#SEDweekly – Events and Opportunities Digest – 30th November

Welcome to our third weekly digest featuring the best events and opportunities we’ve just discovered and that are coming up in the next week. To get an email alert when the new digest is live please sign up using the form below. If you’d like to add anything to next week’s digest then please email us.

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Events

margherita-laera

Drama Quorum Seminar Series: Margherita Laera | Wed 30 Nov | 6pm | QMUL Mile End Campus

Continuing our themes of capital and imperialism, we welcome Dr. Margherita Laera for a seminar entitled ‘A Theatre of/for Europe: Giorgio Strehler and the Dream of a United Continent’.

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English PGR Seminar Series: David Nowell-Smith | Thu 1 Dec | 5.15pm | Lock-keeper’s Cottage, QMUL Mile End Campus

Dr. Nowell-Smith is Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA, his main interest being in philosophical poetics. His talk is entitled ‘Eight Theses on Poiesis’.

 

Spoken Word with PEACH | Wed 1 Dec | 7-9pm | Drapers Lounge, QMUL Mile End Campus

PEACH is hosting the first Spoken Word Open Mic event of the year this Thursday in Drapers Lounge with professional poets: Kat Francois and Chris Redmond!

 

Critical Solace – A guest | Mon 5 Dec | 6-7pm | Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Literature

Our very own David James is giving a special visiting lecture at Birkbeck entitled ‘Critical Solace’. The talk relates to work that David has recently been undertaking into the consolotary powers of literature, funded by a Leverhulme Research Prize.

For more SED events see our calendar here

 

Jobs & Paid Internships

Development Officer | Young Vic | £25,500 – £27,500 | Deadline: Monday 5 December

The Young Vic are looking for a Development Officer to join their busy fundraising team with writing experience and a strong interest in the arts for a primarily research based job.

 

Opportunities & Volunteering

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Student Media Conference | Weds 7 and Thu 8 Dec | QMUL, Mile End Campus

The Student Media Conference 2016 will feature a programme of talks and workshops from media industry professionals and recent alumni who were involved with Student Media during their time here. The event concludes with an evening networking sessions over drinks and nibbles.

 

Calls for Papers

None sent through to us this week.

 

To add a listing to next week’s digest or to help us update this edition please email sed-web@qmul.ac.uk by Friday 2 December at 5pm

#SEDweekly – Events and Opportunities Digest – 23rd November

Welcome to our second digest featuring the best events and opportunities we’ve just discovered and that are coming up in the next week. To get an email alert when the new digest is live please sign up using the form below. If you’d like to add anything to next week’s digest then please email us.

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Events

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SLAPPIN’ DA BASS on Wednesday 30 November – more details below…

English PGR Seminar Series: Dr Kathryn Allan | Thu 24 Nov | 5.15pm | Lock-keeper’s Cottage, QMUL Mile End Campus

A free guest seminar by Dr Kathryn Allan (UCL) as part of our Postgraduate Research series exploring ‘degrees of lexicalization’ for concepts across the history of English.

 

Emeritus Professor Dr Dushant Patel presents Guest Lecture Series: Marginalisation, Unmarginalisation, Extramarginalisation, Demarginalisation, Premarginalisation, Postmarginalisation.  | Wed 23 Nov | RR2 2pm – 3pm & RR2 4:30pm – 5:30pm

In this comedy lecture, taking place in the year 2100AD, Professor Patel re-examines the structural and personal protest actions that occurred in a response to racialised inequality, gentrification, and racism itself throughout the 2050s.

 

Location, Location, Location – A Festival by Queen Mary Theatre Company | QMUL Mile End Campus | Fri 25-Sun 27 Nov

A weekend festival of performance presented by Queen Mary Theatre Company around the themes of location.

 

QMUL Inaugural Lecture Series: ‘The Lion, the Children and the Bookcase: Anne Frank and C.S. Lewis’ Professor Margaret Reynolds | Tue 29 Nov | 6.30pm

Join Professor Margaret Reynolds, Professor of English, for her Inaugural Lecture at Queen Mary University of London.

 

The discussion is this one: (not really) belonging in arts one. | QMUL Mile End Campus –  RR1 | Wed 30 Nov 2-6pm (come and leave as you please)

A space where students from the School of English and Drama at QMUL who experience under-representation / are not recognised (race, disability, class, neurodiversity, etc.) can talk about this issue freely and without censorship.

Please email pateldushant@gmail.com if you have access requirements.

