Event Date: 22 May 2012
Swedenborg Hall
20-21 Bloomsbury Way,
London, WC1A 2TH

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL
Presents

Professor David Wills (SUNY Albany) – Bloodless Coup: Love in the Heart of Technology

David Wills has written widely on literary theory, especially the work of Jacques Derrida, film theory, and comparative literature. He has translated numerous texts by Jacques Derrida including The Gift of Death (Chicago UP, 1995) and The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham UP, 2008) and is the author of several books including Prosthesis (Stanford UP, 1995) and Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (U of Minnesota Press, 2008).

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Event Date: 22 May 2012
Swedenborg Hall
20-21 Bloomsbury Way,
London, WC1A 2TH

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL
Presents

Dr Branka Arsic (SUNY Albany) – Memorial Life: Thoreau and Benjamin on Nature in Mourning

Branka Arsic specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and early American literature. She is the author of On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (StanfordUP, 2007). She has co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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Event Date: 21May 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Michael Thompson (University of Pittsburgh) – You and I

Michael Thompson received his PhD in Philosophy at UCLA, where he was a student of Philippa Foot. He is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and was formerly an Assistant Professor at UCLA. He is the author of Life and Action (Harvard University Press 2008, 2012; Suhrkamp 2011) and “What is it to Wrong Someone?” in Reason and Value, ed. Wallace et al. (O.U.P. 2006).

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Room 416,  Birkbeck
University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Pain Project & Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities present:

The History of Pain without Lesion in the Mid to Late 19th Century West

Organised by Visiting Fellow to the Birkbeck Pain Project Daniel S. Goldberg (East Carolina University, U.S.),

Much work in the history of medicine and science has touched on experiences of pain in the modern era. Yet little scholarship focuses on prevailing attitudes, practices, and beliefs among either lay or professional therapeutic communities regarding pain without lesion.

This workshop will help to fill the gap. We seek to generate discussion and exchange knowledge around the social, cultural, and medical influences of what we might now refer to as chronic pain sufferers.

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Introduction by Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck)

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Dr Daniel S. Goldberg (East Carolina University)
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Event Date: 18 May 2012

Room B34
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

Birkbeck School of Law presents

School of Law, Annual Law Lecture 2012

Professor Peter Goodrich (Cardozo School of Law, New York) – An Instance of the Fingerpost: An Excursus on the Legal and the Digital

The lawyers who forged the early modern common law, our dear insular Anglican tradition, were also the authors of numerous legal picture books, the emblemata iuris that mixed picture and motto, image and explanation.

The legal emblem framed the expression of law and indeed became so familiar, was so structural and persistent to legality that it still defines the spectacle of the juridical. As Freud put it, the unconscious thinks in images, and lawyers, as dogmatists are experts in unconsciousness.

This multimedia presentation, lacking only song and dance on the part of the orator himself, will extrapolate, if all goes well, from the early juristic use of images to the contemporary digital interplay of picture and word.

Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law and Director, Law and Humanities at Cardozo Law School in Yeshiva University, New York. Professor Goodrich one of the founding members of Birkbeck Law School in 1992, where he was also the Corporation of London Professor of Law. He has written extensively in legal history and theory in the areas of law and literature and semiotics and has authored 10 books. He is managing editor of Law and Literature, and on the editorial board of Law and Critique. Recent books include (with Mariana Valverde) Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws (Routledge, 2006); and (with Lior Barshack and Anton Schutz) Law, Text, Terror (Routledge, 2006). His most recent book is Laws of Love: A Brief Historical and Practical Manual (Palgrave-Macmillan,2006).

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Welcome by Professor Patricia Tuitt (Dean, Scholl of Law, Birkbeck) .

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Introduction by Professor Patrick Hanafin (Birkbeck) .

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Accompanying Images

Event Date: 17 May 2012
Room B34,
Birkbeck College, University of London,
London WC1E 7HX.

The Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism
presents:

Professor George Steiner (Churchill College, Cambridge) -  Homelands   

The history of Judaism and of Jewish identity has been characterized by radical inner tensions. These tensions, Professor Steiner suggests, oscillate between priest and prophet, the desert and the city, Zionism and the hopes and ideals of the Diaspora. The Shoah and its legacy have accentuated such divisions. Yet, Steiner argues, the opposing ideals are inextricably interwoven. Is it possible, he asks, to make any responsible conjectures to the future?

Professor Steiner is a Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He has held professorships at Yale, Geneva, New York and Oxford and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. He is a renowned literary critic, essayist, novelist, scholar and teacher. In his writing he explores comparative literature and the nature and power of language. A further biding concern has been the implication of the Holocaust for our understanding of civilization and culture.

Professor Steiner is a prodigious writer and has published more than 25 books. His non-fiction works include,  In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (Faber and Faber, 1971) and After Babel:  Aspect of Language and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1975), adapted for television as The Tongues of Men (1977). His fiction includes the controversial novella about Hitler, The Portage to San Cristobel of AH (Faber and Faber, 1981) and Proofs and Three Parables (Faber and Faber, 1992). Most recently he has published My Unwritten Books (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008) and George Steiner at the New Yorker with Robert Boyers (New Directions, 2009).

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Introduction by Professor David Feldman (Director, Pears Institute) .
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The Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism
“The relationship between antisemitism and other forms of racism and exclusion is not only a historical question. It is an urgent issue for today.” Professor David Feldman, Director.
The Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is funded by the Pears Foundation and based at Birkbeck, University of London. It is a centre of innovative research and teaching, contributing to discussion and policy formation on antisemitism as well as other forms of racial prejudice and intolerance. It is both independent and inclusive.

Event Date: 17 May 2012
Room B06
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

Birkbeck Arts Week

Victorian Sentimentality

Panel discussion:  The curators (Nicola Bown, Vicky Mills, Alison Smith) of a new display opening at Tate Britain this week talk about the display which aims to shed new light on this much misunderstood and maligned topic. Victorian art is often criticised for being sentimental, but what does this mean? And is sentimentality always a bad thing?

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Event Date: 15 May 2012
Birkbeck College
Room 124,
43 Gordon Square,
London WC1H

Birkbeck Arts Week

Jokes, Laughter, Literature

Short talks and discussion: What are the links between literature and jokes? What makes us laugh when we read? What do we do when we don’t understand a joke?
The four speakers have research interests across a wide historical range, from the Renaissance to the contemporary, will talk about laughter and jokes in Shakespeare, Beckett, and the writing of World War One.

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Dr Adam Smith

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Dr Kate McLoughlin

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Dr Laura Salisbury

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Toby Litt

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Event Date: 14 and 15 May 2012
Senate House
Room S261
University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

The Institute of Philosophy presents

Neuroscience, Responsibility and the Law

DAY 1 (Monday 14 May)

Al Mele: Free will and substance dualism: the real scientific threat to free will?
[AUDIO HERE]

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Marcel Brass: Who is in control? Brain correlates of intentional action
[AUDIO HERE]

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Paul Catley: Responsibility and personality change
[AUDIO HERE]
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DAY 2 (Tuesday 15 May)

Lisa Claydon: Criminal responsibility and the issue of involuntariness
[AUDIO HERE]

Event Date: 14 May 2012
Birkbeck College
Room B13,
43 Gordon Square,
London WC1H

Birkbeck Arts Week

 Romantic Objects Lecture:

Dr. Helen Cowie (University of York)
Doing a Roaring Trade: Travelling Menageries in 19th-Century Britain

Helen Cowie’s research project explores the collection, study and exhibition of exotic animals (c.1750-1880), how contemporaries conceptualised rare animals, where they encountered them and what symbolic, pedagogic and scientific value they attached to specimens in zoological gardens and touring menageries.

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