18 May 2022
Session Title: "I Am Only Writing a Utopia to Show that It Is Not One”: Genre as a Performance in Theodor Herzl’s Old-New Land This paper looks at The Old-New Land, a utopian novel by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, in the context of a resurgent utopian craze. It examines the novel in relation to the genre as a whole, and explores tensions between Herzl's open scepticism towards utopian thought and relatively tame social innovations, and his explicit use of, and reference to, the internationally popular genre of utopian fiction. It examines his “genre-savviness” and what its performative function says about Herzlian Zionism as well as nationalist politics generally. Speaker: Alex Marshall studied French and German at the University of Edinburgh, and a doctorate in German at the University of Oxford on early Zionism and concepts of nationhood. He worked as a translator and EFL teacher before coming to Sheffield Hallam University, and now teaches German language and culture alongside linguistics, English and other languages-related modules. |
4 May 2022
Session Title: Sound of Cinema Author, broadcaster, and historian Dr Matthew Sweet will discuss Sound of Cinema the BBC’s film music programme since 2013. In those years it has brought listeners scores from the latest releases and the deeper history of the medium, staged live concerts of classics and works never previously played in concert, and built up an archive of interviews with the major figures in the field – Terence Blanchard, Anne Dudley, James Horner, Rachel Portman, David Shire, Hans Zimmer. Most importantly, though, the programme has reflected a growing public appetite for film music and helped to make a case for its seriousness. In this talk Matthew will reflect on the changes of the last decade and celebrate the labour that cinema has performed for the cause of contemporary music – preserving and expanding the language of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, encouraging avant-garde approaches to composition and creating a mass global audience for new orchestral music - without ever quite getting the credit. Speaker: Matthew Sweet is a UK author, broadcaster, and historian, and presents both 'Sound of Cinema' and 'Free Thinking' on BBC Radio 3. His latest book, 'Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers and Themselves' is published by Picador. In 2021 Matthew collaborated with artist and filmmaker Esther Johnson, and composer and sound design Nguyễn Nhung in the creation of an audio-visual installation titled Liberation Radio. Twitter: @drmatthewsweet |
27 April 2022
Session Title: Investigatory Power Rose Butler will present research led, informed and steered by art making. Her research examines the in-between spaces generated by physical and digital, visible and invisible borders such as buffer zones, ‘no man’s land’ or surveillance data. For eight months as part of doctoral research she followed the Investigatory Powers Bill’s (aka The Snooper’s Charter) passage through the Houses of Parliament. She then selected historical surveillance material from hidden cameras at the Stasi Film and Video Archive, Berlin. This included training material for agents alongside surveillance footage documented on hidden cameras. This transcoded, sometimes sabotaged or anonymised material contains historical layering and witnessing of oppression and resistance. These works and material begin to raise ethical questions surrounding state surveillance and privacy that teeters on the edges of freedoms. Speaker: Rose Butler is an artist, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and part of the Empathy and Risk research group. She is the Early Career Researcher Representative for CCRI. Rose uses adapted technology and custom built software alongside early cameras and analogue technique to make interactive installations, single and multi-screen videos or large-scale photographs. Rose’s work brings together photographic and filmic documentation, archival material, political commentary and fiction. |
Image © Stasi Records Agency (BStU), Ref: MfS-BV-Suhl-Abt-VIII-Fo-3192-Bild-0019
This image demonstrates the use of a button hole camera. Image © Rose Butler
Houses of Parliament, June 2016. Image taken on a Minox Complan. |
16 March 2022
Session Title: Discussions on the rural, urban and the journey in contemporary French horror Alexandra West’s Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity (2016) contains a chapter called ‘Bon Voyage’, which analyses Calvaire (2004), Sheitan (2006) and Frontier(s) (2007). This chapter discusses the three films in terms of oppositions between the urban and the rural and what they say about French society and politics. This presentation will discuss this writing, my prior work around the topic, and some thoughts about how this analytical framework could be extended throughout contemporary French horror history, with particular emphasis on the works of Jean Rollin. I wish to pose these ideas as a work-in-progress, aiming to engage with other academics who may offer additional insight. Speaker: Oliver Hicks is a post-graduate student at Sheffield Hallam University. |
2021
