Comment from leading Queen Mary researcher at Alan Turing Institute, Professor Ruth Ahnert
The most exciting research innovations happening at the moment are at the interface between the humanities and sciences. The digital humanities and computational humanities are thriving research areas.
But it’s important not to think of the sciences as the saviour of the humanities in these spaces.
The increasing prevalence of large language models mean that we need critical reading skills at scale, to understand the harmful biases that arise form the vast training data being fed to these machines.
AI initiatives desperately need more humanities graduates at the table.
Professor Ruth Ahnert (QMUL) working on Living with Machines Project at Alan Turing Institute
Cultural Historian Tiffany Watt Smith (Drama)’s work is featured in the report:
There is a strong correlation between the skills of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) graduates and key skills valued by employers.
Eight of the 10 fastest growing sectors employ more AHSS graduates than graduates of other disciplines. A Humanities training may not pay back most quickly in the workforce, but it is likely to give good resilience and longevity for longer term prospects.
The number of UK students choosing Humanities subjects suggests they continue to recognise the value of degrees that fit them not narrowly for any one particular career, but which develop the talents and skills needed for a wide range of opportunities.
Charlie Pullen suggests we look to the career of Professor Emerita Morag Shiach for inspiration in what the arts and humanities can do within and beyond the university. Here, in an adapted version of his opening remarks to the Practical Experiments in Hope conference in March 2023, he explains why we should view education and creativity as hopeful resources which we can use to combat the enveloping despair of our present moment.
On the dark and rainy morning of Saturday 18 March 2023, colleagues from Queen Mary and beyond joined me at Practical Experiments in Hope – a day of celebration to mark the retirement, in September 2022, of one of the School of English and Drama’s longest-serving and most distinguished colleagues: Professor Morag Shiach.
In whatever capacity we know Morag – whether we’re colleagues from Queen Mary, former students, collaborators from different universities and organisations, friends, family, or some combination of the above – many of us will be aware of the central, decisive role that she has played in the formation of English, Drama, and the institution as a whole here at Queen Mary. Across some thirty-five years – a period in which she served in many leadership positions, from Head of School to Vice Principal for Teaching and Learning and subsequently Vice Principal for Humanities and Social Sciences – Morag’s dedication to the shaping and development of this university and especially to arts and humanities education and research has been unmatched.
Arriving in 1987, Morag came to Queen Mary first as a temporary lecturer in English, before becoming permanent the following year and then, in 1999, Professor of Cultural History. Over that time Morag has been at the forefront of great and progressive changes at Queen Mary as well as an expansion of higher education more broadly. To take the English department as just one example of those transformations: when Morag first came to work here at the tail-end of the 1980s (another low, dishonest decade not unlike our own in the 2020s), the English department took just 25 students a year; now it’s more like 200. When Morag arrived at Queen Mary, we didn’t have a Drama Department – and it was she who played no small part in the founding and growth of what is now a pioneering centre for the study and production of theatre and performance.
But many of us, within the School of English and Drama and further afield, will also know Morag through her work as a notably prolific and incredibly versatile scholar. From her early research on popular culture and feminist studies, and her wide-ranging publications within the field of modernist literature and cultural history, to her more recent turn towards work in the cultural and creative economy, Morag’s career has been marked by a unique degree of flexibility and by a dedication to fostering connections and conversations reaching across disciplines, institutions, and sectors.
That commitment to interdisciplinary study, and that capacity to turn her hand to an extraordinary range of subject areas and methodological approaches, is borne out in Morag’s educational trajectory. She began her academic career with a degree at the University of Glasgow, starting out in English – a department which, quite unlike our own here at Queen Mary today, she found to be ‘disengaged’ and uninspiring – before switching to an innovative programme in Drama and Philosophy, the first student to take such a combination of subjects at that university.
It was at Glasgow, coincidentally, that Morag seems to have developed a taste for university leadership. There she served in numerous student council roles, voicing her progressive views on student politics in the Glasgow University Union paper – as she does here, in this clipping from 1978, which details her work in anti-Apartheid and anti-Nazi movements, as well as her commitment to increasing student grants and improving democratic representation at the university.
(Image Source: University of Glasgow)
From Glasgow, Morag continued her journey across disciplines (and indeed the world) by taking a Master’s degree in Communications at McGill University in Canada, where she read literature, media, and film studies, and wrote a thesis on ideas of ‘the popular’ in cultural studies, the front page of which you can see reproduced below. That MA dissertation led into her PhD at Cambridge on the historical development of a critical discourse on popular culture from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, which was supervised by the great cultural theorist Raymond Williams.
