HARC 2009-2010: schedule
Susan Howe and David Grubbs Seminar
Wed, 7 October, 15:00 – 17:00
Birkbeck College, Room TBC
Susan Howe and David Grubbs will speak about the ideas that have nourished their collaboration as poet and musician. Howe and Grubbs have released two CDs, Thiefth (2005) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (2006), works which take the encounter between poetry and music into new territory. Each will speak for around 30 minutes and the second hour will be devoted to questions and discussion. Susan Howe’s explorations of American history and letters place her in a line that runs from Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens to the frontiers of 21st-century lyric. David Grubbs is a former member of the post-rock group Gastr Del Sol whose subsequent career is notable both for his acclaimed solo releases and his collaborations with artists and writers. Presented jointly by the Poetics Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Supported by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, the Faculty of Arts and the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Howe and Grubbs will perform at the South Bank Centre on Thursday 8th October at 7.45 in the Purcell Room.
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Andrew Bowie (RHUL) “Background capabilities and prereflexive awareness” Presentation will include musical examples and be followed by a performance by the Andrew Bowie Jazz Quartet
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 21 October, 14:00 – 17:00
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, they say. But recent critics writing on the aesthetic argue such sentiments reduce artistic experience to relativism and commodification. Rather than merely absorbing beauty into subjectivity, such critics contend that art – as art – is deeply and dynamically dialectical; it creates a productively provocative tension with the person(s) who hear, watch or read it. Viewed thus, the aesthetic potentially constellates all kinds of ostensibly segregated issues. In examining the dichotomy between subject and object, it also examines the philosophical concepts (such as ‘truth’ or ‘reason’) which derive from this relationship, and, by extension, the social or intersubjective communities which are founded on or constituted through these concepts. Ultimately, then, the aesthetic may articulate or represent radical or utopian possibilities for renegotiating subjects, concepts and communities alike. This event, co-ordinated by the Humanities and Arts Research Council, the Schools of Graduate Studies and Arts, and the departments of Classics, English, French and German at Royal Holloway University of London, brings together some of the most exciting writers working today on this cluster of topics. We are delighted to welcome from Arcadia University Professor Hugh Grady, author most recently of Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (CUP 2009) and Professor Andrew Bowie, recognised expert in the field and author of Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (2nd ed. Manchester University Press 2003). Joining them from the Royal Holloway Classics Department will be Professors Ahuvia Kahane and Richard Alston. This interdisciplinary conversation aims to elicit a variety of theoretical, and historical perspectives, thus stimulating and provoking discussion from students and staff from across the humanities.
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 28 October, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Jason Gaiger (OU) “Can there be a universal theory of images?“
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 4 November, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Havi Carel (UWE) “Objective and subjective wellbeing in ill health“
Thu, 5 November, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RA
Friday, 6 Nov 2009, 9:30 – 18:00
Abstract: Thirty Years After In 1979 Richard Rorty published his magnum opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The headlining ambition of the book is to complete a turn Rorty discerned in current analytic philosophy against a constellation of ideas informed by the assumption that Mind serves as the foundation of epistemic authority. By setting this in a broader ‘therapeutic’ context inspired by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the aim is to ‘liberate’ philosophers from their epistemologically fixated inquiries and, in the spirit of the book’s other hero, Dewey, provide them with a new intellectual task: helping to spread the ‘precious values’ of the Enlightenment by playing their part in “continuing the conversation of the West”. Its attempt to transform the philosopher from epistemologist to hermeneuticist makes Philosophy… more existential than programmatic in character. Nevertheless, its synthesis of the pragmatic and behaviourist elements in Sellars, Quine and Davidson with the historicism of Kuhn presents a challenge to those who wish to retain a ‘realist’ or ‘transcendental’ standpoint for inquiry, and thus aim to draw a methodological line in the sand between philosophy and science, or between philosophy and other ‘kinds of writing’. The purpose of this conference is to invite the speakers to address what they perceive to be the relevance of Philosophy… to their own work, respecting either its substantive claims or its conception of the contemporary role of the philosopher and the methods he or she should pursue (or both). Confirmed speakers: Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh) Bjorn Ramberg (Oslo) Michael Williams (Johns Hopkins) Albrecht Wellmer (Berlin)
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 11 November, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Denis McManus (Southampton): “Heidegger, Wittgenstein and the Last Judgement“
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 25 November, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Tim Thornton (UCLan) “Clinical judgement and the medical humanities”
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 2 December, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Nina Power (Roehampton) “Stony Ground but not entirely: Beckett and the Humanities.”
