
Welcome to the June 2018 newsletter – apologies for the gap in newsletter continuity. As you are undoubtedly aware, there were the GDPR issues to deal with and we had to make sure that we were not doing anything illegal. On top of that there were issues like the weather and the universities strike; all of that has calmed down now and we can again bring you hours upon hours of recorded research papers and lectures.
Let’s start off with the Royal Asiatic Society, where we recorded 8 events:
Susan Whitfield – Silk, Slaves and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road
Charles Melville – The Illustration of Mirkhwand’s Raudat al-safa in RAS Ms. P.38
Anthony Stockwell – Plunder and Restitution: Britain and the Mandalay Regalia
Omniya Abd al-Barr – K.A.C. Creswell’s Photographic Archive at the V and A Museum
Festschrift for Professor Peter Robb (SOAS)
Alex McKay – The View from the Palace: The Sikkim Royal Archives
The Aristotelian Society contributed with 4 lectures:
Holly Lawford-Smith – Collective Culpability and Collective Punishment
Lisa Shapiro – Assuming Epistemic Authority
Hannah Dawson – Fighting for my Mind: Feminist Logic at the Edge of Enlightenment
Alison Hills – Moral and Aesthetic Virtue
May is traditionally the time for Birkbeck Arts week, and this year was no exception – and for those of you unfamiliar with the Arts week, this is a week of events held at the School of Arts at Birkbeck University of London, where scholars from the School of Arts are explaining their research and present on-going projects. So plenty of them here:
or individually, here they are:
Plantae Amazonicae: art, ethnobotany and biocultural artefacts
Curating sound for difficult histories
Landscapes of culture: Raymond Williams 30 years on
Landscape storytelling: the story of an ‘enemy alien’ set designer
Marilyn Monroe: an unlikely feminist
Gaelic hardship: Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Poor Mouth’
Paper Peepshow: peep into the rabbit hole
with an additional interview about Victorian Paper Peepshows here:
Shijia Yu – Discovering the Little-Known: An Interview with Jonathan Gestetner
Then, also from Birkbeck, a book launch and Q&A session from the Politics Department:
Crime and Global Justice: Book launch and discussion
and a discussion on immigration:
Attitudes Toward Immigration Round-table
Continuing the series ‘The Difficulties of Writing Family History’ from the Leo Baeck Institute London – some truly difficult family history:
In conversation: Philippe Sands and Katrin Himmler
Three form the Humanities and Arts Research Institute at Royal Holloway:
Grey/Polychrome: Cy Twombly, Modernity, Classicism, and the History of Art
Ben Thomas – Curating Raphael: Invention and Eloquence
‘Yo soy Fidel!’: Post-Castro Cuba and the Cult of Personality
Then we welcome two new contributors – first off the Royal Historical Society, based at UCL:
Lynn Abrams – Pursuing autonomy: self-help and self fashioning amongst women in post-war Britain
Then, a delight for all art history fans: The Warburg Institute. Their first recording with us was:
Elizabeth Sears – The Courtauld and the Warburg: Complementarities
Next, from the Pears Institute for the study of anti-Semitism comes a fascinating lecture by Ethan Katz:
Ethan Katz – Jews, Muslims, Frenchmen: The Promises and Perils of Fraternity
The 2018 Cosgrove lecture, organised by the Royal Holloway GeoHums research group, was on the 19th century photographer Frederick Dally:
Joan M Schwartz – Lives and afterlives: The photographic lens and legacy of Frederick Dally
From mountains and landscapes to underground, the keynote lecture from Birkbeck’s ‘Underground’ conference:
Stephen Graham – Subterranean urban politics: Insurgency, sanctuary, exploration and tourism
Now on to the super-clever philosophers at the Centre For Resaerch in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston. This was their end of year conference:
Exemplarity, Authority, Universalizability: How is a Geopolitics of Philosophy to be conceptualised?
The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities had plenty to offer too, with a talk from Guardian commentator Gary Younge:
Gary Younge – All That Is Solid Melts Into Air – The politics of hope in a time of fragility
and from Jacqueline Rose (who needs no introduction, really), with her new book ‘Mothers’:
Mothers by Jacqueline Rose: Book launch and discussion
and finally, a look back to May 1968 with a conference with Françoise Vergès, Lewis R. Gordon, Sylvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh and Tariq Ali:
Global ’68: Solidarity in Alliance and Global History

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All the best,
René