(Morag’s MA thesis from McGill, University in Montreal, Canada)
On the day of the conference, colleagues in the School of English and Drama and I created an exhibition of just some of the many publications Morag has produced throughout her career. And so, in preparation for this display, I took a trip to the library to see what books I could find. During this trip, I was struck by two things. Firstly, by how well-used Morag’s books clearly are by our students and staff: hardly any page in her volumes is left untouched by pencil markings and sticky notes. And secondly, I was struck by how far I had to walk around the library to find her work. I began, in the history section, where I picked up her first book, an adaptation of her PhD thesis from 1989, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in the Analysis of Popular Culture. From there I found myself having to walk to the modern languages section to find her study of the French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous (A Politics of Writing, from 1991).
After that, I had to walk to sociology to get a copy of her edited volume Feminism and Cultural Studies (1999); and then, to English literature, to pick up various works on modernism, most notably 2004’s Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930. The search continued: from there I went to economics to find Cultural Policy, Innovation, and the Creative Economy: Creative Collaborations in Arts and Humanities Research (2016). These were just some of the intellectual products of Morag’s career. But by the end of this trip around the library, aside from being quite worn out and weighed down with all these books, I had got such a strong, experiential sense of the sheer range of Morag’s work – this ability to produce highly influential and impeccably researched scholarship within and across disciplinary boundaries. Who amongst us could have their work spread so far across a library?
Morag’s ability to bring together and to create connections between disciplines and practices that might otherwise simply not get much of a chance to talk to each other was demonstrated vividly at the Practical Experiments in Hope conference, which saw assembled colleagues from English, Drama, and Creative Writing, of course, but historians too, and scholars from modern languages, geography, law, and economics, as well as from arts projects, heritage organisations, and museums. So it was then, on that cold and wet morning, we came together at Practical Experiments in Hope to continue that spirit of conversation and interdisciplinarity that Morag had long pioneered through her work.
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And yet, when I first began planning the conference, I was, I must admit, more than a little overwhelmed by the prospect of bringing together this incredible range of interests, experience, and expertise in Morag’s career into just one day. When I sat down with Morag in late 2022, I asked, pleaded really: ‘You’ve done so much, Morag! How can I possibly tie it all together into a single conference?!’ And Morag, with characteristic clarity, composure, and modesty too, replied: ‘Yes, it is quite a lot. But there is a thread running through it all. And it’s that old Raymond Williams thing, of resources of hope. The arts and humanities, literature and the study of literature, education, and creativity as resources for a journey of hope. Resources, as Williams once put it, to make hope practical rather than despair convincing.’
And there we had our keywords for the day. From then on, re-reading Morag’s work, I found that thread which I should have seen all along – not least in an article she wrote for Paragraph in the year 2000, right on the cusp of the millennium, which gave us our title and central theme for the conference. In this fascinating essay, ‘Millennial Fears: Fear, Hope, and Transformation in Contemporary Feminist Writing’, Morag – showing once again her versatility and her willingness to engage with the actualities and difficulties of the present moment – identified in a variety of feminist writers of the time what Raymond Williams might have called a structure of feeling: a particular mood, or effort to respond to fear and despair about the political realities of the day with a defiant, hopeful outlook. Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, and others, Morag argued, were carrying out through their writing ‘a practical experiment in hope, or perhaps in refusing fear.’ Those writers were meditating on and expressing the possibilities, she said, ‘of the collective and individual construction of hope.’
(Charlie Pullen presenting at Practical Experiments in Hope, 18 March 2023. Photo by Richard Ashcroft)
From the perspective of our own day, over twenty years later, in the face of the horrors of the pandemic, humanitarian crisis, climate breakdown, economic disaster, the systematic divestment of the arts and cultural sector, and, more locally, the devastation of university departments and entire disciplinary communities, the need for such a hopeful energy seems both immeasurably necessary but also increasingly inaccessible, impossible. Despair seems all the more convincing; fear seems impossible to refuse.
I myself am one who, like Connie at the beginning of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tends to think of our particular historical moment as a tragedy. ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age,’ Lawrence wrote in 1928, in the fallout of war, plague, economic and political crisis, so much that seems familiar to us. ‘The cataclysm has happened’, he writes, ‘we are among the ruins.’
It’s very telling, however, that when Morag came to write about D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she drew out and emphasised the rest of what Lawrence says. And here is the opening paragraph of the novel in full:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘thus begins with catastrophe and ruin’, Morag says in her book Modernism, Labour and Selfhood, ‘but it also begins with the necessity for hard work’. With both disaster and the possibility of carrying on.