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 27 January 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Brian Dillon (Kent) “Hypochondriac Lives”
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 3 February 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Stephen Mulhall (Oxford)
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 17 February 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Brian Dillon (Kent)/Jonathan Rée
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 24 February 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Margherita Pascucci (RHUL)
Music and Text
Wed, 24 February 2010, 13:30 – 18:30
Where?
Details to follow
Music and Text
Wed, 3 March 2010, 13:30 – 18:30
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 10 March 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Julia Borossa (Middlesex)
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 17 March 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Speaker: Katerina Deligiorgi (Sussex)
Philosophy and the Humanities
Wed, 24 March 2010, 16:30 – 19:00
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA
Jonathan Rée (RCA): “William James: Religion, neurology and the will to believe“
Royal Holloway History Department Research Seminar Series 2009-10: schedule
Date - Speaker and Title
Autumn Term
20 Oct.
Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway)
What’s wrong with medieval medicine?
27 Oct.
3 Nov.
10 Nov.
Nick Holder (Royal Holloway)
History, Archaeology and Engagement with the Public
24 Nov.
Russell Wallis (Royal Holloway)
Britons, Poles and Jews after WWI
1 Dec.
Tommaso Bobbio (Royal Holloway)
Economic and Social Change and Violence in Ahmadabad 1950-2000.
Spring Term
12 Jan.
Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway)
The Vanishing Liberal Subject: Morality in Russian Literature 1860-1910
19 Jan.
History and Extra-Europe: Joint Presentation
Markus Daechsel (Royal Holloway)
The Historian and the Pakistan Crisis
Vanessa Martin (Royal Holloway)
The Historian and the Iraq War
9 Feb.
2 Mar.
Hayes Robinson Lecture: Stefan Collini – History in English Literary Criticism
29 April
Vanessa Martin
Series Convenor
From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan 1947 – 1964
Royal Holloway University of London Department of History and
The University of Leeds School of History
Event Date: 12 August 2009
From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan 1947 – 1964
Programme / Index:
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Session I – Citizenship: concepts and problems
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)
Chair: Yasmin Khan (RHUL)
- Ornit Shani - ‘Concrete conceptions of citizenship and everyday life: India, 1940s–1970s’
- Talat Ahmed – ‘Becoming an Indian citizen through ‘Bollywood’: the films of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’
- Vazira Zamindar - ‘Citizenship and national boundries in postcolonial South Asia’
- Questions / Discussion
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Session II – Violence and the everyday state
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)
Chair: Francis Robinson (RHUL)
- William Gould – ‘Policing, ‘punishment and quotidian violence in late colonial and early independent north India’
- Taylor Sherman – ‘Retaliation, not rehabilitation: everyday violence in the aftermath of the Police Action in Hyderabad, 1947-51‘
- Questions / Discussion
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Session III – Development and resettlement
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)
Chair: Markus Daechel (RHUL)
- Ilyas Chattha – Differential treatment: Kashmiri refugees’ experiences of rehabilitation and Punjab-centre relations, 1947-1961
- Tommaso Bobbio – ‘Countrymen within the city’: the construction of citizenship and the rhetoric of ‘slum development’ in twentieth-century Ahmedabad
- Questions / Discussion
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Session IV: Gender, childhood and the nation
(click speaker/title for individual archive pages)
Chair: Eleanor Newbigin (Cambridge)
- Ravinder Kaur ‘Bodies of partition: gendered subjects, ‘social’ work and the limits of moral citizenship’
- Uditi Sen – Rehabilitation’s residue: recasting refugee women as ‘permanent liabilities’
- Sarah Ansari - Children, citizenship and the state in 1950s Pakistan
- Questions / Discussion
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Project website: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/subjectstocitizens/index.html
Sarah Ansari – Children, Citizenship and the State in 1950s Pakistan
Sarah Ansari, Royal Holloway University of London
Children, citizenship and the state in 1950s Pakistan
This paper explores the position of children in 1950s Pakistan at the time when the new state was still in the process of working out its citizenship rules and responsibilities. It considers the evolution of Pakistan’s citizenship laws in the early 1950s; individual cases in the mid-1950s when the state intervened in children’s lives thanks to ambiguities concerning their status as Pakistani citizens; and the general uncertainty that existed during this period with respect to the state as ‘protector’ of children’s well-being and rights.
