Event Date: 28 March 2009

Gregory Claeys and John Keane
speak
Paine’s legacy 200 years
after his death

A special meeting to mark the 200th anniversary
of the death of Thomas Paine, revolutionary
democrat and author of The Rights of Man, The
Age of Reason and Common Sense.

Jointly organised by The Socialist History Society, The Thomas Paine Society, The South Place Ethical Society and the Freethought History Research Group.

Two of the leading experts on Paine share the platform:

Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway University of London specialising in 19th century radicalism, socialism and Utopianism, author of Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (1989) and the forthcoming Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire 1850-1920.

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and author of a political biography of Tom Paine, Violence and Democracy and The Life and Death of Democracy. In 1989 he founded the Centre for the Study of Democracy, now established as a major research centre for the study of international relations, political theory and cultural studies.

Socialist History Society
Thomas Paine Society
South Place Ethical Society

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Event Date: March 28, 2009

Continuing Professional Development
The British Psychoanalytic Council
for Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire
and
Pegasus Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy

invite you to a study day with

Margot Waddell

STATES OF MIND:
DEVELOPMENT AND THE LIFE CYCLE

Chair: Jane Cassidy

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This study day with Margot Waddell provides a perspective on the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the nature of human development.

Following the major developmental phases from infancy to old age and drawing upon a wide range of clinical, non-clinical and literary examples, Margot explores those vital aspects of experience which promote mental and emotional growth and those which impede it. The day offers a detailed and accessible examination of contemporary psychoanalytic thought and provide a personal and vivid approach to the elusive question of how the personality develops.

This study is of interest to therapists and other practitioners working with children, young people and adults within social work, education and health settings as well as researchers, academics and those working in private practice.

Margot Waddell is a Psychoanalyst and Consultant Psychotherapist in the Adolescent Department at the Tavistock Clinic. Margot is editor of the Tavistock Clinic Book Series and is the author of Inside Lives, Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality.

Jane Cassidy is in private practice in London where she has set up a group practice of independent child and adult psychotherapists. She is Co-chair of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists Child and Adolescent Division and Chair of the Independent Practice Committee of the ACP. Jane has has written about her special interest in childhood depression.

LINKS:

psychoanalytic-council.org
pegasuspsychotherapy.co.uk

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Introduction by Jane Cassidy

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Infancy

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Latency

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Adolescence

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Adulthood

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Buy Margot Waddell’s publications here.

25 March 2009

In 1936 the screen sweethearts Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy performed ‘The Indian Love Call’ in this example of Hollywood’s saccharine representation of ‘the other’ as dangerous and untrustworthy. Living outside government authority and the mainstream Anglo-Canadian population, characterized by darker skin and thick accents, the indigenous Metis are perfect targets for the treatment that ostracized other Native Americans, the Vietnamese and the Iraqis.

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Event date: Saturday 21 March 2009

The Runnymede International Literary Festival and the Humanities and Art Research Centre (HARC) Department at Royal Holloway University of London present:

Alain de Botton
‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’

We spend much of our lives at work, but surprisingly little gets written about what makes work both one of the most exciting and most painful of all our activities. Alain de Botton comes to the Runnymede Literary Festival to present his new, ninth book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, evoking what other people get up to all day – and night – to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his characteristic combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art – in search of what makes jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.

Along the way de Botton skilfully raises the big questions we all tend to ask of our work. What is the right job for me? How can I make the most of my talents? What should I be aiming for in my career?

Alain de Botton’s books include Essays in Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness.

http://www.alaindebotton.com/

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Saturday 21 March 2009

The Runnymede International Literary Festival and the Humanities and Art Research Centre (HARC) Department at Royal Holloway University of London invite you to:

DUNSINANE

with Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey

Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey are two of the world’s leading young Shakespeare scholars – with six books and a series of brand-new original ‘minigraphs’ (Shakespeare Now!) behind them. Now they have broken with conventional literary criticism and created Dunsinane – a sequel to the Scottish play that sees the porter’s three sons each relive the temptation and terror of Macbeth.

Dunsinane is a story of love, religious passion and political resistance. At once a compelling, heartrending fiction and a fully embodied response to Shakespeare’s masterpiece, it aims to reveal new ways forward for both contemporary criticism and contemporary art.

