Events kicking off in 2014

 

I’m not sure what the term is for what I am right now – a post submission but pre-Viva PhD researcher (my Viva is set for the 28th Feb). But it all seems busy now I’m free to generally bum around at seminars and attend any research events and meetings I feel like. I thought I’d put a quick note on here (rather than a proper blog entry) about some of the public events I’ll be involved with over the next few months, in case anyone is around…

On the 29th January – a week today – I’ll be giving an evening talk / reading at the Daniel Blau gallery in Hoxton Square, as the first event kicking off the 2014 run of the series Amid the Ruins (series image above). Alongside myself, William Rowe, and Joe Luna, the fourth reader will be the contemporary political poet Sean Bonney (see for instance his publications Document (2009) and The Commons (2011)), so there should be some good discussion on riots, space, and landscape over some glasses of wine. On Saturday night (the 8th February) I’ll be presenting a collaborative work at Rich Mix as part of the cross-disciplinary event Wrogowie: Polish Poetry run by The Enemies Project and co-curated by Steve Fowler and Marcus Slease). I’ll be paired with the Polish poet and academic Ula Choweniec, who teaches at UCL, and other paired collaborators are listed here. This event is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute and will also be preceded by the reading and discussion eMigrating Landscapes at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies on Friday evening.

On the 24th February (Monday) there will be the next Passengerfilms session, curated by the Cultural Geographies MA students as part of the Royal Holloway Science Festival, which will tackle the play worlds and imaginary worlds of children. This will be our first attempt at an MA-run event so it’s exciting to see the student team running with the ideas as we gear up for the rest of the screenings (three or four next events are being finalised at the moment so that hopefully we can advertise them all at once). On the 26th February (Wednesday) I’ll be presenting a midday Media Arts research seminar on the Passengerfilms curating project (and perhaps drumming up some future collaborations). A fair way off still, but on the 12th May I’ll be speaking at the Royal West Academy, Bristol, as part of the public interdisciplinary symposium British Waters and Beyond: The Cultural Significance of the Sea Since 1800 (in partnership with Leeds Metropolitan and Oxford Brookes). For those interested in the topic of historical geographies of the sea, there’s also a slightly earlier conference based in Oxford which has a great selection of speakers – including geographers and literary scholars – though I’ll only be attending, not presenting: Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, 1775-1914.

 

 

In the meantime, I’m off to Leeds early next week for my first academic interview and interview presentation (!), followed by a trip to Nottingham for the site visit for an emerging project, ‘View from the East: Landscapes of Stories-so-far’, which will be run by the arts organisation Ordinary Culture around the Colwick wood and estate. I’ll be contributing to the public programme on the temporal understandings of Colwick wood and its archived materials, so am excited to meet up with them and see the space (partly visible above: Jan Siberechts’ ‘View of Nottingham from the East’, painted from Colwick Hill, c. 1695). There are a couple of more events and talks in the works which don’t have specific dates and times yet – including an evening lecture which I’ll be giving in the wonderful new series Print Screen: Writing and the Moving Image at Westminster (which so far has been very literary-geographical, beginning with David Herd’s talk on immigration and the political coastline of Dover), and a group event in February with a performance and round table at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, with musicians and writers collaborating on specific places, following on from James Saunders’ Location Composites project.

All quite exciting interventions in what I presumed was going to be quite a vacant start of the year (for job hunting, reviews, and manuscript editing.). It’s quite amazing being a PhD student with no PhD to do…!

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~ by amycutler on January 22, 2014.