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Lecture Archive

Visiting Speaker - Corinne Jaber

On 17 October 2018, the German-born Syrian/Canadian writer/director and actor Corinne Jaber visited the university for a day of events part-funded by the HRC. Jaber is a Molière-award winning performer (Best Actress, 2001) and a distinguished director; her productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Comedy of Errors made international headlines in 2005 and 2012 respectively for their ground-breaking work with actors from post-Taliban Kabul. Jaber is currently touring Oh My Sweet Land, a one-woman play about the crisis in Syria described by The Observer as “both an intense theatrical experience, and an important act of bearing witness”.

Jaber spoke about this work as part of the Department of English and Comparative Literature’s research seminar series, attracting a large audience of staff and postgraduates from across the university. She then led a four-hour workshop on ‘Storytelling in Theatre’ with an interdisciplinary group of 18 students. In the evening, she gave a Q&A following a screening of her Afghan production of The Comedy of Errors.

The day of events was also part-funded by Warwick’s new Partners in Performance network, and it provided a valuable opportunity for students and colleagues from different departments to get together for interdisciplinary discussion, practical exploration and networking. Jaber is in the early stages of planning a collaboration with Warwick in which the university will participate in the research and development process for her new play about memories of the Partition of India; her visit on 17 October was thus an important first step in nurturing this collaboration.


Visiting Speaker - Professor Jack Zipes

Professor Jack Zipes visit to the university was organised by IAS Early Careers Fellow Emma Parfitt. The event was funded collaboratively across the university by an IAS residential fellowship, the support of the Humanities Research Centre and the Departments of Sociology and English & Comparative Literary Studies (raising a total of £1733.19). The funds were used for a number of academic and public engagement events.

On the 31st of May Professor Zipes and Emma Parfitt were panel members at Loughborough University to debate the role of storytelling in education (32 members of the public, students and academics attended). In addition, 12 PhD students from Sociology, English and Comparative Literature studies, WBS and Sociology registered for a ‘how to publish workshop’ on Warwick Campus. The discussion was recorded to be used in a collaborative Critical Reflections essay between four PhD students for the IAS journal Exchanges.

On the 1st of June Priscilla Pizzato, a French documentary maker from Paris, conducted a two hour interview with Professor Zipes for a documentary about Cinderella for the French-German channel Arte. This was followed by a public talk and wine reception in the Ramphal building entitled 'Childism and the Grimms' Fairy Tales, or How We Have Happily Rationalized Child Abuse through Storytelling.' This was attended by 40 students, members of the public and academics from English and Comparative Literature Studies, Sociology, WBS, Centre for Education Studies, and School of Law, Social Sciences and Communications at Wolverhampton University.

On the 2nd of June a collaboration between Emma Parfitt and Shiela Bates, Coventry Childrens’ Champion, enabled a two hour storytelling and drama workshop to take place in the Coventry city council building, Earl Street. Professor Jack Zipes led 22 young people through creative writing, drama and storytelling excercises. This was received very well by parents. For example, one father talked to Professor Zipes, Emma and Sheila after the workshop and asked that the storytelling and drama workshop be part of a regular event to allow more children to attend, especially those who needed help with writing skills. Sheila Bates was interested in continuing a discussion about this with the university which has been brought to the attention of the widening participation team at Warwick.


Wednesday 15th May 2013 - Roberto Tejada

'Everything I See Needs Rearranging: Media and Experience in Los Angeles, 1965'

The HRC Visiting Fellow for 2012-13 was Roberto Tejada, Endowed Professor of Art History at Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. Roberto Tejada is the author of many books that include, most recently, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has served also as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007).


Monday 14th January 2013 - Professor Cary Wolfe

Annual Donald Charlton Lecture

'The Biopolitics of Human and Animal Bodies'

Cary Wolfe holds the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Chair in English at Rice University. His publications include What Is Posthumanism?, Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside,” Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity, and Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, all published by the University of Minnesota Press.


HRC Visiting Fellow 2011/12 - Patrick Keiller

In May the Humanities Research Centre was proud to welcome the renowned British filmmaker, writer, artist and curator Patrick Keiller as HRC Visiting Fellow. Patrick visited the university from Monday 14th May to Friday 17th - a busy week that included a series of workshops, seminars, and screenings. His visit also coincided with a major exhibition, entitled The Robinson Institute, which was a commissioned response to the Tate’s art collection. The Robinson Institute runs from March to October 2012 at the Tate Britain, and is the latest manifestation of research and exploration by the mysterious figure of Robinson, a character who first appeared in Keiller’s breakthrough 1994 film London, and subsequently in Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010) - all of which are currently available on DVD, and Robinson in Ruins has also been released on Blu-ray by the British Film Institute.