Here then we had, at the start of the conference, the beginnings of an answer to the question, ‘why “practical experiments in hope”?’ In what ways might we imagine hope to be a practical and experimental process? What might the arts and humanities broadly conceived have to do with the making of hope in dark times? My answer, riffing on Morag, was because hope is hard work. Because it is, as she says, something we ‘construct’, which we build, which we make practically in the here and now even as the sky has fallen. And that reminded me too of something the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin said about love: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,’ she said: ‘it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.’
Hope, then, might not be something that just sits there waiting to be picked up, but instead the work ofhope might be something we have to do and keep doing. As an experiment, as an open-ended process, we might not know the outcome of this hopeful work, we might not have a smooth road or clear view of the future, but that, I suggested, is the journey of hope, that is the path we must take to discover a new and better future.
My suggestion for us on the day was that we must look to the the balance between, as Lawrence says, cataclysm, ruin, and the hard work of rebuilding; or, as Morag says, between fear and the refusal of fear; or despair and the construction of something better. For in that uneasy balance, I ventured to propose, that is the space of hope, that is the location where our practical experiments in hope take place. And throughout the day, in our speakers’ presentations and through open discussion with everyone there, I invited us to explore, test out, and discover what hope we might still create with the work we do in the arts and humanities, in education, and in our creative practices.
During the day we shared our experiences of teaching and learning with Morag, as students and as lecturers; we reflected on her work shaping educational institutions beyond Queen Mary, such as the founding of our partnership schools like Draper’s Academy; and we discussed the interaction between arts and humanities research with the wider world of the creative economy, including via the class politics of the publishing industry. What became clear to us across the event was the possibility that such a conference, with its potential for facilitating collective discussion, sharing, and forming generative connections between disciplines and practices, might itself constitute one of the most fruitful opportunities for carrying out our own practical experiments in hope.
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Those of us who could be present on the day were there to celebrate Morag, to thank her for all that she’s made possible for us, and to recognise the way her work has shaped and will continue to shape our own work, whatever that is – whether it be academic, administrative, creative, or some blend of all three. And it was in that spirit of tribute that I ended my welcome talk on a personal note – by briefly gesturing to the impact that Morag has had on me, on my life and work, as a student and now a member of staff at Queen Mary. For my own history is very much bound up with the work that Morag has carried out and made possible during her time here at this university.
Arriving as an undergraduate just over ten years ago to study English, I was one of the many, many students who came and still come to Queen Mary from working-class backgrounds and the first in their family to go to university. I couldn’t have known it then, but coming here I was stepping into an institution that had been, over many years, built and shaped to transform the lives of those who might not otherwise get the opportunity to experience higher education, much less to work in it.
While here, even though Morag – then Vice Principal – was not teaching in the department, her presence was felt in the incredibly diverse and stimulating learning I was taking part in, on a degree programme that allowed me to move across methodological approaches and genres of literature and media: my studies led me directly to her work on popular culture when I wrote essays on topics as diverse as the film Titanic or cultural responses to Princess Diana’s death; to Cixous when I studied the reception of ancient myth in modern critical theory; and to Virginia Woolf, especially Morag’s 1992 Oxford University Press edition of A Room of One’s Own andThree Guineas, which did much to foster my own interest in the vexed topic of education in the modernist period.
After that, as a Master’s student at Queen Mary, I came to Modernism, Labour and Selfhood, which became, then as now, a model of the sort of modernist literary scholarship I wanted to do: richly cultural historicist; attentive to the dynamic relationship between literary forms and their changing political and historical context; and committed to the study of alternative and marginal traditions within the literature and culture of the early twentieth century. It was inevitable, then, that I would go straight to Morag for a PhD on modernism and education, her supervision of which – with Scott McCracken – was by turns generous, exacting, and empowering.
(Charlie Pullen, Morag Shiach, and Scott McCracken)
And one of the greatest pleasures of the conference was to see more of Morag’s former students return to Queen Mary to reflect on the power of her teaching and mentorship, including the writer Lynsey Hanley, who in her memoir Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide (2016)writes of her journey from a working-class home on a Birmingham council estate, via a traumatic interview at Cambridge, and eventually to Queen Mary, where she was interviewed much more supportively and given a place by Morag. Hanley recalls the Queen Mary of the 1990s as a beacon of progressive higher education, as a place which ‘resembled far more closely the dream that some of us have of all children getting a good education’, she says: an education ‘which equips them both to function well in the society we have and to take part in building the society we hope for – regardless of their origins.’ If ever there was an articulation of what a practical experiment in hope might be, there it is, in Hanley’s account of the transformative potential of a properly inclusive and socially-directed form of higher education.
