Monday 19 March 2012

'The Making of Modernity' Seminar Series 2012

This Wednesday is the first in a new series of seminars called ‘The Making of Modernity’.  This is a new series of research seminars that replaces the ‘Late Victorianism and Modernism’ series that we ran in 2010-2011.  Since then, we’ve established a new research centre, the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity, that brings together research into this period.  The new seminar series, ‘The Making of Modernity’, is the flagship research seminar for this new centre.
The first seminar in the series is on Wednesday the 21 March 2012, 4-6pm, in Arts 103.  The speakers are:
1.  Sue Currell (University of Sussex): Painting the Town Red:  New Masses Magazine and Communist Partying in the 1930s.
2.  Clare Pettitt and Mark Turner (King’s College, University of London): The Distance of Print: Global Networks in the Nineteenth Century
Details are available on the Centre’s website here:
You can download the poster here:

BRITISH ACADEMY SHAKESPEARE LECTURE

Shakespeare and the Reformation

Professor Brian Cummings

University of Sussex

Tuesday, 1 May 2012
6.00pm - 7.15pm, followed by a drinks reception
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH

Religion is the last great mystery of Shakespeare studies. For most of the last century he was regarded as a quintessentially secular author, and attributing religious belief to him was a kind of blasphemy. In the past few years a counter-argument has been made, associating Shakespeare with the recusant Catholicism of Elizabethan England. Such issues have run aground in the frustrating remains of his personal biography. This lecture asks whether we could take a different approach to the legacy of the Reformation in Shakespeare. Rather than seeking the miasma of individual faith as a key to dramatic meaning, it investigates instead the burden of religious change and controversy on fundamental questions of identity and the human body. Looking at a variety of different plays, it shows how the transformations in the rituals of everyday life are constantly present in the dynamic forces of Shakespeare’s theatre in performance.

About the Speaker:
Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and was founding Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, 2004-8. He was previously Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and has held visiting fellowships in California and in Munich. His books include The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (OUP, 2002), and The Book of Common Prayer: the Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (OUP, 2011). Currently, he holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for 2009-12, researching his next book, The Confessions of Shakespeare. In 2012 he will give the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University on ‘Bibliophobia’.


Registration is not required for this event. Attendance is free and seats will be allocated upon arrival.

A poster for your notice board can be downloaded
here:

British Academy Shakespeare Lectures
In 1910 Mrs Frida Mond established ‘the nucleus of a fund which may hereafter be enlarged, to be devoted to the furtherance of research and criticism, historical, philological, and philosophical, in the various branches of English Literature’. One fruit of the fund was the foundation of this lecture series – on ‘some Shakespearean subject, philosophical, historical, or philological, or some problem in English dramatic literature and histrionic art, or some study in literature of the age of Shakespeare’. The lecture was first delivered in 1911.