Patrick’s week at Warwick began with a workshop entitled ‘Film as Pedagogy’. This was co-organised by the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, and took place in the white open space of the IATL Rehearsal Room in Millburn House. This intimate session provided the opportunity for a number of students, staff and researchers from across the university who are interested in using film or video as part of their teaching or research to meet with Patrick and to join in a group discussion of the potentials, parameters and possible pitfalls of adopting such methodologies. One key point of discussion was what we actually mean when we say we are using film to do research.

On Tuesday Patrick gave the first of a series of morning workshops in Millburn House. Entitled ‘The view from the train: linearity, narrative and cinema’, this well-attended and absorbing workshop found Patrick guiding us through a series of early ‘phantom ride‘ films - short, mobile views from cameras mounted on trains, trams and other vehicles made in the first decades of cinema.

This was followed by a public screening of Robinson in Ruins, Patrick’s most recent film, at the Warwick Arts Centre, followed by a Q & A with the director chaired by Prof. Jackie Labbe. Patrick once again offered generous, surprising and often hilarious insights into his thought process, research and filmmaking practice.

On Wednesday he gave a second morning workshop, entitled ‘Film-making as research’. He then introduced a screening of Robinson in Space at the Millburn House cinema theatre, and followed this with his entry in the Millburn Seminars series. Here he addressed staff and students of the academic departments based in Millburn House with a paper entitled ‘Journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest: an overview of three exploratory projects’.

Patrick’s final event, and the end to a hectic week, came with his Thursday morning workshop ‘The Great Malady: the problem of dwelling’, which offered a pleasingly relaxed discussion with Patrick about the rich and eclectic set of themes, historical events, figures and artworks that form the backbone of The Robinson Institute. Using detailed slides he showed us how he grouped and linked the vast array of material that makes up the exhibition.

Patrick’s visit was a great success, and allowed him to interact with a large number and variety of people from around the university and beyond, and we look forward to welcoming him back in the near future.


Thursday 27th October 2011

Professor Marvin Carlson

'Arabic Theatre: Oxymoron or Occidental Oversight?'

On 27 October 2011, Professor Marvin Carlson (CUNY) delivered the Donald Charlton Lecture on ‘Arabic Theatre: Oxymoron or Occidental Oversight?’. He asked some fundamental questions about how Theatre Studies as a discipline developed, and where its blind spots lie.

Professor Carlson began by arguing that the early surveys of world theatre from the 1920s focussed on England, France, Germany and Italy. As time went by, other countries such as Russia and Spain were paid greater attention. Even non-European traditions such as those of Latin America or Japan (e.g., Kabuki) came under scholarly scrutiny and subsequently entered the handbooks of the discipline from the 1960s onwards. And yet, the Arabic theatrical culture remained nearly completely unstudied. In historical surveys, one would move from Ancient Egypt and Greece to Renaissance Europe. And allegedly the religion of Islam, opposed to pictorial representations, stifled any possible dramatic endeavours.

 

Moreover, Europeans and North American displayed a clear Eurocentric bias, even as they began to pay heed to Arabic theatre. Professor Carlson illustrated this with two examples. First, the best-known Arab playwright in the West is Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987), whose The People of the Cave (1933) propelled him to prominence in Europe. He also wrote a King Oedipus (1949) with a programmatic preface in which he argues to a marriage of Arabic and Greek literature. Second, the Arab author and director who currently has the greatest success on the Western stage is Sulaymān al-Bassām, a Kuwaiti with strong ties to the UK where he received a good part of his education. His Richard III, for example, was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company for the Complete Works Festival, and was subsequently performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Again, the familiar theme (Shakespeare), adapted and directed by a UK-educated Arab, made the transition to the Western stage much more smooth.

 

In conclusion, Professor Carlson persuasively argued that 'Arabic theatre' is by no way an oxymoron. Even in the Middle Ages, its shadow and puppet plays developed the sophistication that we also find in Aristophanes, as the example of Ibn Dāniyāl (1248–1310) shows. And in modern times, the Arab stage is extremely diverse and active. Professor Carlson concluded by challenging his audience to continue to ask itself why the discipline of Theatre Studies has largely overlooked the contributions of the Arabs to the development of dramatic art.

