development of the posthumanities, where The Posthuman continued to unfold the transversal and relational vision of the subject, while affirming an empirical project of transformative ethics based on such ontological relationality. Posthuman ethical subjects suggest a transformation for the human sciences - humanities today. Offering a political - and an institutional - programme, the new humanities emphasise the potential of the posthuman. Braidotti’s work has reactivated disciplines, arguing for a new form of knowledge and ethics and has had lasting influence on generations of researchers in numerous fields of study. 

Supporting The Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway

26th-27th April 2019

This project drew together colleagues across disciplines within the Centre for Victorian Studies (CVS) to examine how we research radicalism and reform in the long nineteenth century (1776-1914). Activities focused particularly on how digital technologies can help researchers excavate and analyse radical and reformist texts, networks and activities, presenting their findings to academic and non-academic audiences. Central to these activities has been a project to digitize the correspondence of Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a founder of Bedford College. Reid is a central but neglected figure in Victorian reform networks in Britain and transnationally. The College holds between 500 and 1000 letters, mostly to Reid from correspondents in Britain, Europe and the US that illuminate the complex connections within Victorian reform culture. 

Supporting the departments of Geography, and Drama, Theatre & Dance

Organisers: Dr David Overend and Professor Danielle Schreve.