The London Beckett Seminar is convened by Em. Professor Derval Tubridy, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Stefano Rosignoli, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin.
The London Beckett Seminar brings together national and international scholars, researchers, postgraduate students and the general public to discuss issues arising from the prose, theatre and poetry of Samuel Beckett that pertain to aspects of literary, philosophical and historical analysis with particular attention to translation studies, performance and practice, digital humanities and visual cultures. Inherently interdisciplinary in approach, the seminar has established a vibrant research network for postgraduate students, early-career researchers, and established academics on a national and international level.
Established by Prof Steven Connor, in 1998, and then convened by Prof Laura Salisbury (both at Birkbeck, University of London, at the time) the London Beckett Seminar has been co-convened by Prof Derval Tubridy (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Stefano Rosignoli (Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin) since 2015. In recent years, the seminar has received the support of the Department of English and Creative Writing, at Goldsmiths, and of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
The seminar currently operates online as a carbon-neutral and cost-neutral seminar series with eight sessions each year. Each session is free to attend, but registration is required.
All queries can be sent to londonbeckettseminar@gmail.com.
Friday, 27th September 2024, Prof S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University), “Beckett’s Co-authors: A Revised Archaeology of Waiting for Godot”
Friday, 25th October 2024, Dr Nathan O’Donnell (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Tim McGabhann (University of East Anglia) and Dr Chloé Duane (University of the West of England Bristol), “Responding to Beckett”
Friday, 22nd November 2024, Prof Mariko Hori Tanaka (Aoyama Gakuin University), Prof Michiko Tsushima
(University of Tsukuba) and Prof Yoshiki Tajiri (University of Tokyo), “Facing the Unending End in the Age of Catastrophe”
Friday, 20th December 2024, Dr Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson (Mid Sweden University), “Considering the Role of Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s Drama”
Friday, 24th January 2025, Michael Coffey (Independent), “Beckett’s Children: Intertextuality and the Mysteries of Inheritance”
Friday, 21st February 2025, Prof Corinna Salvadori Lonergan (Trinity College Dublin), “Dante on Beckett’s Stage”
Friday, 21st March 2025, Prof Tom Cousineau (Washington College), “The Ezekias Complex: Samuel Beckett’s Bilateral Ploy in Murphy”
Friday, 18th April 2025, Dr Luz María Sánchez Cardona (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), “Sounds in Samuel Beckett’s Listening Productions: How to See. How to Hear”
Download the 2024-24 LBS Programme (PDF file, 326KB)
(Click on the links below to see the previous years’ programmes:
2023-24 LBS programme
2022-23 LBS programme
2021-22 LBS programme)
Programme 2024-25
All events are free, but registration is required. Please register by email.
Friday, 27th September 2024, 18.00-19.00
Prof S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University)
“Beckett’s Co-authors: A Revised Archaeology of Waiting for Godot”
The fact that Samuel Beckett had a number of co-authors early in his dramatic career may shock readers and audience members familiar with his fastidious attitude toward textual fidelity and the integrity of his artwork. Those alterations were extensive enough that some of his early theatrical collaborators might accurately be deemed co-authors, especially those whose textual alterations found their way into print—under Beckett’s name. This presentation, then, constitutes a re-viewing of those early productions directed towards a revisionist archaeology of their creation.
While the French staging of Godot was plagued by economic delays, political infighting and the author’s reluctance to let go of his product (or at least to turn full control over to others), the path to English production and subsequent publication was littered with such divestment, with various curiosities emerging through the process, including altered scripts, competing translations, cultural censorship, various interventions and other struggles for creative control that seem to have caught the débutant playwright unawares as he struggled to maintain some level of artistic integrity for his vision of humanity in decline: something of an atavistic comedy, what we today might call “dystopian modernism”. But the overseers of the Anglo-American commercial theatre world tended to keep their authors at a distance, separating the literary figure from the machinery of commercial art. Producers and directors of the Anglo-American theatrical world would take it upon themselves, blatantly at times, to reshape the work of a neophyte playwright to increase the product’s accessibility and so its commercial value, even as Beckett’s creative thrust continued single-mindedly toward a counter goal: the development of what would become his Dystopian Trilogy (Godot, Endgame and Happy Days), something of a theatrical cluster featuring human and environmental decline, what Estragon calls a “muckheap” and a landscape dominated by “worms” as Estragon picks up the thread of Lucky’s tirade in Act I that humanity “wastes and pines”. Such visible signs of degradation in Beckett’s desiccated and arid landscape, then, offer a parallel to the ontological dispersal that dominates Beckett’s post-war sequence of French novels. But the process, the machinery of theatrical production and the economic forces that drive it, stands, as well, as testimony to Beckett’s artistic resilience. As he tangled with and became entangled in the forces that constitute theater and commerce (rather theater as commerce, say), he would evolve into his own interventionist, staging his own plays and, like other interventionists, rewriting or re-shaping them in the process of their realisation, their spatial articulation, re-validating thereby a creative process of serial revision through which he excised what he deemed untheatrical clutter and so sharpened the outlines of his vision. His early and constricted dealings with English-language productions of his first professionally produced play, however, resulted in a litter of corrupted texts, bad Godots, seven of which found their way into print and remain in circulation, at least in the aftermarket, to this day.