 


Wednesday 9th March 2011

Professor Peter Lake

Elizabethan Politics and the Origin of the History Play

The HRC Visiting Fellow for 2010-2011 was Professor Peter Lake (Vanderbilt). Professor Lake is a leading early modern scholar. He is currently writing a book on Shakespeare's history plays and another about Samuel Clarke’s collections of godly lives. Prof. Lake visited Warwick in June 2010 as part of an IAS Vacation School and led a seminar, along with Dr. Femke Molekamp (Early Career Leverhulme Scholar in the English Department), on the topic of ‘the natural and the strange’ in the period 1550-1650. Prof. Lake’s designation as the Visiting Fellow for 2010-11 is part of the HRC’s efforts to forward the University’s international strategy by exploring links and collaborations with its designated strategic partners. During his visit Prof. Lake offered a public lecture, a postgraduate seminar, and office hours for individual student consultation.


Tuesday 16th November 2010

Professor Samik Bandyopadhyay

‘Living Many Cultures Simultaneously: The Problematic Indian Experience'

 Video of Lecture 

On 16th November, 2010, Professor Samik Bandyopadhyay delivered the HRC Annual Donald Charlton Lecture. His topic was ‘Living Many Cultures Simultaneously: The Problematic Indian Experience’. He addressed the importance of looking to oral culture and traditions in order to approach knowledge about embodied Indian life. Arguing that each region and state has its particular heritage as well as local languages and linguistic practices, and that theatre and performance convey the most about Indian life when grasped through these forms, Professor Bandyopadhyay singled out Manipur for special attention as a case study of the multiplicity of cultures co-existing within it and the contradictions of the nation-state in relation to its regional history and identity. Accounting for the violence of Manipur’s history in terms of its struggle for recognition and autonomy within the Indian national project, and also as a result of state violence, Bandyopadhyay stressed the necessity of acknowledging parallel and often incompatible concepts of citizenship and national belonging.

Professor Bandyopadhyay was visiting Warwick as part of a delegation from Jawaharlal Nehru University that had been participating in a colloquium during the previous week in the School of Theatre, Performance, and Cultural Policy Studies. The School and the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU have had an on-going research collaboration for the past two years. Seven Warwick staff travelled to Delhi in March 2010 for a similar colloquium hosted by JNU.

Professor Bandyopadhyay is a leading Indian theatre scholar specializing in Indian performance history since independence. He has translated plays and fiction by Badal Sircar and Mahesweta Devi, and reconstructed for publication film scripts by Shyam Benegal and Mrinal Sen. In the 1970s he was Regional Editor for Oxford University Press in Calcutta, and in the 1980s he developed Segal Books and served as Editor. He is currently Editor of Tema Publishing, Kolkata.


Wednesday 10th March 2010

Francisco Goldman

HRC Visiting Fellow - 2009-2010

'In Conversation' with Maureen Freely and John King discussing the art of political murder and other works

Francisco Goldman reads an extract from his latest book Say Her Name


Podcasts about ‘The Art of Political Murder’ - 'Warwick Prize for Writing' website

Francisco Goldman's first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Ordinary Seaman, his second novel, was a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award. Both novels were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Goldman’s novel The Divine Husband was published by Atlantic Books in 2006. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, and New York Review of Books. His latest book, The Art of Political Murder (Atlantic 2008), won the 2008 TR Fyvel Freedom of Expression Book Award from the Index on Censorship and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2008.

The Art of Political Murder is the first non-fiction book from acclaimed novelist Francisco Goldman and is the story of the seven-year investigation into the murder of a Guatemalan Bishop.

Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala’s leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in the garage of his parish house on the evening of Sunday 26 April 1998. This took place just two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some two hundred thousand civilians. Realising that it could not rely on police investigators or the legal system to solve the murder and bring those responsible to justice, the church formed its own investigative team, a group of secular young men in their twenties who called themselves ‘Los Intocables’ (the Untouchables). Known in Guatemala as “The Crime of the Century,” the Bishop Gerardi murder case, with its unexpectedly outlandish scenarios and sensational developments, confounded observers and generated extraordinary controversy. For seven years, Francisco Goldman has closely followed Los Intocables’ efforts to uncover the truth; the killing or forced exile of multiple witnesses, judges, and prosecutors; the brave struggle of the church’s legal team; and the efforts of one courageous prosecutor to solve the case and bring the killers to justice.