 

Young Writer of the Year Showcase | Wed 30 Nov | 7-8.30pm | Second Home, Shoreditch | Free (ticketed)

A special event to celebrate the shortlist of The Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award 2016 ahead of the upcoming winner announcement, join us for author readings, discussion and free beer. The event will feature readings and discussion from three of this year’s four shortlisted writers – Max Porter (Grief is the Thing with Feathers), Benjamin Wood (The Ecliptic) and Jessie Greengrass (An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It) – plus last year’s winner, Sarah Howe (Loop of Jade), and will be chaired by The Sunday Times literary editor, Andrew Holgate.

The event opens at 6.30pm for free beer provided by Brewdog. Authors will be signing their books after the event.

 

SLAPPIN’ DA BASS | Wed 30 Nov | 8-10pm | Pinter Studio, QMUL

SLAPPIN’ DA BASS (pictured above) is a monthly variety night hosted by Chloe Borthwick and Livvy Lynch in the Pinter Studio, Queen Mary. The event aims to create a space where the talents of Queen Mary folk, ranging from a variety of disciplines, can come together for an evening that celebrates diversity on the stage.

For more SED events see our calendar here

 

Jobs & Paid Internships

Dina Roncevic, Car Deconstruction at Fierce 2014 photo by James Allan
Dina Roncevic, Car Deconstruction at Fierce 2014 photo by James Allan

Freelance Operations Manager | Fierce Festival | Application deadline: Wed 7 Dec  | Set fee: £5,000

Fierce is an international festival of cross art form performance centred in Birmingham. The Festival is looking for an experienced Operations Manager to join the team between now and April 2017 on an interim basis to help support the operational side of the business and some fundraising support. This is being offered as a freelance role based on 40 days between now and the end of April at a set fee of £5000. If you are interested in the position please request a full job description from recruitment@wearefierce.org

Production and Marketing Coordinator | Poet in the City | Application deadline: Mon 5 Dec | £18,000 (pro-rata) April-December contract

Do you have a passion for photography? Do you want to develop your skills by producing photographs for a wide range of projects and events? The Students’ Union is looking for enthusiastic students experienced in events photography to join our team as QMSU Student Photographers!

Opportunities & Volunteering

Wellcome Trust introduces new funding schemes

The Wellcome Trust has unveiled a new programme of funding for engaging the public in conversations about health-related science and research. These may be of particular interest to those studying MSc Creative Arts and Mental Health.

 

Calls for Papers

English Studies in Ruins | Deadline for Abstracts: Fri 16 Dec

Papers are invited for ‘English Studies in Ruins?: The Future Shape of English Studies in a Changing Academic Climate’ at next year’s English: Shared Futures conference.

Download the CfP document here

To add a listing to next week’s digest please email sed-web@qmul.ac.uk by Friday 25 November at 5pm

#SEDweekly – Events and Opportunities Digest – 16th November

This is the first of our weekly opportunities and events digests. They will be released every Wednesday.

To get an email alert when the new digest is live please sign up using the form below. If you’d like to add anything to next week’s digest please email us.

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Events

digitalhumanities

Beyond Digitisation: Reimagining the image in Digital Humanities | Thursday 16 November | Mile End Campus | Free (booking required)

In this lecture, Melissa Terras will showcase work from projects as diverse as the Great Parchment Book, Transcribe Bentham, and the Deep Imaging Mummy Cases projects, showcasing how those in the Digital Humanities can contribute to advanced cultural heritage imaging research.

 

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A Season of Bangla Drama | Until 27 November 2016 | Various Times and Prices

The festival continues with the women only Saree Day on Sunday and lots more events for everyone to celebrate Bangla drama and Queen Mary’s commitment to working with our local community.

Download the full programme here

 

Plus don’t miss these coming up:

For more SED events see our calendar here

 

Jobs & Paid Internships

Student Photographer Position | QMSU | Application deadline: Fri 18 Nov 2016 | Rate: £9.39 per hour | Hours: Flexible

Do you have a passion for photography? Do you want to develop your skills by producing photographs for a wide range of projects and events? The Students’ Union is looking for enthusiastic students experienced in events photography to join our team as QMSU Student Photographers!

Marketing and Communications Manager | Wilton’s Music Hall | Application Deadline: Mon 12 Dec 2016 | £26k

The Marketing and Communications Manager is a key member of Wilton’s team and will be responsible for driving all marketing and communications activity for Wilton’s including our cultural programme, learning and participation programme and our commercial offer, creating effective and creative marketing strategies across print, broadcast and new media.

 

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Opportunities & Volunteering

QMSU Volunteering

There’s lots of opportunities coming up to volunteer in the winter months. Help make something great happen in your community!

