The CCL Annual Lecture Series
We are delighted to announce the inaugural lecture in our Annual Lecture series:
Marina Warner
Viral Spiral: Multiple Shape-shifting from Ovid to Covid
A group of metamorphoses in myths and legends features gods and in between creatures, who are not quite divine and not quite mortal either, who can change their shape multiple times. For example, Mestra, the daughter of Erisychthon, is given this gift by the gods when her father sells her, and she is able to elude the clients he panders her to.
Marina Warner will explore stories of multiple transformations in and out of different bodies, and reflect on their significance in relation to today’s concerns with fluid identities and interspecies contact and contagion.
12 October 2023, 6pm (in person and online)
If you register to attend in person:
The lecture will be in the Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Whitehead Building, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW. Directions and a campus map can be found at https://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/.
The lecture will be followed by an informal reception in the Foyer outside the lecture theatre.
If you register to attend online:
Look out for the email message with the zoom link, which will be sent the day before the event, and again a few hours before the start of the lecture (if you do not receive it, please check the spam folder just in case!).
Attendance is free but BOOKING will be required. BOOKING HAS NOW CLOSED. Watch the video recording of the lecture:
Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history. Her award-winning books explore myths and fairy tales; they include From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights (2011). She has published five novels and three collections of short stories, including Fly Away Home (2014). Her most recent book, Inventory of a Life Mislaid (2021) is an ‘unreliable memoir’ about her childhood in Egypt where her father opened a bookshop in 1947. She contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and to artist’s catalogues, for example for Paula Rego’s retrospective at Tate Britain (2021). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities, and in 2017 she was given a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 2016, she has been working with the project www.storiesintransit.org in Palermo, Sicily, and is currently writing a book about the concept of Sanctuary. She lives in London.
If you are interested in this lecture, you will also be interested in the event series Sing in me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative, a series of talks, workshops, readings, discussions on the social, political and cultural relevance of the classics to our times.