S.E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he edited the Journal of Beckett Studies(1989-2008). He published over forty books, among which are his most recent monograph Bad Godots: “Vladimir Emerges from the Barrel” and other Interventions (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Beckett. Przewodnik, translated by Piotr Szymor (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2024). He co-edited Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of “Gardzienice” with Tomasz Wiśniewski and Katarzyna Kręglewska (Routledge, 2022). Of recent publication are also Camille Vilela-Jones’ and Robson Corrêa de Camargo’s Portuguese translations of his Beckett theatre handbook in two volumes: Samuel Beckett: Os Grandes Textos Teatrais and Samuel Beckett: Os Pequenos [Grandes!] Textos Teatrais (Giostri Editora, 2022 and 2024).
Friday, 25th October 2024, 18.00-19.00
Dr Nathan O’Donnell (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Tim McGabhann (University of East Anglia) and Dr Chloé Duane (University of the West of England Bristol)
“Responding to Beckett”
Tolka is a biannual literary journal of non-fiction publishing essays, reportage, travel writing, auto-fiction, individual stories and the writing that flows in between. In Issue Three (2022), it published Tim McGabhann’s “Hare”: a fictional conversation between Samuel Beckett and Wilfred Bion. In Issue Seven (2024), instead, it published four original creative works from the Creative Fellows at the University of Reading and Trinity College Dublin: Claire-Louise Bennett, Simon Okotie, Niamh Campbell and Nathan O’Donnell. In these five pieces, the writers draw on a range of traces and threads in Beckett’s universe: from incessant and eternal returns to closed spaces and compulsive personal memories and experiences.
In this conversation, Tolka editor Chloé Duane will speak to writers Nathan O’Donnell and Tim McGabhann about their experience of responding to Beckett—the challenges, the boundaries and the transgressions—as well as exploring Beckett’s living legacies.
Nathan O’Donnell is a Dublin-based writer and artist, and one of the co-editors of Paper Visual Art. He has been a Curatorial Associate at the Irish Museum of Modern Art since 2018. He lectures on contemporary art and experimental publishing at the National College of Art and Design and Trinity College Dublin, where he was the recipient of a Samuel Beckett Creative Fellowship in 2023.
Tim MacGabhann is the author of Call Him Mine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019) and How to Be Nowhere (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020). His work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Winter Pages and elsewhere. He lives in Paris.
Chloé Duane is a digital learning designer at the University of the West of England Bristol. Her research examines the relationship between audience and scenography in post-millennial performances of Samuel Beckett’s texts. Her work has been published in Theatre and Performance Design, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, the Journal of Beckett Studies and The Beckett Circle. She is also a contributing editor at the literary non-fiction journal Tolka.
Friday, 22nd November 2024, 18.00-19.00
Prof Mariko Hori Tanaka (Aoyama Gakuin University), Prof Michiko Tsushima
(University of Tsukuba) and Prof Yoshiki Tajiri (University of Tokyo)
“Facing the Unending End in the Age of Catastrophe”
Mariko Hori Tanaka. “Catastrophe” as a term signifies the denouement of a drama—a climax, especially in a classical tragedy—but now the term commonly refers to an event causing great damage or suffering. Therefore, the term connotes both an urgent sense of ending and an idea of a survival imminent in the violent event. Experiencing the Covid crisis, we now know that even if the threat of the surviving Covid virus were removed, other crises which characterise the Anthropocene would continue to be latent. That we are in the midst of the unending end is what Beckett depicted in his post-war works.
Michiko Tsushima. The post-catastrophic temporality of “after” in Beckett’s grey realm reveals a form of suspended time that persists as a sense of infinite ending. Characterised by a grey, omnipresent light that envelopes all without making a shadow, Beckett’s grey realm appears in the dissolution of the subject-object relation in the paradigm of representation or “in the absence of object”, to quote “Peintres de l’empêchement” (1948). Radically questioning our empirical perception, Beckett’s grey involves an attunement to a form of wholeness with an atmospheric intensity that cannot be objectified or grasped through rational understanding, or an attunement to “the inexplicable”, “where we have both dark and light”, as Beckett explained to Tom Driver in his 1961 interview.
Yoshiki Tajiri. In the Fifties and Sixties, Beckett was writing in a milieu pervaded with the trauma of the Holocaust and the anxiety about nuclear war. While popular films related to the possibility of nuclear war depicted everyday life as something all the more precious because of its fragility, the everyday life in Beckett’s works such as Endgame and Happy Days seems powerless and empty as it is deeply undermined by trauma and anxiety. I want to explore Beckett’s depiction of everyday life in the face of catastrophe, referring to Yukio Mishima and other authors.