Session Title: The cinema of Pedro Almodóvar The cinema of Pedro Almodóvar offers a comprehensive film-by-film analysis of the cinema of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, from early transgressive comedies of the 1980s and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, to award winning dramas like All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Julieta. In doing so, it shows how Almodóvar's films draw on various national cinemas and film genres, including Spanish cinema of the Dictatorship, European art cinema, Hollywood melodrama and film noir. The book argues that the political nature of Almodóvar's work has been obscured by his alignment with the allegedly apolitical Spanish cultural movement known as la movida, but is in fact a form of social critique disguised as frivolity. Almodóvar's films consistently engage with and challenge stereotypes about traditional and contemporary Spain, addressing Spain's traumatic historical past and how it continues to inform the present. Focusing in particular on memory work, it explains how Almodóvar uses the poetic techniques to explore personal and collective trauma. Almodóvar is not, as commonly thought, a postmodern filmmaker, but a metamodern one who uses postmodernist techniques with an ethical purpose. Speaker: Dr Ana María Sánchez-Arce is Reader in English at SHU. Her research specialisms are contemporary literature, global literature, and film. Identity and form, trauma and censorship, best sum up her work. Her approach is interdisciplinary with a focus on issues of social justice and human rights in relation to gender and race. |
2021
Session Title: Comics: An Introduction Comics: An Introduction, Routledge (2021) provides a clear and detailed introduction to the comics form – including graphic narratives and a range of other genres – explaining key terms, history, theories, and major themes. Taking a broadly global approach, Harriet Earle discusses the history and development of the form internationally, as well as how to navigate comics as a new way of reading. Earle also pushes beyond the book to lay out the ways that fans engage with their comics of choice – and how this can impact the industry. She also analyses how comics can work for social change and political comment. Discussing journalism and life writing, she examines how the coming together of word and image gives us new ways to discuss our world and ourselves. Speaker: Dr Harriet Earle is a Senior Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University and the author of Comics: An Introduction (2020) and Comics, Trauma and the New Art of War (2017). Her research interests include violence, conflict and biopolitics in comics and popular culture. She is in the early stages of her third book, on the Vietnam War in comics. |
Image © Harriet Earle 2020
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15 June 2021
Session Title: Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy – A Psychoanalytic Exploration In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film. Speaker: Jack Black is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. His research examines the interlinkages between culture and media studies, with particular attention given to cultural representation and ideology. |
12 May 2021
Session Title: Modern Languages and Mobility: Redefining a Disciplinary Area Recent global events can leave no doubt as to the necessity of understanding the interconnected aspects of mobility and immobility, the movement of people and the movement of ideas, practices, and artefacts. The hidden legacies of the enforced displacement of people, the enduring effects of centuries of colonial activity, the likely consequences of accelerated processes of globalization are everywhere apparent. The context imposes the need for disciplinary frameworks to question whether they are so oriented that they can fully engage with research of all kinds to address the enormity of the issues at stake. With specific reference to Modern Languages, the talk considers the role played by funding schemes such as Translating Cultures and the Open World Research Initiative in the development of the disciplinary field. It looks at how the project ‘Transnationalising Modern Languages’ (2014-18) sought to use the inquiry into diasporic Italian communities as a means of pursuing innovations in teaching practice and it considers the purpose of the expanding LUP series, ‘Transnational MLs’. The final part of the talk, looks at the role of the Institute of Modern Languages Research in promoting and in supporting the development of MLs, understood as a capacious, wide-ranging, and fundamentally important disciplinary field. Speaker: Professor Charles Burdett is director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. Professor Burdett gained his PhD at Oxford University in 1994 and has since taught at the Universities of Cardiff and Bristol, and was Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Durham. His principal areas of research include literary culture under fascism, travel writing, the Italian colonial presence in Libya and East Africa and its legacy, and the representation of Islam and the Islamic world in recent Italian literature and culture. His publications include Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing between the Wars (Berghahn, 2010) and Italy, Islam and the Islamic World: Representations and Reflections from 9/11 to the Arab Uprisings (Lang, 2016). |
