Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 26 March 2012
Room B36, Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London presents:

I-D The Boundaries of Identity

Three lectures in dialogue around the themes of identity from different subject perspectives.

Lecture 3:

The Conceptual and Ethical Boundaries of Human Identity

Introduction by Professor Miriam Zukas (Professor of Adult Education and Executive Dean, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy) .

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Professor Joanna Bourke (Department of History, Classics and Philosophy)

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Dr Robert Northcott (Department of Philosophy)

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Questions

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Event Date: 26 May 2011
Room B35, Birkbeck Main Building
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

Talking Books – Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain

This is the first in a series of public debates and conversations in 2011 about academic books of major importance. This event will revolve around Stefan Collini’s book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. On its publication in 2006, the book attracted extensive comment for its analysis of the concept of the intellectual and its exploration of the traditional claim that ‘real’ intellectuals have not existed in Britain (or, more often, England). For this event, four younger scholars from various disciplines will reflect on the significance of the book and its bearing on their own work. In conversation with the author they will move beyond the immediate reception of the book and consider its subject-matter in a series of longer perspectives.

Speakers to include:

• Stefan Collini (Cambridge)
• Matthew Beaumont (English, UCL)
• Joel Isaac (History QMUL)
• Clarisse Berthezène (Institut Charles V, Université Paris)
• Jonathan Derbyshire (New Statesman)
• Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck) Chair

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at UCL, where he has recently set up a City Centre. He is the author of Utopia Ltd. (2005) and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). In addition, he is the editor of Adventures in Realism (2007) and the co-editor of Restless Cities (2010).

Joel Isaac is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. He also currently holds the Balzan-Skinner Lectureship in Modern Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge (Spring 2011). His research focuses on the history of philosophy and the social sciences in the United States.

Jonathan Derbyshire is Culture Editor of the New Statesman. His literary journalism has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, Prospect and the Times Literary Supplement.

Clarisse Berthezène is a Lecturer (“maître de conférences”) at the University of Paris Diderot. She is the author of Les conservateurs britanniques dans la bataille des idées. Ashridge College, premier think tank conservateur (Presses de sciences po, 2011) and a number of articles on British Conservatism, notably « Creating Conservative Fabians : the Conservative Party, Political Education and the Founding of Ashridge College, 1929-1931 », Past & Present, 182, February 2004, pp. 211-240. Her new book Training Minds for the War of Ideas. The cultural and intellectual politics of Conservatism in the interwar years will be coming out with Manchester University Press.

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Introduction by Joanna Bourke.

Order of Speakers:

Stefan Collini

Matthew Beaumont

Joel Isaac

Clarisse Berthezène

Jonathan Derbyshire

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questions:

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Event date: 21 May 2011
Room B33 Birkbeck
University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

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

Rhetorics of Pain: Historical Reflections

Pain is one of the most influential forces in history. An examination of its many transformations over time provides unique insights into everyday life. This workshop seeks to explore the complex phenomenon of pain from the eighteenth century to the 1960s. We are interested in exploring the biomedical, neurological, psychological, cognitive, and sensory aspects of pain as well as the relationship between bodily sensation and cultural understanding.

Programme:

Professor Joanna Bourke (Chair, Birkbeck College)
Rhetorics of Pain: Historical Reflections .

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Professor Sander Gilman (Emory University)
Seeing Pain
(AUDIO HERE)

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Dr Anna Carden-Coyne (University of Manchester) 
Cultures of Pain: The Political, Social and Sexual Provocations of War Wounds
(AUDIO HERE)

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Dr Lucy Bending (University of Reading)
Translating pain – overcoming the ineffability of pain
(AUDIO HERE)

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Dr Jeremy Davies (University of Cambridge) 
The Distinction between Mental and Physical Pain
(AUDIO HERE)

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Professor Javier Moscoso (Spanish National Research Council) 
The Topics of Pain and the Anthropology of Experience
(AUDIO HERE)

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WHY HUMANITIES?

Event Date: 5th November 2010
Room B34, Birkbeck College, Malet St, London WC1

Programme:

Welcome – Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck) .

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Stefan Collini (Cambridge) ‘Holding our nerve’  - (AUDIO HERE)

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Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck)
‘La Fontaine’s Cat, Kafka’s Ape, and the Humanities’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Francis Mulhern (New Left Review)
‘Humanities and University Corporatism’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Raimond Gaita (Kings, London)
‘Callicles’ Challenge’  - (AUDIO HERE)

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Iain Pears (Historian and Writer)
‘Taxes, banks, loans, and students’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Kate Soper (London Met)
‘Rhetoric, Reality, Revisionings’   – (AUDIO HERE)

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Quentin Skinner (QMUL)
‘Why the history of philosophy?’  - (AUDIO HERE)

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CLOSE .

Introductory conference lecture by  Professor Onora O’Neill,  Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve – ‘The Two Cultures Fifty Years On’

Event Date: 5th November 2010
Room B34, Birkbeck College, Malet St, London WC1

WHY HUMANITIES?

Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck) – La Fontaine’s Cat, Kafka’s Ape, and the Humanities

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talk:

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questions:

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<< back to main conference page >>

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Event Date: Saturday, 6 June 2009

As historical fiction enjoys a huge commercial renaissance, this debate will explore how far the changes in the last forty years of historiography means that novelists willing to spend real time in the archives and libraries are now producing a new kind of historical fiction, more accurate and thus more truthful about the past, than the work of their predecessors.

Speakers:

Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck) is Professor of History at Birkbeck. She is the award-winning author of nine books, including books on Irish history, gender and “the body”, the history of psychological thought, modern warfare, the emotions, and sexual violence. She is currently writing a history of humanity and animality.

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Hilary Mantel, studied law at LSE and Sheffield University, and lived for some years in Africa and the Middle East. Her nine novels include A Place of Greater Safety, set in Paris during the Revolution, and The Giant O’Brien, set in London in the 1780s. For her new book she has shifted back to the Tudor era; Wolf Hall traces the early career of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister, and will be followed by a second novel to conclude Cromwell’s story. She has also written radio drama, a short story collection called Learning to Talk, and a memoir, Giving Up The Ghost. A former film critic of The Spectator, she writes for a range of papers here and in the USA.

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Sarah Dunant, (BIH Research Fellow) Sarah studied history at Newnham College Cambridge in the early 1970’s, from where she went on to become a writer, broadcaster and critic. She has written eleven novels, four of which have been short listed for awards, three screen plays and edited two books of essays. She worked for many years with the BBC in radio and television, producing and presenting arts documentaries and magazine programmes , most notably The Late Show on BBC 2 (1989 – 1996) and Night Waves (Radio 3 1996- 2004). For several years she presented the BBC television’s coverage of the Booker Man prize for fiction. She was a founding patron of the Orange Prize for women’s fiction, and writes and reviews for many British newspapers including The Times, The Observer and the Guardian, and sits on the editorial board of The Royal Academy’s art magazine. She has taught at Goldsmith College in London and Washington University at St Louis and lectures regularly to American students in Florence. Her recent novels The Birth of Venus ( set in Florence in 1490’s ) and In the Company of the Courtesan ( Venice 1550’s ) have been international best sellers and the final volume of the Renaissance trilogy Sacred Hearts will be published in June 2009 .

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John Sutherland (UCL) is the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at UCL. He has written a number of books on Fiction, including: Fiction and the Fiction Industry, Bestsellers, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. He is currently engaged on writing The Lives of the Novelists for Profile Books.

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Discussion:

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