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

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

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.”

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19th Century, Visual and Material Culture

Docks, Ships and Shows: Maritime Cityscapes and Spectacle

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. Continue reading Docks, Ships and Shows: Maritime Cityscapes and Spectacle →

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

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

by Fiona Anderson and Mark Turner in conversation

Headshots of Fiona Anderson and Mark Turner

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.

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Contemporary, Gender and Sexuality, Literature, Medicine and Science

Crossings: Reflections on Disability and Intersectionality

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. 

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Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Studies, Culture, Text and History

Chaucer’s Own Scribe? Adam Pynkhurst and the Production of Middle English Literature

by Lawrence Warner, Reader in Medieval English, KCL

Book cover of Chaucer’s Scribes by Lawrence Warner.

Dr Warner’s third monograph, Chaucer’s Scribes: Medieval Textual Production, 1384-1432, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. He is also undertaking a new critical edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He is recipient of the 2016 Beatrice White Prize of the English Association for outstanding scholarly work in the field of English Literature before 1590, and Honorable Mention for the Richard J. Finneran Award for 2013, awarded by the Society for Textual Scholarship.

How did I end up writing a book arguing that the most exciting announcement ever in Chaucer studies — in medieval literary studies, perhaps even in English studies as a whole — was, to be blunt, wrong? Continue reading Chaucer’s Own Scribe? Adam Pynkhurst and the Production of Middle English Literature →