14 April 2021
Session Title: Cultural representations of the workplace in 21st Century France. Professor Sarah Waters (Leeds), is an expert in French Popular Culture and will discuss aspects related to her recent monograph (Suicide voices. Labour Trauma in France, Liverpool, 2020) focusing on work-related suicides in France and the role popular culture played in bringing this issue to the fore. Speaker: Sarah Waters is a professor of French Studies, former Deputy Head of School (2015–2017) and Head of French (2011–2014) at the University of Leeds. She was Honorary Secretary of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French (AUPHF) until 2020 and a previous member of the editorial board of Modern & Contemporary France.Sarah's recent research, funded by the Wellcome Trust and subsequently an AHRC research leaders fellowship has focused on work-related suicide and labour theory in France. This research was published as a monograph Suicide Voices. Labour Trauma in France by Liverpool University Press in 2020. She awarded funding by Research England in 2021 to undertake a qualitative study of work-related suicide in the UK. |
7 March 2021
Session Title: Un Homme Qui Dort: Exploring the Adaptation and Translation of Georges Perec’s quiet masterpiece. Adapted from his own 1967 novel and co-directed by him, Georges Perec’s 1974 feature film Un Homme Qui Dort is a quiet, languid and mildly oneric low budget black and white film. The ever hard to please Time Out wrote that the award-winning work is ‘an astonishing tour de force’. Directed in partnership with Bernard Queysanne this distinctly Parisian film traces the descent of one man from mere boredom through alienation and, arguably, into terror. Looked at through a contemporary lens, the themes of depression and mental illness are obvious but hailing, as it does, from an era of left-bank culture where alienation and detachment were somewhat cool and aspirational, there are other undiscovered aspects to the film that are worthy of our attention. Parallel with these concerns are the issues that surround the writers adaptation from his novel into the film. Some pragmatic, some aesthetic. There’s also the enigmatic differences between the French and English versions that invite speculation and debate. It is often difficult to discuss any of Perec’s work without first introducing the elusive and precious man himself. He can often hide behind his work and literary structures. Un Homme Qui Dort is perhaps his most personal and revealing of all of this longer works so at least some of his biography is worth exploring in relation to this body of work and translations. There will be risks, we may get in trouble, but that’s how we know it’s an adventure. Speaker: Christopher Hall is Senior Lecturer in Post Production on BA Hon Film & Media Production at Sheffield Hallam University. A Georges Perec devotee for most of his adult life, he directed the English Language premieres of Perec’s The Machine at the Crucible Theatre (2012) and The Raise at The Leeds Drama Workshop (2016). One of the founders of the BBC BAFTA Albert Higher Education Partnership, which seeks to embed TV and Film Industry sustainable production practices into HE curriculum, he has also spoken internationally about how to make student production more environmentally friendly. His TV industry background includes over 100 broadcast editing credits. |
10 February 2021
Session Title: Woman at Sea? Space and Work in Catherine Poulain’s Le grand marin This paper considers the question of space as it relates to work in Catherine Poulain’s Le grand marin (l’Olivier, 2016). Poulain’s debut novel foregrounds the relationship between space and work on more than one level: the fictional account of French runaway Lili and her incursion into the male-dominated world of Alaskan fishing has been much lauded, but the extra-diegetic narrative of nomadic labourer-cum-author Poulain is arguably just as compelling as that of her protagonist. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (Duke University Press, 2006), I propose to analyse Lili’s engagement with the boat space as a whole and with the table in particular, demonstrating how descriptions of these are used to evoke the character’s experiences in her new working environment. The table also brings us to the question of space as it relates to the work of Poulain herself. Her orientation as a first-time novelist with a non-literary background echoes Lili’s ‘other’ status, and the ‘path clearing’ required to open up a new (work)space is therefore twofold – the mission of character and creator alike. ‘Le grand marin,’ I contend, is a trope which transcends the boundaries of the text: Lili herself is a ‘great sailor’, negotiating with equal tenacity the turbulent Alaskan waters and the politically and sexually charged spaces of her adopted profession, and her skills mirror those of Poulain, who emerges as an unlikely yet adept navigator of the French literary landscape. Speaker: Dr Amy Wigelsworth is a senior lecturer in French within the Languages and Cultures SG, BTE at Sheffield Hallam University. Her main area of expertise is French popular culture. She is the author of the monograph Rewriting Les Mystères de Paris: The Mystères Urbains and the Palimpsest (2016), as well as a number of articles and a book chapter on French urban mysteries and French crime fiction, and is also co-editor, with Angela Kimyongür, of Rewriting Wrongs: French Crime Fiction and the Palimpsest (2014). Her current research is on work and culture, with a particular focus on French fictional representations of work, and the socio-cultural contexts in which such texts are produced, marketed and consumed. |