First appearances were that of a revenge killing, but the official explanation became increasingly bizarre, involving dissolute priests, homosexual liaisons and a geriatric German Shepherd dog as the prime suspect. Los Intocables uncovered a chain of responsibility that led to the President and the Guatemalan authorities whose motivation was to keep the identity of Bishop Gerardi’s killers a secret.

 


Thursday 14th January 2010

Colm Tóibín

'In Conversation' with Professor Jeremy Treglown discussing Brooklyn and other works

Warwick TV interview on YouTube

The HRC was fortunate to scoop Colm Tóibin for a visit in January, on the cusp of his most recent novel, Brooklyn, claiming the Costa Novel of the Year Award 2009.

Hosted at a public event at Warwick Arts Centre, Tóibin read a handful of vignettes from the book, written from the perspective of an Irish immigrant, Eilis, living in New York. The novel captures her experiences in the quirky Irish diaspora, moments of human interaction rife with generosity and warm observations about the community. Talking about his understanding of diaspora, Tóibin claimed that, “Some places won’t allow you to call them home,” pointing to Eilis’ attempts to establish a connection in her new environment.

The event was chaired by Professor Jeremy Treglown, who drew out Tóibin’s humour and encouraged the author to let loose in the question and answer session. Showing great energy and a droll wit, Tóibin responded raucously to technical questions, such as his experiences of teaching creative writing as a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas and Stanford University, where he famously banned the use of flashbacks and, for a term, penises – with the exception ‘perhaps,’ of references to prostate cancer.

He also described his reactions to Irish history as making him want to “howl with laughter,” though with the implication that this might well be the only response to such a complicated mess of politically-contested events. He ended on a note about how the manipulation of Ireland’s history too often undermines the vitality of the human spirit, which, as Brooklyn shows, is something to be celebrated above all.

Biography

Irish novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a member of Aosdána, an Irish organisation founded to promote the arts.

His first novel, The South (1990), set in Spain and rural Ireland in the 1950s, is the story of an Irish woman who leaves her husband and starts a relationship with a Spanish painter. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book. Eamon Redmond, the central character in The Heather Blazing (1992), is a judge in the Irish High Court, haunted by his own past and the history of modern Ireland. The book won the Encore Award for the best second novel of the year. His third novel, The Story of the Night (1996), is set in Argentina during the Falklands War.

The Blackwater Lightship (1999), describes the uneasy relationship between a grandmother, her daughter and granddaughter, brought together by a family tragedy. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

His non-fiction includes The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994) and The Irish Famine (1999) (with Diarmaid Ferriter). He is editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999). His new book, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002), consists of a number of essays some of which had previously been published in the London Review of Books. In 2002 he became a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, enabling him to research the life of Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory for his book Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). His latest novel, The Master (2004), is a portrait of the novelist Henry James. It was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and in 2006, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

His latest book, published in April 2009, is Brooklyn.

Synopsis of Brooklyn

In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice: between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean.

 Brooklyn is a tender story of great love and loss, and of the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty. In the character of Eilis Lacey Colm Tóibín has created a remarkable heroine and in Brooklyn a novel of devastating emotional power.


Wednesday 4th March 2009

Iain Mackintosh

The Face and Figure of Shakespeare - How British 18th century sculptors invented a National Hero

Iain Mackintosh, theatre consultant, co-founder of the Prospect Theatre Company, theatre producer, curator of theatre exhibitions and author of Architecture, Actor and Audience published by Routledge in 1993 and currently in its fourth reprint (among numerous publications and articles), came to Warwick as the HRC Visiting Fellow in March 2009.

The schedule for his three-day visit included giving a seminar on devising theatre spaces for the future (for Theatre and Performance Studies), a lecture for History of Art on ‘The downfall of Shakespeare on a Modern Stage, 1765: how a single Painting satirising a single opera can be seen as a gateway into the arts of mid-Georgian England’, and meeting individual students to discuss their research.

Iain Mackintosh’s background includes engagement in practical theatre as a stage manager and stage designer at the Oxford Playhouse. In 1973 he joined Richard Pilbrow as a Director of Theatre Projects Consultants International. He was involved in the design of new theatre spaces including The Cottesloe (1977), The Tricycle, London (1980 and 1989), The Wilde Theatre, Bracknell (1984), The Martha Cohen, Calgary Canada (1985), The Orange Tree, Richmond Surrey (1991), Glyndebourne Festival Opera House (1994), The Founders’ Theatre for Shakespeare and Company, Lenox, Massachusetts (2001) and the Jazz chamber and folk music space at the Sage, Gateshead (2004). He has been engaged in many theatre restorations (including the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (1994), the Royal Court, London (2000) and the Theatre Royal Richmond, Yorkshire (2003) and has brought together the team that will build the Rose Playhouse.

