Jenna Owen

BritGrad 2013 now has a resident shutterbug! We’re delighted to announce that Jenna Owen will be our official photographer at this year’s conference. Jenna is currently completing her MA in Shakespeare and Theatre here at the Institute, and will also be delivering a paper at the conference: ‘“Do you stand for me”: re-evaluating the ‘play within a play’ scene in 1 Henry IV’ – however, we highly doubt that she can take pictures of herself whilst delivering a paper at the same time. Any gorgeous photos of you basking in the Institute gardens during lunch, blame Jenna. Any unflattering (but really quite hilarious) photos of you delivering your paper because you’re entertaining the crowd with a dramatic reading of Cymbeline, credit Jenna. We’re thankful to her for volunteering for the post, and we look forward to her fantastic pictures!

[Want a little taster? Or do you just want to relive the good times? Have a look at last year’s photographs taken by Jon Harvey.]

BritGrad is holding a bake sale this Sunday, 19^th May, in the Parish Centre across from Holy Trinity Church at 11.45am. If you’re in the Stratford vicinity, we hope you’ll join us and sample some delicious treats. If you’d like to prepare some yummy baked goods for the sale, we’d appreciate that too!

There’s already been talk of brownies and cake pops. I hope that whets your appetite. 

If you want to be considered for the award, your abstract must be no longer than 200 words maximum. If your abstract exceeds this, it will be disqualified from the competition (but don’t worry, you can still present your paper!). You are welcome to continue to edit your abstract and to resend it to britgrad@yahoo.com. We’d also like to remind you all that every single abstract will be published in the conference literature for delegates to read, so if you just want to polish yours before it is published, please feel free to do so. In all cases, a final version must reach us by Thursday 23^rd May. We wish you the very best of luck!

We are delighted to announce another plenary speaker: Christie Carson! She will join us to deliver a plenary titled ‘Influencing Editors, Influencing Performers: the Page to Stage relationship’.

Dr Carson is Reader in Shakespeare and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has co-edited The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive (2000) with Jacky Bratton, as well as overseeing the AHRC-funded Designing Shakespeare: an audio visual database, 1960-2000, documenting Shakespearean performance history in London and Stratford; The Visual Gallery Project; and the Digital Resources for Teaching and Learning Project, created while with the English Subject Centre at Royal Holloway, where she has also been a CETL (Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) Liaison Officer. As well as her work in digital humanities, she has co-edited Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (2010) with Christine Dymkowski and Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008) with Farah Karim-Cooper. Before joining the English department at Royal Holloway, she taught in the Department of Drama and Theatre, and was the Director of the Centre of Multimedia Performance History, a research centre within that department. She has also taught at McMaster University, Herstmonceux Castle, and the University of Glamorgan.

[P.S. Thanks to all of you who have registered to present at BritGrad this year. All of us on the committee are excited to hear about your research this summer, and look forward to meeting you/seeing you again in June!]

STOP!
Who would cross the Border of Eternal Peril must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see:
What is your name?
What is your quest?
What is your nationality?

On a more serious note, we would like to inform all delegates – presenters and auditors alike – that this year all BritGrad delegates are required to supply their country of nationality to the Registration Coordinator, in keeping with university policy.

As a UK Border Agency (UKBA) Highly Trusted Sponsor, the University of Birmingham is required to ensure that all international visitors hold a visa which is appropriate for the purpose of their visit to the UK. Therefore if you are a non-EEA national they may get in touch with you to request the information they need in order to advise whether you will need a Letter of Invitation to assist your entry to the UK for the 2013 conference.

If you have already registered, you will have received an e-mail from us asking you to provide your name and nationality. We would ask that you reply in the earliest convenience. If you haven’t already registered, you will be asked to supply your nationality on the updated registration form, which is now available on the blog.

BritGrad apologises for these inconveniences, and hopes to see you in June. In the meantime, we hope you know the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow…

Interested in one of our lovely bursaries? The application form is now on the blog for all of you lovely people to fill in! Remember that we must receive your complete applications before Wednesday 22nd May, and you must have registered to present a paper at this year’s conference by last Thursday. (The full list of eligibility requirements can be found on the form and in our previous blog post.)

Please direct enquires to our Treasurer, Eleine Ng, at eleineng@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing your applications!

Download the form here: 2013 Bursary Application

]]> http://britgrad.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/travel-bursary-form-now-available/feed/ 0 money-wallpaper-2 britgrad http://britgrad.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/money-money-money-its-a-grad-students-world/ http://britgrad.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/money-money-money-its-a-grad-students-world/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:54:47 +0000 BritGrad http://britgrad.wordpress.com/?p=694 Read more]]> BritGrad is delighted to announce that we have a small number of bursaries available for delegates. Thanks to the generous support of the Society of Renaissance Studies and the University of Birmingham’s CLAD (Centre for Learning and Development), we can offer a select number of bursaries to students intending to present at the conference, which can help towards conference fees and/or accommodation and travel expenses. Are you eligible for such an award? We sure hope you are. Read on!

