All posts by Francesca Allfrey

Life writing, Creative writing and Performance, Performance Research Group

Currents of Intimacy: Performance Lab

By Sylvia Solakidi, student on the MA in Theatre and Performance

On November 30th 2015, performance projects developed by the students of Performance Lab – an MA module run in the English Department during the autumn term – were presented in the Anatomy Museum, Strand Campus. The module was taught by Dr Harriet Curtis as a workshop comprising performance-based activities, student-led practice and seminar discussions on, among other topics, aspects of intimacy in the work of influential performance artists that have attracted vivid scholarship during the last decade.

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Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Ruth Padel drafts ‘Capoeira Boy’

An open drafting process of ‘Capoeira Boy’ from Ruth Padel’s collection, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (Chatto, 2014).

Introduction

by Penny Newell

Sometimes poetry mutters, sometimes it sings, oftentimes it catches our eye and looks. There’s a line from a poem of Ruth Padel’s collection, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (Chatto, 2014), which manages all three. It runs: ‘I am looking too hard, or this scene is looking too hard/ at me.’

You need only read the commentary below to realise that here we overhear the poet muttering to herself, pen and notebook in hand. Yet we also hear a clue to the song that Padel plays on the oud. The oud is both the instrument, and perhaps a Middle Eastern homonym of the ode (from the Greek ’αοίδη [aoide], ‘a song’). The oud is a solemn song, sung by a chorus of CNN, Youtube and eBay, refugee camps and tanks. Last week, Jo McDonagh and Rowan Boyson asked ‘How might the humanities contribute to an understanding of the current refugee ‘crisis’?’ Padel’s poetry is alive to this question. The poems of this collection catch our eye with it, and let it look at us hard.

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Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture, Contemporary

Research Hour: Refugees and Migrants

By Prof. Josephine McDonagh, Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature and Dr Rowan Boyson, Lecturer in English Literature

How might the humanities contribute to an understanding of the current refugee ‘crisis’?   That was the general question that generated the informal session of staff and researchers in the English Department held on 10th February, 2016.

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Culture, Text and History, Early Modern and Shakespeare

King’s Shakespeare Festival: What You Will

February 13-14th saw the launch of a festival celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare’s legacy. King’s College London are part of this year-long series of cultural events called Shakespeare 400.

In this video director of the London Shakespeare Centre, Professor Gordon McMullan and English department scholars Dr Emma Whipday and Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann talk about the festival and their involvement.

Click here to book tickets.

20th - 21st Centuries, Gender and Sexuality

Echoes in Wax of Virginia Woolf

Introduction by Max Saunders, Professor of English and Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (AHRI)

The idea for Wax Virginia was developed by Prof. Clare Brant, Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research, and Ruth Richardson, Visiting Research Fellow of the Centre, who both worked closely with the artist Eleanor Crook, on the design of the installation. The project is characteristic of the creativity and imagination they have brought to the Centre. At the unveiling during the Arts & Humanities Festival people were astounded by the way the sculpture transformed the lobby space. It was just what was needed to realise the presence of Arts & Humanities at 22 Kingsway.

Watch a time-lapse video of the artist Eleanor Crook producing the work,  then read more about the project in a post from Catriona Livingstone.