Seminars

Thursday 26 September, 5.15-7.30pm, Hebdomadar’s room Research seminar with Philippe Beck Inspired by an article published in December 2019 relating how polar bears were dangerously approaching the village of Ryrkaïpii, on the edge of the Arctic banks of the Choucotka River at the north-eastern tip of Russia, the one hundred poems that form Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023) invite … Read more

Wednesday 25 September, 2-4pm, Buchanan 216 a Masterclass with Philippe Beck (open to UGs, PGs and researchers) ‘Poetry is here or there. Not everywhere./ It depends on a sortie.’ (Opéradiques, Flammarion, 2014) In this masterclass we addressed the relationship between poetry and the other arts. The following questions were discussed: How does poetry approach the … Read more

1-2pm, 2 April 2024, Buchanan 216 Dr Elodie Laügt The ‘chantier’ has multiple literal and figurative senses: as a site of activity and production in relation to which modern and contemporary French poets have positioned themselves and their practices; as a place whose material, processes and stories are transformed and elevated into poetry; as a … Read more

1-2pm, 25 March 2024, Arts Seminar Room 5 Dr Fabio Caiani In his major work, Plague Lands (1995), the late Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim (Baghdad, 1945 -London, 2019) revisits the Baghdad of his childhood and youth. In an attempt to transcend the troubled time of Iraqi modern history, he merges his own autobiographical time with the time … Read more

5-6:30pm, 14 March 2024, Buchanan Room 216 Professor Peter Constantine, University of Connecticut When a language becomes extinct, it takes with it more than just its words to a silent grave. With it disappear millennia of culture, knowledge, and tradition. Its unique interpretation of our world unravels and dies. UNESCO warns us that 90 to … Read more

1-2pm, 11 March 2024, Arts Seminar Room 5 Dr David Evans In this session we will look at some metaphors which are widely used in ecocritical textual analysis, and consider how effective they are as tools for both textual analysis and thinking through cultural responses to the climate crisis. Looking at a selection of texts … Read more

1-2 pm, 5 February 2024, Arts Seminar room 5 Leena Nammari, Artist Printmaker,  Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee   ‘I have as an artist been drawn to the ordinary spaces, in the extraordinary land of Palestine. The everyday stories of what Mahmoud Darwish called: ordinary grief. Artists have always … Read more

1-2pm, 22 January 2024, Buchanan 216 Dr Damiano Benvegnu Can a forest be fascist? My project presentation explores layers of that question charting the history of the 20,000 pines planted in the late 1930s to spell the word DUX in trees on an Italian hillside. This grand and controversial arboreal inscription — Benito Mussolini’s Latin … Read more

27 October, 2-4.30pm, Hebdomadar’s room A workshop conceived to explore further the collective poems that emerged from the workshops held in June 2023 and designed in response to the themes of the EE2023 conference Financing the Future – with a focus on exploring ‘visions of and expectations for the future’, ‘relations of obligation and indebtedness’, … Read more