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Patrick Pollard, BA, PhD (Lond), is Emeritus Professor of French at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research interests lie in the history of ideas (with an emphasis on 19-20th c. France), the history of literature (with publications on Gide, Stendhal, Zola, and the reception of Wilde and Robert Browning in France) and the history of sexuality (homosexuality; has published on Gide, Magnus Hirschfeld, and researches on gay novels published in France in the 3rd Republic (i.e. 1871-1914) and Jean Genet). He also conducts research on the classical tradition in France (i.e. the history of translation from Greek and Latin authors into French; the modern reuse of ancient myths; gender and sexuality in the ancient world and its relationship to modern discourse in this area).

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SELECT  BIBLIOGRAPHY

The story of Gyges and Candaules

Ancient texts

Archilochus, fragment 19 (West).
Herodotus, I.8-15.
Plato, Respublica, 359d, f, and 612b.
Cicero, De officiis, II, 9. 38 (a translation of Plato).
Nicolaus Damascenus, in F.H.G., III, 343-64.
Diogenianus, in Paroemiographi graeci (ed. Leutsch), vol.1, p.232.
Plutarch, Moralia (‘Quaestiones graecae’ 302A; ‘Quaestiones convivales’ 622F; ‘Adversus Colotem’ 1108D-E).
Philostratus, Heroicus, 137-8.
Achilles Tatius, De amoribus Leucippes et Clitophontis, I.8.
Aelius Aristides, XLV.56.
Libanius, Oratio funebris, 18.294.
Libanius, Orationes, 25.69.

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General

GIDE, A. Le Roi Candaule. Édition critique, avec une introduction et des variantes, par P. Pollard (Lyon, 2000).
GIDE, A. Œdipe. Suivi de brouillons et de textes inédits.Édité par Clara Debard (Paris, 2007)

CLAUDE, J. André Gide et le théâtre (Paris, 1992).
McLAREN, J.C. The Theater of André Gide (Baltimore, 1953).
POLLARD, P. André Gide. Homosexual Moralist (New Haven, 1991).
SMITH, K.F. ‘The Literary Tradition of Gyges and Candaules’, American Journal of Philology, 41 (1), Jan.-March 1920, p.1-37.

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Other relevant publications by Patrick Pollard

Répertoire des lectures d’André Gide. I: L’Antiquité classique. Paris: ATAG; London: Birkbeck College, 2000. 8vo 190pp. pbk. ISBN 0 907904 81 5.

Répertoire des lectures d’André Gide. II: Lectures anglaises. London: Birkbeck College, 2004. 8vo 2 vols xxiv, 419pp. pbk. ISBN 0 907904 13 0.

Répertoire des lectures d’André Gide. III: Divers (L’Orient, la Scandinavie, l’Italie, l’Ibérie et l’Amérique latine, la Grèce moderne). London: Birkbeck College, 2006. 8vo 155pp. pbk. ISBN 0 907904 27 0.

Répertoire des lectures d’André Gide: IV: L’Allemagne et les pays germanophones. [London: Birkbeck College, 2009 - to be published later this year.]

March 17, 2009 18:00 GMT

Royal Holloway Holocaust Research Centre Annual Lecture:

Professor Sue Vice : ‘False Testimony’

In this talk, Sue Vice explores the phenomenon of false Holocaust testimony and ask two questions: first, whether these inventions are part of a wider phenomenon of invented victimhood; second, if false testimony about the Holocaust is different from other kinds of imposture, and is a form of representation which is only to be expected as the Holocaust stops being an event within living memory.

Professor Sue Vice is the UK’s leading expert on Holocaust Literature, and is the author of, among others, Holocaust Fiction and Children Writing the Holocaust. She has also published widely on contemporary literature, theory, film and television.

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Live Broadcast:

Tuesday, 17 March 17:00 GMT

HARC Lecture Series on Cinema and Citizenship convened by Professor Mandy Merck.