After a long and productive career, Morag now gets the chance to enjoy her well-earned retirement. For those of us who remain working at Queen Mary and at universities and the cultural sector more broadly, I suggest Morag’s work still has lessons for us. As our day of discussion, sharing, and conversation unfolded at the conference, and as I reflect on the day now, my final thought for us was and is that we look, for inspiration, to the breadth of Morag’s work, at Queen Mary and beyond, as one quite varied but continuous project committed to the principle that the arts and humanities, education, and creative practice are some of our most vital and enduring resources – the tools and the very basis for our practical experiments in hope.
Early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme are invited to get in contact with us as soon as possible
Early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme are invited to get in contact with us as soon as possible
Deadline for applications: midday on Monday 5 September 2022
The School of English and Drama invites early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme to get in touch by submitting as a single PDF:
(1) an explanation of the reason(s) for your choice of Queen Mary as the host institution (150 words maximum)
(2) an outline of your proposed programme of research (1,500 words maximum)
(3) details of your planned research outputs, e.g. monograph, journal article(s), book chapter(s), digital resources, events, other (please specify) (300 words maximum)
(4) a list of existing publications (1 page maximum)
(5) a CV (2 pages maximum)
(6) a sample of writing. This should be of book chapter length (5,000–8,000 words) and either published or accepted for publication.
Please submit the above documents to sed-fundingapplications@qmul.ac.uk, by no later than midday on Monday 5 September 2022. Please state ‘British Academy PDRF’ in the subject line.
Your application should demonstrate:
that you are eligible according to the BA’s criteria (applicants are expected to have completed their viva voce between 1 April 2020 and 1 April 2023)
the excellence of your research track record and professional track record (where relevant);
your academic record;
the research outputs you propose, how you will structure, pursue, and complete your project in the time frame, and its importance;
the relevance of QMUL SED to your research and vice versa;
who you would like as a mentor and why.
You are strongly encouraged, before submitting your application and time permitting, to find a member of staff in QMUL’s School of English and Drama who will be your nominated mentor, provisionally agree their support, and get some feedback from them on a draft application. Please note this in statement (1).
All outline proposals will be considered by our Directors of Research, and those to whom we give institutional support will be invited to a workshop run by the Queen Mary Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences during the week commencing 19 September.
Finalised applications will be due for submission via the British Academy’s Flexi-Grant system by 5pm on Wednesday 5 October, five working days ahead of the British Academy deadline of 12 October 2022.
Dr Rebecca Menmuir (Queen Mary) and Hannah Armstrong (York)
When you hear the word forgery, what do you think of? Perhaps your thoughts jump to counterfeit artwork, heist films, the BBC’s Fake or Fortune; or to the Turin shroud, The Pardoner’s Tale and debates surrounding the authenticity of religious artefacts; or maybe to something else entirely.
Part of the appeal of studying forgeries and imitations are their breadth and universality. Colin Burrow writes in the preface to his 2019 Imitating Authors that one of the pleasures of writing the book was that almost everyone had something to say about the concept of imitation. Similarly, anxiety about forgery is not new, with ‘Fake News’ as only its latest iteration in the popular consciousness. The spurious has existed alongside the genuine through ever-changing definitions of ‘spurious’ and ‘genuine’, and its malleability and persistence is both perplexing and fascinating.
It’s against this backdrop that we—Rebecca Menmuir, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in SED at Queen Mary, and Hannah Armstrong, a PhD candidate at York—decided to organise a workshop to ask some closer questions about forgeries and imitations. Our research projects approach the same topic, imitations and the medieval, from different angles. Rebecca works on forgeries and imitations of the Roman poet Ovid produced during the medieval period; and Hannah works on imitations and reimaginings of Old Norse sagas in 19th–21st century literature. We realised that we were circling around the same topics and asking the same questions, but the strict periodisation of literary studies meant that we rarely crossed paths. Nor had we been able to meet art historians, archaeologists, theologians, or the many scholars in other disciplines who were likely to have something to say about how we should be studying ideas of medieval forgeries.
The idea was there: we started to plan how to bring together a small group of academics working on some aspect of forgeries, imitations, or appropriations, either produced during the medieval period or which forged ideas of the medieval in some way. The result was a one-day workshop, held on Friday 10th June: ‘Medieval Forgeries / Forging the Medieval’.
We were incredibly fortunate to be able to use the Museum of London as our venue, which itself raised lots of pertinent and timely questions about how we curate and present the past. There we were joined by eleven other co-investigators, all scholars who work in one form or another on medieval forgeries or post-medieval imitations. The range of experience in the room was one of the strengths of the event, with researchers whose work might normally sit within Classics, History, or Modern Languages presenting side by side with English Literature scholars whose period expertise stretched from the late antique to the late 20th century. We also represented many different career stages, from PhD students to Postdoctoral researchers and Professors.
