Jon Ward and Rafael Lubner will be discussing #AbolitionistCurriculum at the English Department Virtual Research Hour on November 11th, 12.30 – 1.30. In this blog post the pair reflect on how the curriculum embraces Blackness and resists the structures of exclusion within ‘The University’ environment.
Category Archives: Contemporary
From PhD to Novel
From the English department to creating games and interactive fiction, King’s PhD graduate Greg Buchanan recalls his path from academia to creative writing.
Thinking in Crisis Times
Thinking in Crisis Times: A Collective Exploration by the English Department 2020-21
The shift to online learning this year, however partial or temporary, presents a tremendous change in teaching and learning in our department. Because these changes are both profound and at the moment unavoidable, they have raised countless urgent and pragmatic questions for everyone involved. Staff have spent months in the lead up to September 2020 thinking about the best way to use the online systems provided by KCL, and students will have spent time grappling with their own questions about online learning, not least the way it will affect their university experience and long-term future.
The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss
by Professor Alan Read
In the 1980s Alan was director of Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, a neighbourhood theatre based in the Docklands area of South East London, in the 1990s he worked as a freelance writer in Barcelona and was Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and from 1997-2006 he was Professor of Theatre at Roehampton University where he directed a five year AHRC research funded programme on performance, architecture and location exploring theatre and public ceremonial in rational housing blocks and council estates.
The Dark Theatre was written as a critical response to my first book Theatre & Everyday Life (Routledge, 1993). This book mimicks the ambitions and two-part structure of that earlier work but takes stock of the intervening quarter-century turn towards financialization and precarity in Western Europe, exploring a ‘general economy of performance’ by way of response to these capitalized conditions. The Dark Theatre is not an updating of the source work but instead engages with questions of community, ecology, and what I call ‘cultural cruelty’ as evidenced in practices ranging from theatrical acts to legal processes.
COVID-19: 3 Poems that Can be a Source of Inspiration During Uncertain Times
by Nura Haji
Nura Haji is an undergraduate student studying at King’s. Here Nura reflects on the power of poetry in times of uncertainty.
There is something exciting about the build up towards the beginning of summer. Year in, year out, we are teased by the burst shots of a fast approaching spring, with strokes of sunlight and the return of longer days formerly stolen by winter.
Continue reading COVID-19: 3 Poems that Can be a Source of Inspiration During Uncertain Times