To be eligible, delegates:

• Must be a full-time or part-time graduate student
• Must present a paper at BritGrad 2013
• Must attend the full duration of the three day conference
• Must submit the following: a completed registration form (200-word paper abstract included) and a copy of the bursary application form to the conference organisers before 22 May 2013. All applications must be sent via email to britgrad@yahoo.com (RE: ‘BritGrad Bursary Application’), or by post to the following address:

BritGrad Bursary Application
The Shakespeare Institute
Mason Croft
Church Street
Stratford-upon-Avon
Warwickshire CV37 6HP
United Kingdom

Applicants must register for BritGrad by this Thursday, 25^th April. The bursary application form will be released very soon – be sure to keep your eye on the blog. Both local and overseas delegates are eligible to apply. Incomplete applications will not be processed. More details to follow. We look forward to seeing your applications!

This just in: we’re happy to announce that Professor Jonathan Dollimore will be leading a plenary session at BritGrad! All of us on the BritGrad committee are delighted to welcome him to the Institute this June, where he will deliver a talk tentatively titled ‘On Human Nature’. We hope you will join us for this exciting lecture.

Jonathan Dollimore left school at fifteen with no formal education to speak of. He worked in a car factory, in farming, and journalism before going to university as a mature student. His first degree was in English with Philosophy. He has a PhD from London University.

His last academic position was Professor of English at the University of York. Prior to that he was a Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at Sussex, a university which he had twice tried to get into as an undergraduate, and by which he was twice rejected, and where he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.

He has also been visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, Australia, 1988; Mellon Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA, 1988‑89; Scholar in Residence, Centre for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, Maryland University, USA, 1991-2; Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa Visiting Fellow, July 1996; Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, 1997; Cohen-Porter Visiting Professor, University of Tel Aviv, 2002; and Selfridge Lecturer in Philosophy, LeHigh University, 2002.

Prof. Dollimore was once described by Alan Sinfield as ‘a provincial upstart with expensive perversions’, a characterisation of which he is said to be proud, and has tried to live up to. He became disaffected with academic life some years ago and left the profession. He now lives reclusively and writes.

He is the author of Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (1991); Death, Desire, and Loss in Western Culture (1998); and Sex, Literature, and Censorship (2001); as well as co-editor of Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) with Alan Sinfield.  A fourth edition of his very first book, Radical Tragedy, which has been continuously in print since its publication in 1984, appeared in 2010. Most recently he has written the Foreword for Ewan Fernie’s The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2012), as well as the critical essays ‘On Leaving’ (2011) and ‘A Civilisation and its Darkness’ (2012).

[As a final note, we’d also like to remind you all that registration closes a week from today – that’s Thursday 25^th April. Get sending in those abstracts!]

Play, writes Roger Caillois (Man, Play and Games, 1961), is an activity that is free and non-productive, unfolds in a circumscribed time and place with an uncertain conclusion, is rule-governed and ‘accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality’….
This conference will explore diverse expressions of game/play in literature, film, the visual arts, performance, architecture and design. It is concerned with games that serve as allegories, as narrative devices or as structuring metaphors; from playful conceits through to the esoterica of avant-garde experimentation.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers from students at MA and PhD level, both from literature departments and across other disciplines. Extracts from work in progress are welcome.

Submissions might consider game/play as…

…a confrontation with chance and uncertainty 
…a questioning of identity
…a sublimation of conflict 
…an envisaging of ulterior space
…a reaction against utility
…a challenge to systemisation
…an engagement with structure and restraint 

The following list of fluid, non-restrictive categories, exemplary practitioners and works demonstrates the range of approaches and topics that applicants might like to consider…

Game/play as content

- Thomas Middleton’s A Game of Chess
- Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler
- Michael Haneke’s Funny Games
- Raymond Chandler’s The High Window

Game/play as form

- Laurence Sterne’ s Tristram Shandy
- Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style
- Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
- Philip Sydney’s Lady of May

Game/play as practice

- Unconventional, non-linear and emergent videogame narratives – Christine Love, Fumito Ueda, thatgamecompany 
- Immersive, confrontational and experimental theatre practitioners – Punchdrunk, Forced Entertainment, The Factory 
- Improvisatory, collaborative and performance-based art – Marina Abramović, Spartacus Chetwynd, Jeremy Deller

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words, along with a very brief biographical statement, to PlayingGamesUCL@gmail.com. 

Deadline for submissions: midday, Friday 26 April 2013.

You can download the pdf here: Playing_Games_UCL_CFP.

Reblogged from Cardiff Shakespeare:

  Senior Lecturer / Reader in English Literature 

  Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy

The Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy wishes to make the following appointment, tenable from 1 September 2013.

Senior Lecturer or Reader (Grade 8). Candidates will have an established national, or emerging international, reputation for excellence in research and a commitment to teaching and to public engagement in Renaissance Literature.

Read more… 6 more words