The Workshop
In the first of our two morning slots, six of the participants gave short (5–7 minutes) presentations on their research into medieval forgeries. The examples ranged from forgeries of classical authors to fraudulent monastic charters, and our discussions between papers highlighted just how foundational and intrinsic forgery was to medieval textual culture, across different forms of media (from documents such as charters and diplomas to literary works). This naturally also led to questions of morality: did medieval people think of forgery as a negative act, and in turn, what kind of language should we as scholars use or not use?
Our second session pivoted to focusing on post-medieval imitations and appropriations of the Middle Ages. The seven presentations covered topics from 18th century Gothic reimaginings to queer theory and 20th century film, and political appropriations of imagined pasts. The variety represented in this session demonstrated just how generative and intriguing questions of forgery and imitation are, but it also raised issues as to what kind of language we can use to describe it and how do we create space for transhistorical and interdisciplinary dialogue.
It was these challenges we turned to in our third and final session of the day. We were keen from the outset that our workshop be not only a space for presenting and sharing work, but for collaboratively finding new ways of thinking and approaching the topic. With this in mind, we used the third session as an opportunity to break into small groups to brainstorm responses to questions which had been raised earlier in the day. Initially, we had been worried about whether this technique would work—would it feel too close to an undergraduate seminar? But we were delighted to find that it works just as well for researchers, and it helped to dig deeper into the issues whilst also building collegiality.
Finally, we fed back to the group as a whole and used the final part of the day to consider how we could keep these kind of conversations (interdisciplinary, transhistorical, across different career stages) going in the future… watch this space! You can also find a brief overview of each presentation in a Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/RebeccaMenmuir/status/1536350623095980032
On Friday 10th @HJP_Armstrong and I ran the workshop “Medieval Forgeries/Forging the Medieval” at @MuseumofLondon, which was a great success! Here’s a celebratory photo of everyone who came, and a thread of talks and topics 🧵 pic.twitter.com/QdMx5Traik
— Dr Rebecca Menmuir (@RebeccaMenmuir) June 13, 2022
Reflections and Lessons Learnt
With the help of a feedback form sent out to the workshop attendees, we met again for a debrief. Overall, we enjoyed the workshop enormously, and the feedback was really positive. One person wrote that the atmosphere was ‘calm, uncompetitive, and yet intellectually challenging’; this is something which we are extremely proud of, particularly given the stress and competitiveness that academia can sometimes promote. Learning about how others approached medieval forgeries and imitations has been genuinely fruitful, and both of us have benefited from following up on reading and resources which were shared and discussed. Rebecca has discovered, perhaps belatedly from a nineteenth-century-ist’s point of view, Rudyard Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, a story involving a fraudulent ‘discovery’ of a lost Chaucer manuscript. We have continued that sharing of resources by setting up a collaborative bibliography, where several of the attendees have added key scholarship on medieval forgeries and imitations, and forgeries and imitations of the medieval. (Please contact either of us if you would like a link to this document.)
Aspects of the day had required a sharp learning curve—did the ominous large button in the cupboard switch off one light or the entire building electrics? Why was the clicker not working? Is the camera on?—and we were glad that the AV and events team at the Museum were on hand to help (note: the large button was not the correct button). Before the event, we had questions and concerns which would only be answered on the day: would there be enough discussion to fill the time, or would there be enough time to accommodate discussions? Would the questions we had planned for the third session, which reflected on the day’s presentations and discussions, be relevant to the day’s proceedings? How do you write closing remarks before a workshop has even started? We found that the best approach was to plan for flexibility, such as incorporating a ‘buffer zone’ of time to continue should Q&As be too interesting to interrupt at their allotted end-time. We also scheduled the final session after lunch so that we had time to meet and make any changes during the lunch period. Since several recurring themes and questions had been raised throughout the day, we made several adaptive changes to our prompt questions, including a new question which incorporated a quote from one presentation, on the topic of whether there is such thing as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ forgery. While the unknown element of any event is worrying in some ways, it was gratifying to see how the workshop developed in ways which we didn’t foresee: there would be little point in organising a workshop to exchange new ideas where we could predict every question, thought, or answer.
We learnt several assorted things from planning the workshop. Firstly, in our opinion it is far more effective (and more fun) to plan an academic event with a co-organiser, whether a new colleague or an old friend: having an interlocuter to encourage the seed of a new idea, or veto impractical suggestions, is extremely helpful. It is essential to leave enough time to plan— ‘enough time’ might be dictated by a funding deadline for a grant, or dependent on your other commitments. We found it helpful to think about the potential outputs and afterlife of the workshop in early planning stages, but we left concrete decisions on any outputs to the workshop and the feedback form, where we could ask the attendees their thoughts.
