Here’s the first weekly events and opportunities digest for 2018.
Please do get in touch if you have any listings for our next edition.
Events
Book Ahead
Writers @QMUL: Anjali Joseph reading & in conversation | 31 January | 5:30-7.30pm | Free
In the second of our ongoing Writers @QMUL series, prize-winning novelist Anjali Joseph will read and be in conversation about her work. Joseph was born in Bombay, has taught English at the Sorbonne, and was Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). Her first novel, Saraswati Park, won the Betty Trask Prize and Desmond Elliott Prize. Another Country, her second novel, was published in June 2012. A third novel, The Living, appeared in 2016.
Reception to follow reading and Q&A.
Theatre in the Dark | 6-9 February 2018 | Battersea Arts Centre
To mark the 20th anniversary of Battersea Arts Centre Playing In The Dark season in 1998, and the launch of Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre, a new book edited by Martin Welton and Adam Alston, join us for a week of Theatre In The Dark, presented with Queen Mary University.
FICTION | 6 – 8 Feb | 7:30pm & 9pm | £5 with code below
A surreal, immersive experience taking place in total darkness. Don a pair of headphones for an intimate journey through the scrawling architecture of dreams.
Exclusive student offer: £5 tickets for Fiction with the code FICTION5
THEATRE IN THE DARK: DIALOGUE | Curated by Queen Mary University and Battersea Arts Centre | 7 Feb | 8:45pm | Free
Join us for a free post discussion following Fiction.
THEATRE IN THE DARK SCRATCH NIGHT | 9 Feb | 7:30pm | Pay What You Can
A selection of Scratch performances, all performed in the darkness by a variety of artists.
This week
English PGR Seminar: Mark Wormald ‘Poetic Electrons: Ted Hughes and the Mayfly’ | Thursday 18 January 2018 | 5.15pm
In 1981, the artist Leonard Baskin wrote to the poet Ted Hughes with a list of fifteen projected poems about insects that would feature in their next collaboration. It began with ‘The Mayfly’.
This paper describes Hughes’s education in the mayfly. Like its subject, it had a long and hidden larval stage, but took memorable flight in a fishing trip to Ireland in May 1982, which ended at Saint’s Island on Lough Ree. Two remarkable prose accounts of this trip are among Hughes’ papers in the British Library. Between them they shape a visionary narrative, beginning with an Oxford tutorial in entomology from his son Nicholas, and detailing Hughes’s attempts, in the company of a group of fanatical Irish fishermen, to catch lough trout on imitations of its dun, or Green Drake, and spinner, or Spent. The poetry that emerged from this experience is faithful to these circumstances but also transcends them, offering a powerful vision of ecological interconnection not just to lovers of poetry but to all those concerned for the health of our rivers and lakes.
Dr Mark Wormald is Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is the editor of the Ted Hughes Society Journal and with Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts co-edited Ted Hughes: from Cambridge to Collected (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). He is completing The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes, to be published by Little Toller Books.
For more SED events see our calendar here
Jobs, Careers Events & Paid Internships
Career Conversation: Life as a London Barrister | Wednesday 17 January 1-2 pm, ArtsTwo. In conjunction with QMUL Bar Society.
Click on the link above for more info & to book your place. Andrew Simmonds is currently an MA student at QM but previously spent 35 years as a Barrister, he became a QC and later a deputy High Court Judge. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the realities of life as a barrister. N.B. This discussion will not focus particularly on how to become a barrister.
Opportunities & Volunteering
PLUGGED IN: Revolutionary and radical relationship building for young creatives | Wednesday 7 February | 5pm
An evening curated by GUAP Magazine, Design for Disability, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and A New Direction for young creatives aged 18-24 and cultural organisations to connect, debate and revolutionise the way they work together.
Calls for Papers/Contributions
CfP: The BACLS Biennial Conference | Deadline: Wednesday 28 February
Details from Zara Dinnen:
‘The following cfp might be of interest to those of you working on contemporary literary, theatre and cultural studies. It is for the recently launched British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS); the first conference, What Happens Now?, will run in July 2018 at University of Loughborough with a special focus on gender and sexuality studies. I am co-organising the conference with Jennifer Cooke (Loughborough). We are excited about how the line-up is coming together. It will include performances and readings, workshops, publisher events as well as three exciting keynotes. And all the papers!
Details of the cfp, which I hope might be of interest to some of you, are here: https://www.bacls.org/conferences/the-bacls-biennial-conference/
Would be great to see QMUL people there!’