His faculty lecture at Warwick (on Wednesday 4 March) emerged directly from his most recent project, that of co-curating an exhibition at the Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham: ‘The Face and Figure of Shakespeare: how British 18th Century Sculptors invented a National Hero’, 18 April to 7 June 2009.


Thursday 20th November 2008

Professor Bruce Altshuler

'What Exhibitions Do'

The HRC was delighted to welcome as this year’s Donald Charlton lecturer Professor Bruce Altshuler, Director of the Museum Studies Program at New York University and a leading authority on museum and exhibition history. Originally trained as a philosopher, Altshuler has worked in a wide variety of museum contexts and has been director of the Zabriskie Gallery (1985-9) and the Noguchi Museum (1992-8). Before joining the faculty of NYU in 2000, he was on the graduate faculty of Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Director of Studies at Christie’s Education, New York.

Altshuler has researched and lectured widely on museum and exhibition history, producing some of the key textbooks on this subject: The Avant-garde in Exhibition (University of California Press, 1998) and Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005). The first of his two-volume work of exhibition history documentation, Salon to Biennial will be published this Autumn by Phaidon Press.

Altshuler’s lecture discussed the importance of the history and analysis of exhibitions for the study of art history. Highlighting the various relationships that can be obtained between artworks and the exhibitions in which they are displayed, it employed examples ranging from shows of early modern art through conceptual art presentation practices of the late 1960's and 70's.


Tuesday 20 May 2008

Lynn Spigel

'Warhol TV'

This talk explores Andy's Warhol's numerous engagements with US commercial television, from his work in the 1950s as a graphic artist for the networks to his television commercials to his appearance on talk shows to his own experiments with video (such as his Factory Diaries and soap operas) through to his TV programs (such as Andy's Warhol's 15 Minutes on MTV). Although Warhol worked mostly with everyday commercial genres (such as the soap opera, makeover show, and talk show) his use of television reorganized network television's dominant modes of representation, and it especially disrupted TV's heteronormative depictions of everyday life. Warhol TV provided visibility for queer publics and minority cultures, not as subjects of media scandal, but rather as ordinary people populating the most everyday, typical commercial genres. The talk discusses his use of television in the context of the fields of graphic design, advertising, video art, and commercial television, looking at how he skirted the boundaries of art, video activism, and commerce while producing a media space for an alternative vision of everyday life on TV.

Lynn Spigel is the Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures, the director of the Center for Screen Cultures, and co-director (with Jeffrey Sconce) of the graduate program in Screen Cultures. Professor Spigel is the author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke University Press) and Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press).

Professor Spigel is internationally recognised as one of the most eminent television theorists and historians. She has longstanding scholarly links with the Department of Film and Television Studies at Warwick.


Wednesday 28 November 2007

Professor Anil Bhatti ( Centre of German Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

‘Homogeneity, Heterogeneity, Pluriculturalism; dealing with Diversities in Cultural Studies’

The HRC welcomed Professor Anil Bhatti, Head of the Centre of German Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and President of the Goethe Society of India. Professor Bhatti has researched and lectured widely in comparative cultural studies, with a key focus on relations between Europe – especially Germany, Austria and Switzerland - and India/Asia. His lecture ‘Homogeneity, Heterogeneity, Pluriculturalism; dealing with Diversities in Cultural Studies’, touched on questions of migration, exile, multilingualism and syncretism, and on their methodological implications for cultural studies as a transnational interdisciplinary field. In a subsequent seminar for the HRC-funded Warwick Workshop in Interdisciplinary German Studies, Professor Bhatti discussed postcolonial perspectives in German literary studies from Goethe, through twentieth-century exile literature, to contemporary diasporic cultural production.