It was only with institutional and financial support that we were able to plan and run this workshop. Thanks to Queen Mary, University of London (especially the School of English and Drama) and the University of York, who are our host universities and make our research possible. We are extremely grateful for the funding available from the British Academy through their Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme. Finally, we sincerely thank the Museum of London, particularly their events team, catering team, and housekeeping team, all of whom were fantastic.
Please get in touch with us if you want to chat about any aspect of this round-up: r.menmuir@qmul.ac.uk or ha950@york.ac.uk.
Tell us about An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love’. What should we expect?
In ‘An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love’ I have a conversation with a machine-learning algorithm about love, dating, and my life as a single queer mum. The algorithm’s responses range from the funny and surreal, to the poetic and poignant. When I ask the algorithm questions about love it tells me: ‘I’d suggest that you find out how to answer these questions. This is not just about writing. It is about real life. The answers are in your life.’
What inspires you to write stories like this?
I always enjoy finding ways to generate material to work with. In the past I’ve used cut up writing methods a lot, where I splice together existing texts and subvert their meanings. Working with an algorithm is an extension of these procedural writing methods.
I wanted to think about love with this project because in the past I didn’t think about it, I just fell in it. I wondered what a machine-learning algorithm might be able to teach me about love.
What advice would you give to emerging writers at Queen Mary?
Prioritise reading, writing and thinking, and don’t give up.
Early career researchers seeking support for their application to the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship scheme are invited to get in contact with us from now [deadline 12 noon, 5 January 2022].
The School of English and Drama invites early career researchers seeking support for their application to the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship Scheme to submit to us:
An academic CV of not more than 2 pages to demonstrate your research stature.
An outline research proposal including title, abstract (100 words), details of past and current research (250 words), a 2-page (A4) project outline, and a statement detailing relevant research being carried out in the School of English and Drama and your reasons for choosing Queen Mary (200 words).
Please send the above to Dr Huw Marsh, Research Manager, at: sed-research@qmul.ac.uk by no later than 12 pm on 5 January 2022.
All outline proposals will be considered by a School committee and applicants will be notified of the shortlisting outcome in the week of Monday 24 January 2022. Shortlisted candidates will be put forward for approval by the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Executive, who will report their decisions by 27 January. Decisions will then be communicated to candidates, and the School will work with successful applicants to finalise their applications. The final deadline for submission of approved applications is 4pm on 24 February 2022.
The School recommends that applicants make clear the following in applications (CVs and proposals):
the strength of your academic record (e.g. classifications, awards, time taken to complete your PhD, etc.)
the strength of your research record (e.g. publications (including their length; and if forthcoming, where they are at in the process); presentations; research leadership; if you make practice as research, indicate how it is research; etc.)
what research you will publish/disseminate through the fellowship
the importance of doing your fellowship in the School of English and Drama at QMUL (e.g. synergies with staff and research centres)
your proposal’s importance, originality, methods, critical contexts, resources, structure and outputs.
The School of English and Drama is delighted to announce new resources are available:
Digital Theatre+ (digital recordings of theatre productions). This is in addition to Drama Online (digital recordings of theatre productions and play scripts), which we started subscribing to last year.
One of the podcasts produced by Natalie Steed for the Solitudes project has been shortlisted for an award. It’s an episode on ‘The Mind’ in our podcast series, ‘Spaces of Solitude’.
It was curated by Akshi Singh and features the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, the poet Denise Riley, and the neuroscientist Sarah Garfinkel. It’s a terrific podcast, and of course we’re delighted that it’s been shortlisted.
If you listen to it and like it, you can vote for it! There’s a ‘people’s vote’ – link below. But please do it soon, as the results will be made public next month.
The Queen Mary Postgraduate Research committee is delighted to invite you to our schedule of seminars this autumn (see poster above). We have put together a fantastic line-up of speakers from across the UK and America, who will be sharing their work with us, ranging from seventeenth-century skin colour to twenty-first century music videos.
This semester, we will be hosting seminars on Zoom on Thursdays, beginning 14th October. The seminar begins at 17:00 (UK time) and follows the format of a paper of up to 45 minutes and a question session of 15 minutes. All QMUL staff and students are warmly invited to attend, and to share with anyone else who might be interested at other universities or elsewhere.
We hope the seminars inspire you and spark new discussions, especially at a time when we are rediscovering the strength of our QM English community after a long time apart. It is our belief that the PGRS seminar exemplifies all that is best about QM English – innovative, supportive, and led by learning from each other. We are so looking forward to seeing you all there this autumn as we reconnect with our community here at SED.
