Category: Browse by field

Harold Feinstein at Store X: An interview with curator Carrie Scott

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 14 May 2019

From Thursday 16th May to Sunday 19th May The Store X Gallery at 180 The Strand will be hosting FOUND: A Harold Feinstein Exhibition , the UK’s first ever exhibition of the legendary, 20th century American photographer Harold Feinstein. The exhibition is accompanied by screenings at the Curzon DocHouse of Andy Dunn’s film Last Stop Coney Island: The Life and Photography of Harold Feinstein.

Dr. Michael Collins, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture in The School of English, chatted with the curator Carrie Scott about Feinstein’s work and legacy, American photography at mid-century, and the place of optimism in art.

Tags American studies, Andy Warhol, Coney Island, Diane Arbus, Edward Steichen, Evergreen Review, Family of Man, Harold Feinstein, Jean Paul Sartre, New York, photography, post-war USA, Reid Miles, Richard Avedon, Samuel Beckett, Visual culture

20th - 21st Centuries Aesthetics, Philosophy, Theory Contemporary

Surviving Post-Truth Politics: The Theater of Ivo van Hove

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 8 May 2019

By Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai

Susan Bennett is University Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada. She is widely published across a variety of topics in theatre and performance studies, including Theatre Audiences (1997), Theatre & Museums (2013) and Sound (2019).

Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, UK. She has published widely on the history of the transmission of Shakespeare in print and in performance. She is currently working on a new book on Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance and preparing a new edition of Richard III for the Arden Shakespeare.

When asked “What is politics?,” director Ivo van Hove’s answer is straightforward and uncompromising: “Politics is the antithesis of absolute truth.”

Tags avant garde, Ayn Rand, Bryan Cranston, experimental, Hannah Arendt, Ivan Van Hove, Jan Versweyveld, Kings of War, Network, Nietzsche, performance, Roman Tragedies, The Fountainhead, theatre, Theatre and performance

19th Century Visual and Material Culture

Docks, Ships and Shows: Maritime Cityscapes and Spectacle

Post author By Harriet Thompson
Post date 25 April 2019

Whistler, ‘Limehouse’ (1859)

by Aga Serdyńska. Aga is a Modern Literature and Culture MA student with an avid interest in all things Victorian.

The Shows of London Nineteenth-Century Group brings together academics and postgraduates at King’s and the Courtauld Institute to discuss the literary, visual and audio cultures of nineteenth-century London. In the final research seminar of this term, ‘Docks, Ships and Shows: Maritime Cityscapes and Spectacle’, Joanna Hofer-Robinson (UCC) and Oskar Cox Jensen (QMUL) sparked a thought-provoking discussion about the textual and visual depictions of London docks, which also raised broader questions about methodology in the study of arts and humanities.

Tags 19th Century, Docks, Humanities, Jennifer L. Roberts, John Singleton Copley, London, Maritime Culture, metaphor, Methodology, Nautical industry, Nautical melodrama, Research seminar, River Thames, Shows of London, Spectacle, Textuality, Theatricality, Visual culture

20th - 21st Centuries American Studies Gender and Sexuality Interviews Visual and Material Culture

‘They were heady days’: Cruising, theory, and Queer@Kings

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 10 April 2019

by Fiona Anderson and Mark Turner in conversation

Fiona Anderson is a Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle. Her work explores queer social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular focus on cruising cultures, the HIV and AIDS crisis, queer world making practices, and the politics of urban space. Here, Fiona speaks to Mark Turner about her new book, Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Mark Turner is a Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature in the English Department at King’s. He is the author of Trollope and the Magazines (2000), Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (2003), and recently co-edited, with John Stokes, a major new edition of Oscar Wilde’s journalism for Oxford University Press. He has written about queer urban cultures and curated ‘Derek Jarman: Pandemonium’ at Somerset House in 2014. Mark is currently working on a project about the American gallerist Betty Parsons and her queer artists, particularly Forrest Bess. He co-founded the Queer@King’s research centre with colleagues in Arts and Humanities in 2003-4.

Katie Arthur is a PhD student in English at King’s researching the relationship between queerness and obscenity in the works of William Burroughs and John Waters.

Tags cruising, cultural materialism, David Wojnarowicz, Gayle Rubin, HIV/AIDS, John D'Emilio, Keith Haring, New York, piers, Queer, Queer politics, queer theory, Queer@King's, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Delaney, T S Eliot

Contemporary Gender and Sexuality Literature, Medicine and Science

Crossings: Reflections on Disability and Intersectionality

Post author By Harriet Thompson
Post date 27 March 2019

Disability+Intersectionality is a fortnightly reading group based at King’s College London where members meet to discuss key texts in critical disability studies, situating them within the broader context of the humanities and social sciences. Each session will focus on a theme and explore how disability intersects with categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and class.

Christina Lee is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English and a co-organiser of Disability+Intersectionality. In this post she reflects on lessons from the reading group and what intersectionality means to her.

At the Intersection

I am terrified of intersections. There is something about the open space in the middle that petrifies me. Once, while I was trying to cross the road, a car suddenly turned right and the driving instructor – sitting next to the learner in the passenger seat – stuck his head out of the window to rail at me for being on the road. I was actually on the pavement a few seconds before and left to cross to the right. I did not go on the pavement because it was too narrow and had poorly cut curbs. He didn’t want to listen and continued to insist I should be on the pavement. Eventually they drove off, though not before he proclaimed that I ought to be run over by a car. This is what I used to think of when I hear ‘disability’ and ‘intersection’.

Pavements, sidewalks, footpaths, are designed for pedestrians, people who use their feet and walk with an easy, steady stride without canes, crutches or prosthetics.

Tags Accessibility, Chronic illness, Critical Disability Studies, Disability, Gender, intersectionality, Judith Butler, Lennard Davis, Non-visible illness, Oppression, Physical impairment, Public spaces, Race, Robert McRuer, sexuality, Sunuara Taylor