Term 1 2012

Week 2 Wednesday 10th October 2012, 1pm, H502 - Dr Pablo Mukherjee

'The Dead Who Did Not Die: Rudyard Kipling and Cholera'

Week 5 Wednesday 31st October 2012, 1pm, The Writers' Room - Dr Ashok Malhotra, British Academy Fellow

Performing Imperial Masculinity: William Moncrieff's The Cataract of the Ganges: or, Saving the Rajah's Daughter (1823)'

Week 7 Wednesday 14th November 2012, 1pm, H502 - Dr Georgina Green, Research Fellow

The safety of the people is the sovereign law” (Joseph Gerrald, 1793): the idiom of exception in radical discourse of the 1790s’. Week 9 Wednesday 28th November 2012, 5.15pm Location: R0.3/4 Ramphal Building - Dr Ned Curthoys, Research Fellow, Australian National University

‘“Virtue is Eloquent”: On the role of literary narrative in Hannah Arendt’s evocation of worldly political virtues’

Term 2 2013

Week 5: Wednesday 6th February 2013, 1:15pm, H502 - Dr Jonathan Skinner 

"A Ghost is Spouted Up": Theoretical Approaches to Songs of the Humpback Whale -- with Soundings in "Animal Prosody": If Whales Sing like Catbirds, Can Poems Too?

In this talk, drawn from an ongoing writing project, in the wake of research conducted with the "sound" working group at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, I'll consider, first, some theoretical approaches to thinking about the culture and practice of recording, collecting, archiving, studying, and variously rendering "animal sounds"--drawn from the intersection of "sound studies" and the configuration of theories sometimes known as "posthumanities." (My case study is Roger Payne's early-seventies "platinum" recording, Song of the Humpback Whale.) In the second part of the talk, I'll offer some preliminary thoughts on what a "posthumanist prosody" might look and sound like, considering bird life in poetry by Emily Dickinson, Maggie O'Sullivan, and Nathaniel Mackey. I'll play you some animal sounds, and we'll talk about what whales, catbirds, and poems might share in common.

Week 7: Wednesday 20th February 2013,1pm, H502, - Dr Rashmi Varma

‘Primitive Accumulation: The Cultural Economy of Indigenous Art in India’

Week 10: Wednesday 13th March 2013, 1pm, H502 - Prof Debjani Ganguly (Australian National University)

‘What is the “World” in World Literature?’