Professor Bhatti’s recent English-language publications include Jewish Exile in India. Ed. Anil Bhatti & Johannes Voigt, New Delhi 1999 (Manohar); and ‘Cultural Homogenisation, Places of Memory and the Loss of Secular Urban Space. In: Helmuth Berking, Sybille Frank et.al. (eds), Negotiating Urban Conflicts. Interaction, Space and Control, Bielefeld 2006


Tuesday 6 March 2007

Professor Gary Radke

"The Power to Choose: The Artistic Patronage of Nuns in Renaissance Venice"

Gary M. Radke is professor of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he has received fellowship support from the Mellon Foundation, Kress Foundation, ACLS, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, among others. His publications include Viterbo: Profile of a Thirteenth-Century Papal Palace (Cambridge, 1997) and, with John T. Paoletti, Art in Renaissance Italy, 2nd edition (London and New York, 2002), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture. He is past president of the Italian Art Society and guest curator for exhibitions of Italian art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 2001 he was guest curator of "Michelangelo: Drawings and other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti, Florence". He is currently curating an exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta about the restoration of Andrea del Verrocchio's bronze David in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (the exhibition website is accessible at http://www.high.org/david). Professor Radke is also teaching a course for the Syracuse University Honors Program in Savannah, Georgia.


Tuesday 30 January 2007

Professor Gerald Martin (Professor of Latin American Literature, University of Pittsburgh).

‘Getting to Gabo: Reflections on writing a biography of García Márquez’

Publications include:

  • “Spanish American Narrative Since 1970”, in John King, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 105–118.
  • “Los Estados Unidos en que vivió Martí” [with Gail Martin], in Roberto Fernández Retamar and Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, eds., José Martí, En los Estados Unidos (Paris and Madrid, Archivos/Unesco, 2003), pp.1802–1847.
  • “Il romanzo di un continente: l’America Latina”, in Franco Moretti, ed., Il romanzo, vol.III: Storia e geografia (Turin, Einaudi, 2002), pp. 505–529.
  • “Translating García Márquez, or, the Impossible Dream”, in D Balderston and M Schwartz, eds., Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2002, pp. 156–163.
  • Miguel Angel Asturias, El Señor Presidente (Critical Edition) (Madrid, Archivos/Unesco, 2000, LI + 1088pp.).

Wednesday 1 November 2006

Tomás Eloy Martínez

In Conversation with John King

The Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez is one of Latin America’s finest contemporary writers. His novels include, The Perón Novel, Santa Evita and The Tango Singer. He was short listed for the International Man Booker prize in 2005. He is visiting Warwick as a guest of the Humanities Research Centre.



 Thursday 16 February 2006

Sigrid Weigel (Director of Zentrum für Literaturforschung (Berlin))

'The measurements of angels - art and science in the course of secularisation'

Publications include Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin (Routledge, 1996); "Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual" (New German Critique, 1995); "Eros and Language in Walter Benjamin's Writings," in Benjamin's Ghosts (Stanford, 2002); and "Secularization and Sacralization, Normalization and Rupture: Kristeva and Arendt on Forgiveness" (PMLA, 2002).


Tuesday 24 May 2005

Judith Butler (Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley)

Torture and the Ethics of Photography


Tuesday 3rd May 2005

Professor Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago)

“It's not the tragedies, it's the messes: couples, couplets, and Dorothy Parker”


Tuesday 8th March 2005

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

Screening of ‘The May Lady’ followed by a discussion/Q&A


Thursday 18 November 2004

Sabine Gölz

‘Benjamin's Shadow: A Reading of Little History of Photography’

Sabine Gölz is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Split Scene of Reading: Nietzsche, Derrida, Kafka, Bachmann (1998). She is also a practising photographic artist.


Wednesday 12th May 2004

Monica Ali

In conversation with Maureen Freely


Wednesday 10th March 2004

Embracing Contradiction:

Greg Doran and Antony Sher talk about work, life and staging Shakespeare’s worlds

1.00 – 1.30 Tony Howard on Doran and Sher

1.30 – 3.00 Greg Doran and Antony Sher in a Platform Discussion

Greg Doran is an Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Recent productions include: All's Well That Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. His current RSC production is Othello.

Sir Antony Sher’s Shakespeare roles include Richard III, Leontes, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus and, currently, Iago in the RSC's current production of Othello.

Tony Howard is Senior Lecturer in English at Warwick


Thursday 27th November 2003

Professor Efrain Kristal (UCLA)

'Borges and Translation'


Thursday 8th May 2003

Professor Roger Chartier (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

'The Written Word at the Age of its Technical Reproducibility: Literature in the Printing Shop' (XVith - XVIIth Centuries) 


Wednesday 26th February 2003

Ngugi wa Thiong'o (UCLA)

'Wealth, Power, Values and the Language of Imagination'