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Insights

The LION Series 1: Finding Your Critical Voice

By Karen Stewart

This article is part of The LION Series from the Freshers’ Magazine Takeover. Each post this week features a snippet from an article in The LION Magazine 2020/21 Issue 1.

The LION magazine is written by third-year King’s students, all of whom have recently completed their BA English degrees.

The magazine helps first-year students in the English Department transition into university life.

This post is by Karen, an English BA graduate from King’s College London who is passionate about exploring the ways that we can use words to inspire as well as make positive change. Karen is the Editor of The LION Magazine. 

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Categories
Long Read

The Plague Lit Pod: Reflections on New Radio, Learning in Lockdown, and Global Pandemic

by Mike Collins

Mike Collins recently developed, recorded, edited, and hosted a three-part podcast series called the Plague Lit Pod, with contributions from Dr. Jon Day, Dr. Kelina Gotman, and Dr. Emrys Jones on the subject of the relationship between literature and pandemics. The podcast is available through Spotify. Here, he reflects on the history of podcasting, his personal experience of the form, and how he intends to use it in future in research and teaching. Dr. Collins has previously published online on fiction podcasting at Alluvium and in collaboration with Danielle Barrios-O’Neill (Falmouth) for the journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 

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Categories
Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Class of 2020: Graduating From a Distance

Strand Campus, photo by Sarah Mir

by Sarah Mir
Sarah is a 21-year-old soon-to-be English Literature graduate from King’s College London who has an avid interest in writing/editorial work.

A common epithet to describe the coronavirus has been “the invisible enemy”. Not only does the use of the chosen adjective, ‘invisible’, hint at the nature of a biological threat, but it also perpetuates an understanding of the virus as an abstraction, this other-worldly description questions its reality.

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Categories
18th Century 19th Century 20th - 21st Centuries Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Studies Book Review Cross-temporal Culture, Text and History Early Modern and Shakespeare

Lockdown Reading Recommendations from the English Department

Six members of the King’s English Department have pulled together a list of the books, poems, and writing that have been inspiring them during lockdown.

This post was originally posted on Between the Acts, a space for writing by students of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and shared via the Offer Holder Hub by Ellen Englefield and Hannah Hungerford.

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Categories
20th - 21st Centuries Contemporary Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance Performance Research Group

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.

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