PLAY
Uditi Sen – Rehabilitation’s Residue: Recasting Refugee Women as ‘Permanent Liabilities’
Uditi Sen, University of Cambridge
Rehabilitation’s Residue: Recasting Refugee Women as ‘Permanent Liabilities’
This paper explores the position of refugee women within the regime of refugee rehabilitation in post-colonial India. In order to rehabilitate or restore to normalcy millions of partition refugees, the independent Indian state was forced to articulate its vision of a normative social order. The anxiety caused by the figure of the widowed or single refugee woman, who had no male guardian to protect and provide for her reveals the inherent gender bias in this state led project of social reconstruction. Identified as ‘unattached’ women, they were considered to be ‘unrehabilitable’. The state stepped forward to fill the shoes of the missing patriarch and guarantee perpetual relief to unattached women and their dependants by classifying them as ‘permanent liabilities’. This paper demonstrates how the apparent benevolence of the state towards ‘unattached’ refugee women masked their exclusion from rehabilitation. However, the essentialisation of women as economic dependants did not go unchallenged. It rankled with the prominent women of Nehruvian India; and as ministers, administrators and social workers who enjoyed the patronage of the Congress they advocated training ‘unattached women’ to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Vocational training for refugee women introduced a contradictory ideal of feminine self-sufficiency within a project geared towards replicating patriarchal social mores. But it failed to address the root cause of the marginalisation of refugee women- the stubborn refusal of the Indian nation-state to give unattached women access to the core benefits of rehabilitation – land (or loans to buy land) and the capital to set up trades or businesses. This paper will conclude with suggesting that the inability of independent Indian to imagine refugee women as autonomous entities anticipated its refusal to grant equal citizenship to women in general.
PLAY
Ravinder Kaur – Bodies of Partition: Gendered Subjects, ‘Social’ Work and the Limits of Moral Citizenship
12 August 2009
Ravinder Kaur, University of Copenhagen
Bodies of Partition: Gendered Subjects, ‘Social’ Work and the Limits of Moral Citizenship
This paper is about dislocation – of female bodies dislocated from the realm of the ‘domestic’ to the realm of the public. In India’s contemporary history, the moment of Partition is also the moment when ‘women’ appear in a ruptured social space, outside the protective framework of the family, as objects of sexual violations that could be mutilated, abducted, bought, sold, exchanged, sacrificed and ultimately ‘recovered’ by the state. The dislocated female body, then, in some ways appears as a double sign of moral danger – to her ‘self’ as well as the family, community and the nation – that could only be averted and pre-empted through proper state interventions of recovery. The contentious space of ‘recovery’ is where moral hierarchies of citizenship were created among women who were ‘being recovered’ and who were ‘recovering’ them on behalf of the state. The ‘social worker’, as the women involved in recovery process were officially called, often inhabited an ambivalent position shaped by her identity as a ‘woman’ and a nationalist ‘state agent’. This paper enters this ambivalent space to consider the ways in which the notions of sacrifice, virtue, sexual purity and moral danger shaped belonging and hierarchies, as well as limitations, of moral citizenship in everyday life.
PLAY
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