© University of Kent - Contact | Feedback | Legal
The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
School Research Seminar
School of English Research Seminars Spring 2012
All seminars take place on Wednesday afternoons in Darwin Lecture Theatre 3 at 4pm, followed by wine in the School of English common room. All are warmly welcome. Please contact Paddy Bullard (p.s.bullard@kent.ac.uk) or Andy Kesson (a.kesson@kent.ac.uk) for further details.
25th January
Stella Bolaki
'Death in the Cinema: Lightning over Water (Nick’s Film) as Illness Narrative'
Stella Bolaki is Lecturer in American Literature in the School of English at the University of Kent. Her research interests are predominantly in American multi-ethnic and transnational writing and she recently published a book on this topic, Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Rodopi, 2011). Other publications include journal essays and book chapters on trauma, queer diasporas, aspects of race and disability, textual and photographic illness narratives, and the role of artists’ books in the medical community. Her paper today is part of a bigger interdisciplinary book project on the aesthetics, ethics and politics of illness narratives focusing on a wide range of forms and media, which reflects her interest in the growing field of Medical Humanities.
1st February
Rita Sakr
'Orhan Pamuk and the contested history of post-imperial Turkey'
Rita Sakr is a Visiting Lecturer at University College Dublin. She is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (Continuum, 2011). She has published on Middle-Eastern studies, migrant writings, post-conflict literatures, and James Joyce. With Finn Fordham, she is co-editor of James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (Rodopi, 2011); and with Caroline Rooney, she is co-editing The Ethics of Representations in Literature, Journalism, and Art: Transnational Responses to Beirut 1982 (Routledge, 2012). Sakr’s current project is an interdisciplinary study of the “Arab Spring” entitled “Imagining the Revolution: Literatures and Political Geographies of the Arab Uprisings”.
8th February
KIASH Cross-faculty lecture
To be announced (SECL), Marlowe LT1, 4.30
15th February
Chris Danta
'The future will have been animal: Dr Moreau and the aesthetics of monstrosity'
Chris Danta is a lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at the university of New South Wales, Sidney. Currently he is a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Continuum, 2011) and the co-editor of Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (Continuum, 2011). He has co-edited a special issue of Sub-Stance on the Political Animal (2008)and published essays in New Literary History, Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity, Sub-Stance and Literature & Theology.
READING WEEK
29th February
Bob Patten
'Do serialised stories ever end? The case of Great Expectations'
Robert L. Patten has been trying to understand Dickens's serials for more than half a century. He studied in London as a Fulbright Scholar in 1963-64 under Professor Kathleen Tillotson, returned for more study in 1977-78 and 1980-81, and is now back in the UK as Scholar in Residence at the Charles Dickens Museum for Dickens 2012 and as Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His two-volume biography of Dickens's early illustrator and preeminent nineteenth-century graphic humorist George Cruikshank was singled out as the best biography of the 1990s by the Guardian, and he has appeared frequently in re-runs of the American television biography of Dickens and the History Channel's multi-part History of Sex. He had a hard time persuading the producers that the Victorians belonged in the narrative.
7th March
KIASH Cross-faculty lecture: Simon Schaffer
14th March
tbc
21st March
Andrew Warnes
'The New Tantalus? Perpetual frustration in the stories of Raymond Carver'
Andrew Warnes is Reader in American Studies at the University of Leeds. In the past, his research has focused on the relationship between food and race in modern American culture, although he has also written on British indie music and Richard Wright's Native Son. His new project is concerned with images of freshness and alluring newness in post-frontier US culture.
29th March
tbc