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

Deniz Tuerker – The Yildiz Kiosk and the Queen Mothers of the Tanzimat Era: Gender, Landscape, and Visibility

Anthony Stockwell – Plunder and Restitution: Britain and the Mandalay Regalia

John Falconer – ‘A Glorious Galaxy of Monuments.’ Photography and Archaeology in India in the 19th Century

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:

Birkbeck Arts Week 2018

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

Creative writing as research

Landscape storytelling: the story of an ‘enemy alien’ set designer

Marilyn Monroe: an unlikely feminist

Gaelic hardship: Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Poor Mouth’

Renegade: Austin Collings

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