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20th - 21st Centuries, Gender and Sexuality

Sitting at a table in Berlin, thinking about Aretha Franklin

By Penny Newell, PhD student in the English Department

Ever since I attended one of Lois Weaver’s Long Tables on Live Art and Feminism, I have been paying a special attention to tables. Tables structure conversations. Tables anchor discoveries. Tables form communities. Tables ground critique.

In Weaver’s Long Table, the table is a centrepiece of a performed conversation, in which you can choose whether or not to participate. It’s an amazingly simple yet effective performance work. It makes you re-think your critical relationship with tables. It makes you ask: Who sits at my table? Who can sit at my table? Who listens? Who speaks? Continue reading Sitting at a table in Berlin, thinking about Aretha Franklin →

20th - 21st Centuries, Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

22 Kingsway: This is Your Life

By Alan Read, Professor of Theatre, Director Performance Foundation

22 Kingsway: This is Your Life tells the remarkable story of the site for which the English and Comparative Literature Department is the current sitting tenant. Conceived by the theatre makers Forster & Heighes in collaboration with the Performance Foundation and 20th Century Magazine, and generously supported by the KCL Principal’s Fund, our intention was to trace the hidden history of a building that to the outside eye would appear to have little to say. As we discovered, nothing could be further from the truth. Some buildings are silent, some speak, this one, despite its mute modernism, sings. Continue reading 22 Kingsway: This is Your Life →

Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture, Performance Research Group

Postcards from Mindanao

In July 2015, one King’s PhD researcher and a group of Philippine community artists, academics and documenters undertook a two-week ‘RoRo’ journey in Mindanao, the largest island in the southern Philippines. The journey was part of PSi#21, an international Performance Studies research project, which coordinated conferences in fifteen locations across the globe in 2015.

By Ella Parry-Davies, PhD student in Performance Studies

Continue reading Postcards from Mindanao →

20th - 21st Centuries, Contemporary

King’s Fantastic Talks

By Sinéad Murphy, PhD student in Comparative Literature

The King’s Fantastic Talks series came to life with its first instalment on 23rd October, with Prof Pablo Mukherjee delivering a riveting and trenchant study of third world non-aligned science policy and science fiction in India in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the fiction of Satyajit Ray.  Though Ray is better-known outside of India for his films, Mukherjee argues that Ray’s fiction and films are bound by similar aims, particularly the drive to achieve a modernist style which can adequately reflect the process of uneven modernisation in a newly postcolonial third world nation.

Continue reading King’s Fantastic Talks →

20th - 21st Centuries, Gender and Sexuality, Visual and Material Culture

Wax Virginia

By Catriona Livingstone, PhD student in English Literature.

One of KCL’s most famous alumni has returned to the college, taking up ‘a room of her own’ in the lobby of the building named in her honour.

‘Wax Virginia’, a work by sculptor Eleanor Crook, was unveiled – or ‘unleashed’ – on Wednesday evening, at an exciting event organised by Professor Clare Brant, co-director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s, and well-attended by staff, students, and other Woolfish enthusiasts. The sculpture is the result of over 120 hours of work and careful research – Crook studied photographs of Woolf in order to trace the changes in her face over time and to select the particular moment – and emotion – which she wanted her sculpture of Woolf to occupy. Continue reading Wax Virginia →