Zoom registration for our very first talk, ‘Citizenship in an Erotic Mode in the work of Beyonce Knowles and Warsan Shire in Lemonade (2016)’ on 14th October, is open now! Follow this link to sign up: https://queenmaryenglish.wordpress.com/autu/
This post to update you about some exciting developments happening in Arts One on our Mile End Campus. Queen Mary University of London has committed to a major investment aimed at improving and enhancing our arts and culture facilities. The new facilities will ensure that we can continue to support teaching and research that is both world leading, inclusive and accessible to the communities we work with.
The enhanced facilities, for which accessibility has been a driving principle — will include:
A new cinema designed by leading architects McFarland-Latter, including the latest in surround-sound and projection technologies;
The instalment of new digital technologies for motion capture and ambisonic playback in Rehearsal Room 3;
A new production suite adjacent to Rehearsal Room 3 including a fully sound-proofed recording booth, and control facilities for video and audio production;
Improved lighting, sound and seating in Room G.34 enabling flexible use as a seminar room, gallery or installation studio;
Improvements to the toilet facilities in the Arts One Foyer, including improvements to the accessible bathroom facilities;
There may be some temporary disruption while these works are completed, but we are working hard to keep these to a minimum as much as possible. We will also provide regular updates on progress by email, via a project Sharepoint site, and in details posted within the Arts One Foyer. The construction work will mean some temporary changes to the Arts One Foyer as a work and meeting space, students might like to consider using our online tool to book a study space on our Mile End campus:
Early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme are invited to get in contact with us as soon as possible
Deadline for applications: midday on Friday 17 September 2021
The School of English and Drama invites early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme to get in touch by submitting:
(1) an explanation of the reason(s) for your choice of Queen Mary as the host institution (150 words maximum)
(2) an outline of your proposed programme of research (1,500 words maximum)
(3) details of your planned research outputs, e.g. monograph, journal article(s), book chapter(s), digital resources, events, other (please specify) (300 words maximum)
(4) a list of existing publications (1 page maximum)
(5) a CV (2 pages maximum)
Please submit the above documents to Dr Huw Marsh, Research Manager, sed-research@qmul.ac.uk, by no later than midday on Friday 17 September 2021. Please state ‘British Academy PDRF’ in the subject line.
the excellence of your research track record and professional track record (where relevant);
your academic record;
the research outputs you propose, how you will structure, pursue, and complete your project in the time frame, and its importance;
the relevance of QMUL SED to your research and vice versa;
who you would like as a mentor and why.
You are strongly encouraged, before submitting your application and time permitting, to find a member of staff in QMUL’s School of English and Drama who will be your nominated mentor, provisionally agree their support, and get some feedback from them on a draft application. Please note this in statement (1).
All outline proposals will be considered by our Directors of Research and those that we give institutional support to will have approximately one month to finalise their online application, due by 14 October 2021.
This two-day online event explored productive, radical, contemporary encounters between the arts and mental health, bringing together clinical, artistic, and research perspectives that offered a re-interpretation of contemporary mental health science and practice, with a view of imagining a different future. This event was joined by more than 100 people including survivors, service users, mental health professionals, artists and researchers interested in how the arts can contribute to mental health.
The conference was opened by photographic artist Daniel Regan, who shared his discovery of the power of the arts in his own mental health journey. Daniel discussed the shame and stigma of living in crisis and how transforming his relationship to his lived experience turned it into his greatest asset. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Tom Cant introduced Peer Supported Open Dialogue and the ODDESSI* trial, a multicentre randomised control trial funded by the National Institute for Health Research. Developed in Finland in 1986, Open Dialogue is a social network model of mental healthcare where the person of concern is genuinely offered the power to define their recovery.
[*ODDESSI stands for Open Dialogue: Development and Evaluation of a Social Network Intervention for Severe Mental Illness]
On the second day, the artist keynote was given by playwright and theatre directorJulie McNamara, an outspoken survivor of the mental health system, who works with people from locked-in spaces, foregrounding the stories of disavowed voices from the margins of our communities. People who have lived in long-care hospitals are not ordinarily perceived as artists and storytellers with meaningful contributions to make in our cultural industries. Julie talked about her creative process, staging the voices of women who transgress, women who fail to perform femininity as constructed in this ableist, patriarchal society. Lived expert consultant Amanda Griffith introduced the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), a radical approach to understanding emotional distress and wellbeing that is attracting interest both nationally and internationally. Aimed at a wide range of stakeholders, the framework highlights the links between personal, family and community distress and wider issues arising from social inequalities and injustices. This gives particular attention to the experiences of people and groups who have been exposed to abuses of power on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, nationality, age, sexuality, disability, or their status as a mental health service user, and the way these identities and associated experiences of power intersect.