Submissions wanted for Woolf Zine

Ramblings, responses and ruminations on Virginia Woolf. First Issue Dec 01. Published bi-monthly. Submissions always open. Submit to: woolfzine@gmail.com.

Calls for Papers

Adapting Medieval and Early Modern Culture | 3 March 2017 | Centre for Adaptations | Trinity House, De Montfort University, Leicester

The convoluted histories of medieval and early modern monarchs, reformers and rebellions have inspired plays, novels, poems, fairy tales and a recent outpouring of popular medieval and early modern adaptations in novels, film and television, such as Merlin, The Game of Thrones, The Tudors and Wolf Hall. We invite proposals that discuss the adaptation of the medieval and early modern periods in film, television, animation, plays, novels and poetry.

Proposals of a maximum of 100 words should be sent to Cassandra Hunter by 15 December 2016. P11235624@my365.dmu.ac.uk

 

Theatre, Performance & Employment | 23 – 24 February 2017 | Queen Mary University of London

The conference is open to critical engagements with theatre, performance and employment across historical moments and geographical locations, including interdisciplinary approaches. We are seeking 20 minute papers and performative presentations that may be inspired by, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • representations of (un)employment in performance
  • automation / backstage labour / Front of House
  • touring / working across borders
  • familial labour / gendered experiences of labour
  • contracts / pay / unions / strikes
  • unemployment / benefits / workfare
  • voluntary work / internships
  • migration / workers’ rights
  • freelancing / the gig economy / casualisation / precarity
  • regulations / administration
  • non-professional or amateur performance
  • auditions / interviews / casting practices

Please send a 250 word abstract and short biography to: theatreandemployment@gmail.com

Deadline: 12 December 2016

https://theatreandemployment.wordpress.com/

 

To add a listing to next week’s digest please email sed-web@qmul.ac.uk by Friday 18th at 5pm

‘Flights of Oriental Fancy’ by Matthew Mauger

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A print only a few inches wide depicts a man wearing a loose flowing garment and a pointed hat. He reclines against a stone pediment, apparently engaged in romantic conversation with a similarly exotically dressed woman, who holds a fan in her right hand and – like the man – a cup in her left. On the table between them rests an oval-shaped urn. To the right, a labourer waters a bush, whilst on the left – against a background of distant mountains – a many-storied pagoda rises.

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A second print offers a slightly disturbing image of a large insect, with leaf-like wings, crawling across a landscape of rolling hills, with some large chests below bearing markings representing Chinese writing.

 

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A third features an elaborate frame in which are embedded two similar chests, another man in flowing robes and pointed hat, and a cylindrical container marked ‘Finest Plain Green Tea’. The frame wraps around text naming the business of James Randall, who traded at ‘the Golden Lyon on the West Side of Charing Cross’ in the 1770s, and who ‘sells all sorts of fine teas, coffee, and chocolate at the lowest Prices’. Indeed, all three of these engraved designs are eighteenth-century advertisements for London-based grocers selling tea from China.

 

They are ‘trade cards’, typical of the exquisitely illustrated advertisements circulated by metropolitan retailers, many thousand of which survive thanks to the obsessions of collectors such as Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818) and furniture magnate Ambrose Heal (1872-1959), and now housed in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. The mass-printing associated with the newspaper press in the nineteenth century could not accommodate designs of such intricacy, meaning that these beautiful eighteenth century survivals can be seen as an early high-watermark in advertising design, that arguably was not to be seen again until the late twentieth century.

 

Largely dismissed in academic study for much of the twentieth century, the awakening interest in eighteenth century consumer society in recent decades has brought new attention to these unique archives. I have identified over 300 unique cards advertising businesses selling tea, dating from the period 1730-1830. My particular interest here lies in the window these trade cards offer into how eighteenth century consumers encountered tea, a dried leaf which was delivered to London wharves – many thousands of tons a year – via the astonishing mechanics of an international trade overseen by the East India Company. What might these advertisements tell us about the ways in which British consumers were imagined to understand the distant land in which their tea had been harvested and prepared for sale? How do they script the eighteenth-century buyer’s encounter with tea? The idea that I’m exploring here is that these trade cards might be understood as an early site of cultural encounter between Britain and China, distorted through the fabricating lens of product promotion and endorsement… though no less interesting, of course, as a result.

 

Read more on our tea blog or get a copy of our book available at all good bookshops: Empire of Tea: the Asian Leaf that Conquered the World, with Markman Ellis and Richard Coulton

 

All images rights reserved by British Library.