‘Citizens of Two Worlds: Hybrid Identity Formation in Diasporic Coming-of-Age Films’

Dr. Daniela Berghahn

Royal Holloway, University of London

Coming-of-age films, a loosely defined sub-genre of the youth film, centre on the transition from childhood to adolescence or from adolescence to adulthood. This transition usually occurs as a result of a formative experience (first love, separation, death) or a rite-of-passage (test of courage, graduation) and normally results in a fundamental choice the protagonist has to make. In this paper I argue that coming-of-age narratives occupy a central position in the work of diasporic filmmakers for two reasons: firstly, the preponderance of coming-of-age films can be attributed to a semi-autobiographical impulse. Directors and scriptwriters Meera Syal (Anita & Me, 2002), Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, 2002), Ayub Khan Din (East is East, 1999) and Soraya Nini (Samia, 2000) underscored their films’ authenticity by making reference to their own biographies as second or third generation immigrants who have experienced the challenges and opportunities of growing up between or in two cultures; and secondly, diasporic youth operate as a mediator between cultural difference and seemingly irreconcilable ethnic dichotomies, thus functioning as tropes of hybridity in public discourse and popular culture.

What distinguishes coming-of-age films set in a multicultural milieu from those set in a milieu in which race and ethnicity are normalised – and thus invisible and, presumably, socially irrelevant – is that generation conflict, a common plot device in many coming-of-age dramas, is doubly charged because it is conflated with culture conflict. While parents (usually first generation immigrants) uphold the values and traditions of their culture of origin, the children actively affiliate with the cultural norms of the country of residence. Growing up in plural worlds, these citizens of two worlds develop hybrid identities, which connect them with and, ideally, allow them to prosper in two cultures.

In European diasporic coming-of-age films hybrid identity formation is performed through switching between ‘ethnic’ and ‘western’ dress codes and languages – Arabic and French, Turkish and German, Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu and English. The films’ soundtracks underscore the multiethnic, or rather, the postethnic milieu in which the protagonists grow up, while at the same time contributing to the crossover appeal of the diasporic youth film.

The presentation will include examples of Turkish German, British Asian and Maghrebi French cinema.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event date:
10 March 2009

Round Table

THE DECLINE AND RISE OF CHINA: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Dr Weipin Tsai

The ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’ Revisited

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Dr Chi-Kwan Mark

Negotiating with Communism: Britain and China

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Dr Evelyn Goh

China’s Rise and the Regional Hierarchy in East Asia

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7 March 2009
Contemporary Women’s Writing in French: Recent Fiction
New Perspectives
A Celebration of Professor Elizabeth Fallaize

Garden Quad Auditorium – St John’s College, Oxford, OX1 3JP

The Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Seminar is celebrating Professor Elizabeth Fallaize’s retirement and her important contribution to the field.

You are warmly invited to join us via this sound recording.

The day draws and builds on some of the insights on 1970s and 1980s writing in Elizabeth’s 1993 volume French Women’s Writing: Recent Fiction. It provides the opportunity to establish a bilan of women’s writing in French in the 1990s and post-2000 in relation to the perceived shift from the impact of second wave feminism to that of a putative postfeminism.

The first two sessions focus on recent works by two of the authors Elizabeth featured, Annie Ernaux‘s Les Années (2008), led by Diana Holmes and Alison Fell; and Marie Redonnet’s L’Accord de paix (2000) and Diego (2005), led by Ruth Cruickshank and Sarah Fishwick. Adopting the format of French Women’s Writing, they are structured around short excerpts of these writers’ most recent fictions, identifying ways in which Ernaux and Redonnet reflect the realities and challenges of gender, sexuality and identity and of being a woman writing in French in the twenty-first century.

The third session is devoted to a round table session on 1990s and post-2000 women’s writing in French, featuring CWWF members at different career stages and with complementary areas of expertise (Lucille Cairns, Amaleena Damle, Shirley Jordan, Gill Rye and Helen Vassallo; chaired by Margaret Atack). It is loosely structured around a set of questions which build on those raised by Elizabeth, considering developments in notions of gender, sexual and racial identity; in the condition of women and women writers; and in the field of Francophone women’s writing.

Supported by the Department of
French at Royal Holloway, University of London
and St John’s College, Oxford
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Contact:
Dr Ruth Cruickshank

The Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Seminar is based at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, Senate House, University of London. The Seminar is a forum for the discussion and promotion of contemporary women’s writing in French (from either metropolitan France or elsewhere), the main focus being new and recent texts.
See: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CWWF/Index.htm

CWWF-SEMINAR Newsletter archives can be found at:
http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CWWF/Index.htm

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