A series of panels invited discussion on different topics. In the panel led by the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, the audience applauded the concept of “emodiversity”, developed as part of a programme for emotional literacy in primary schools, a superb pilot run by Prof Thomas Dixon.
Conference delegates participated in a Creative Enquiry all group activity, led by Dr Louise Younie, pioneer of the creative enquiry approach for flourishing in medical education. Moreover, selected participants were invited to present their artworks of poetry, painting and music: a delightful moment, inviting both aesthetic pleasure and reflection.
During discussions and reflections raised by this momentous event, the audience was enraptured and applauded the presented projects and innovative practices. Also, organizers and the public felt stimulated to discover new alternative approaches to mental health for future times, taking into account above all creativity, open dialogue, and direct participation from users of the health system.
It was clear that the bio-scientific, logical-rational, reductionist, and mechanistic model of mental health needs updating. An empathetic look, which gives rise to interpretive and communication abilities, is necessary to approach the idiosyncratic narratives brought by survivors and service users. In addition, the well-established hierarchy relationships within the mental health medical environment, which highlight authority and power, oppress and make stagnant the creativity and humanization that should permeate all human relationships. All this misinterpretation over mental health care leads to overly rigid and standardized models of approach, lacking human connection.
Hence, health professionals need to be open to access subjectivity and make deeper connections, giving voice and opportunity for self-expression. Ultimately, the arts seem to be a catalyst tool to materialize the inner turmoil of mental disorders, providing opportunities for representation and meaning-making, as well as being a fantastic means to well-being.
Performance, Possession & Automation – a collaborative research project led by Nick Ridout and Orlagh Woods, in collaboration with Dhanveer Singh Brar – invites you to two online conversations.
Possession & Modern Acting
Friday 4th June, 6-8pm (BST)
Online
Shonni Enelow, Julia Jarcho and Nicholas Ridout
Possession: an actor seems to have been taken over by someone else.
Automation: an actor is someone whose actions are not their own.
In this public conversation, Shonni Enelow, Julia Jarcho and Nicholas Ridout explore ideas about possession and automation in relation to 20th and 21st century experiences of acting, theatre and the movies. Do they hold clues to the roles that both possession and automation play in contemporary life, and to how we might think and feel about them.
Click here, to book your place and for further information.
What occurs when “lose her” is recast as “loser”, and covered over once more to become “winner”? And why in each reversioning does “pride” persist, but never in the same guise? These are questions which arise from listening to the Jamaican essayist of the song form, Alton Ellis.
By losing ourselves in Alton Ellis’s losses and revisions, Edward George and Dhanveer Singh Brar believe it is possible to begin to open up an auditory dimension to the question of spirit in Jamaica, the Caribbean, the diaspora, and in turn, modernity itself, as it was being rendered towards the end of the twentieth century.
Click here, to book your place and for further information.
Performance, Possession & Automation is a research project exploring automation and possession as two ways of thinking about what happens to human subjects who act in ways that they do not themselves fully control. How can making and thinking about performance contribute to thinking about these ideas?
In partnership with Fierce Festival, performingborders and Transform Festival
This project is supported by:
Collaborations Fund of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) The Centre for Public Engagement, QMUL Strategic Research Initiative, School of English and Drama, QMUL
Professor Reynolds has recently been featured in The Guardian and the Telegraph and has interviews with Talk Radio, Times Radio, Monocle Radio, about the book and her experiences of adoption and writing the book with her daughter Lucy.
Here’s what she could tell us…
Tell us about your new book ‘The Wild Track: Adopting, mothering, belonging’. How did it come about and what can readers expect?
I adopted my daughter 12 years ago when she was six. And from the first, I used to jot down things that happened to us, little stories about our lives together. Then two years ago I heard a couple of things that reminded me how hard adoption can be, how often (very sadly) it does not work out. But we were still here! So I wanted to encourage others, so show how amazing and important adoption can be in helping children – who necessarily have difficult beginnings – in going on to make a success of their lives.
How has it been working with your daughter on the book? What do you think the book has to say to mothers around the world?
I showed the original version of the book to someone who said ‘don’t you think Lucy should have a voice?’. And I knew he was right! Politically, ethically it is always right to listen to the voices of children. So I asked her to write some sections. In fact, it was great doing this. We have talked a lot about our different experiences and about the things we share.
Mothers are all different. Always, everywhere. There is no such thing as one ‘motherhood’. But there might be overlaps, and there might illumination and there might be a shared understanding, a recognition and acceptance which could be a positive for both mothers and children.
What 3 books would you recommend to readers after reading your book of course?
Are there any lockdown lifelines that have kept you going in the last year?
Growing vegetables, going for long walks with our dog, watching classic films, cooking, noticing the seasons, planning a long trip to remote Greek islands.
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