#SEDCareers: English graduate Mary Carter on her week with Palgrave Publishing

Before my internship with Palgrave Macmillan Journals I had only four days unpaid experience in an office environment. I had met the team’s Publisher, Amy Shackleton, at a careers evening at Queen Mary a few months previously, and since exchanged several emails and had one telephone interview, which culminated in my appointment as their summer intern. I was thrilled, of course, but in the days preceding my stay with the journals team, I was nevertheless a little apprehensive. On Sunday evening various questions occurred to me as I tried to mentally prepare myself for any undesirable situations: ‘What if I’m late on my first day?’; ‘What if I don’t get along with my colleagues?’; ‘What if I can’t keep up with the work?’ The new job jitters were getting to me.

I had been told to arrive at the Glasshouse Building at 9:45am for an orientation with HR. Having looked up the location of this building beforehand and checked the underground schedule for any delays, I arrived early and so was able to sit down in the foyer and collect myself before being given a tour with some other new employees. At least now I knew I could dismiss my fear of tardiness.

As I was only being employed on a temporary basis, after the tour I was taken off into a separate conference room and shown a quick slideshow detailing the terms of my contract, how and when I was going to be paid, and a basic outline of who Springer Nature are (Springer Nature is the merged company name for the majority of brands under Macmillan Science and Education and Springer Science+Business Media, of which Palgrave Macmillan is a part ). Feeling reassured that my needs would be looked after throughout my internship, I was then returned to the Glasshouse Building’s foyer, and told to wait for Beatrix Daniel, Assistant Publishing Manager and my mentor for the week.

Meeting Beatrix and the rest of the team (Lucy Wheeler, Marta Kask, who works at their New York office, and the aforementioned Amy Shackleton) dispelled any lingering worries. I had the opportunity before lunch to speak with each of them in turn about the different aspects of their jobs, their professional backgrounds, and to ask them any questions I had. They were all extremely easy to talk to, and made me feel very welcome. Lunch brought with it a time to get to know this close-knit team a little better, and I spent a very enjoyable hour discussing various topics with them, over a lunch they had kindly bought me in the company café.

What were the highlights of my week? The first was sitting in on a meeting between Lucy Wheeler and the editorial board for the European Journal of Development Research, one of the journals for whom she is Publishing Manager. I was fortunate to experience this, as such a meeting happens only once or twice a year, and one member of the board had even flown all the way from Australia to be there! Our presence was required for the whole morning, during which the journal’s progress and ideas for its improvement were discussed while I took the minutes. When we broke for lunch the feeling in the room was one of satisfaction: significant progress had been made, I had written several pages of useful notes, and there was food left over for Lucy and I to take back to the office!

Buoyed up by the success of the morning, I settled myself at my desk and consulted the timetable Beatrix had handed me at the beginning of the week. That afternoon I was to meet with two members of the Palgrave Macmillan journals production team. These were to be the first of several meetings Beatrix had arranged for me throughout the week, each with individuals working within Springer Nature, but in different areas of publishing. These conversations were highlights because, prior to my starting at Palgrave I had told Beatrix that I wanted to learn as much about the industry as possible, and she certainly made sure of this!

Over the course of the week I spoke with people from Palgrave Macmillan books team, the Open Access team, Nature Publishing Group, and marketing, and by Friday my head was buzzing with the multitude of career possibilities afforded by academic publishing.

Another highlight for me was due to my internship coinciding with the team’s recruitment of a Publishing Assistant. Amy was conducting the interviews and, as it is an entry-level position well-suited to recent graduates, she thoughtfully obtained permission for me to sit in on one of the interviews. It was a superb opportunity for me to gain an insight into what to expect when in the candidate’s shoes, and also to get some valuable feedback from Amy regarding the dos and don’ts of first interviews.

All in all, I came away from my week with Palgrave positive that I had learnt a great deal about academic publishing, and about the individuals within Springer Nature who ensure the world is never short of interesting and varied research publications. I also left feeling as though I had had not only an informative week, but an enjoyable one too. Though the Palgrave Journals team work extremely hard, they also know how to have fun outside of work. Included in the week’s social calendar was the lovely lunch I have already mentioned, a rehearsal with the staff choir, and a post-work pub trip.

My week with Beatrix, Amy, Lucy, and (though I never met her in the flesh) Marta showed me that journal publishing is a challenging, complex, and highly rewarding line of work. From meetings with dedicated academics to troubleshooting from your desk, no two days are the same, and I would like to thank them all for ensuring I had such a valuable and fun week.