13 January 2021
Session Title: The Mountain Bike as an Object of Ecological and Geopolitical Change. The 20th century marked the beginning of a threefold planetary crisis, referred to collectively as the 'Anthropocene' (Purdy, 2015). Ecologically, the earth is at breaking point. The geological volumes of the planet, from its crust to the atmosphere, have been infused with a range of harmful pollutants, leading to the dispersal and extinction of human and nonhuman life. This ecological catastrophe has gradually usurped confidence in free-market economics, as the process of ascribing value to 'Natural' resources is complicated by human interference. Whilst recognising our impact on the landscapes and ecosystems of earth, the Anthropocene emphasises the impotence of existing political intervention in the face of unprecedented planetary change (Meyer, 2019). Thinking with and through the Anthropocene, therefore, demands new modes of collective thinking which recognise the dynamic, transnational and highly contentious nature of this new climatic regime. In this presentation, I will argue that mountain bikes, and many of aspects of mountain bike culture, provide important insights into what a response to this climatic regime might look like. Bringing together a number of recent publications, and drawing on two years of fieldwork, I contend that it is the very 'uncanniness' (Morton, 2016) of the mountain bike as a technological artifact that renders an experience that is both constitutive of, and distanciated from, the surfaces and materials with which it interacts. As opposed to being simply subjective (i.e human-centred), 'tuning' to the nuances of a human/non-human assemblage allows riders to connect to an infinite regress of planetary considerations, which range in scale from the local to the global. Thus, when taken collectively, I posit that mountain bikers form important bonds with other objects and life forms, engendering new and emerging forms of (onto)political subjectivity. Speaker: Dr. Jim Cherrington is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Studies in the Academy of Sport and Physical Activity at Sheffield Hallam University. His research explores how identity, bodies, knowledges and objects are materialised in/through everyday life, with much of his recent work dedicated to investigating the socio-historical, socio-technical and onto-political conditions of 'nature' (sport). Theoretically, Jim's work leans heavily on the critical post-humanities, specifically those approaches that align with new materialist, posthumanist and speculative realist scholarship. He is also interested in methodological innovation, both in his work on visual methodologies and creative forms of representation, and is committed to finding novel ways of documenting a range of human-nonhuman relationships. |
Image © Peak District MBT
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2 December 2020
Session Title: a ROLE to PLAY Professor Esther Johnson will screen and discuss her short film a ROLE to PLAY. This research brings together the lived experiences and dreams of Bolsover residents, one of the most deprived towns in the middle of England. Working with Bolsover Freedom Community Project food bank users, volunteers, adult reading group members, and former Bolsover MP (1970-2019) Dennis Skinner, the film tells stories of the impact of economic changes in post-industrial Bolsover, a Derbyshire constituency where coal was once king. Speaker: Artist and Filmmaker Esther Johnson (MA, Royal College of Art) works at the intersection of artist moving image and documentary to create poetic portraits focusing on alternative social histories and marginal worlds. The repositioning of archival material is explored as a way of looking at intangible cultural heritage and, of addressing the relationship between memory and storytelling. Films have been exhibited internationally in 40+ countries, and broadcast on BBC and Channel 4, with audio works aired on ABC Australia, BBC Radio 4, Resonance FM and RTÉ radio. Esther is former recipient of the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Research Prize in Performing & Visual Arts and, is Professor of Film and Media Arts in the Art, Design and Media Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. https://linktr.ee/BlanchePictures Instagram: @Blanche_Pictures Twitter: @BlanchePictures |
Images © Esther Johnson 2019
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