Mariko Hori Tanaka is Professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. She published two books on Beckett in Japanese. She co-edited Samuel Beckett and Pain (Brill, 2012), Samuel Beckett and Trauma (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). As a former co-convenor of the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research, she co-edited Influencing Beckett/Beckett Influencing (Éditions L’Harmattan, 2020) and Beckett’s Voices/Voicing Beckett (Brill, 2021). She also published several academic essays and chapters on Beckett and other contemporary playwrights.
Michiko Tsushima is Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her books include The Space of Vacillation: The Experience of Language in Beckett, Blanchot, and Heidegger (Peter Lang, 2003) and, in Japanese, Hannah Arendt: Reconciling Ourselves to the World (Hosei University Press, 2016). She co-edited Samuel Beckett and Pain (Brill, 2012), Samuel Beckett and Trauma(Manchester University Press, 2018) and Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her essays on Beckett appeared in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies.
Yoshiki Tajiri is Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He published extensively on modernism in English, Samuel Beckett, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yukio Mishima and other authors. He co-edited Samuel Beckett and Trauma (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Samuel Beckett and Pain (Brill, 2012). He published Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and he is the translator of Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, as well as the co-translator of James Knowlson’sDamned to Fame and of James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett.
Friday, 20th December 2024, 18.00-19.00
Dr Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson (Mid Sweden University)
“Considering the Role of Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s Drama”
This presentation considers the role of imagination, in the non-conventional sense put forward by Eugene Gendlin and against the backdrop of Richard Kearney’s narrative contextualisation of the term, for the purpose of making sense of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic stage images.
According to Gendlin’s essay “Nonlogical moves and nature metaphors”, “Beckett’s characters are not cases of old kinds (concepts, categories, schemes, distinctions, etc.)”: they are the first instances of something new, something “of which we are then cases” (1985, 383-84). Indeed, Gendlin explains, “[i]magination makes and then something ‘was’” (1985, 384). The way imagination works means that perceiving, understanding, discovering, discerning meaning is retrospective. It also means that using words (but also gesturing and moving in the context performance), will always generate more meanings than those frequently associated with the words or gestures used by the characters. Consequently, Gendlin maintains, Beckett’s characters do something to us as spectators rather than mean something specific.
Interestingly, Gendlin’s understanding of how imagination makes meaning stands in contrast to Kearney’s narrative account of the term, which entails conceptualising the somewhat paradoxical status of imagination in Beckett’s writing through the lenses of deconstruction and postmodernism. My discussion of imagination will therefore consider the role of imagination in Beckett’s drama through the bifocal approach of two seemingly contradictory paradigms.
However, in considering the role of imagination in Beckett’s drama I also build on the discussions offered in my recent monograph: Beckett’s Drama: Mis-Movements and the Aesthetics of Gesture (2024). In this book, I suggest that Beckett’s drama resists preconceived ideas about meaning specifically by means of the often-idiosyncratic movements and gestures that Beckett’s characters perform, i.e. “mis-movements”, which could be seen to imply new perspectives, new meanings and more holistic perspectives on interpretation to be imaginatively encountered by audiences. Yet, taking the embodied foundation for meaning-making into consideration does not abolish interpretation. It merely reconfigures it, and, in this book, I address the implications of this situation in the context of Beckett’s drama to suggest that, when interpretation is reduced to confirming preconceived ideas, it becomes an antidote to imagination.
Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Mid-Sweden University, Sundsvall. Her research interests include modernist literature, drama studies, ethics, aesthetics, reception theory, philosophy and phenomenology. She is the author of A Theatre of Affect: The Corporeal Turn in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (ibidem-Verlag, 2017) and Beckett’s Drama: Mis-Movements and the Aesthetics of Gesture(ibidem-Verlag, 2024). Her current project is a monograph on Beckett in Sweden, which examines three Swedish productions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, staged over a period of fifty years, considering how issues of translation, cultural context, interpretation etc., form an architecture of change that predicates on the interaction between text and context.
Friday, 24th January 2025, 18.00-19.00
Michael Coffey (Independent)
“Beckett’s Children: Intertextuality and the Mysteries of Inheritance”
Being an adoptee, a literary person and a writer, I know that I am especially sensitive to the issue of literary inheritance. I spent many decades pursuing my identity through writing, through the lives of writers, through literature, looking for clues as to who I was in the evidence of my own practice and the manners of my reading.
When the rumour of Beckett having fathered the American poet Susan Howe reached me some fifteen years ago, I had already read much of the work of each writer. I began then to consider their work under the lamplight of my own interest in literary and biological inheritance, for indeed I had spent a lot of time imagining a parent of mine whose literary or artistic predilections might be my own, as well as imagining how the literary or artistic practice of a surrendering parent might be affected by such an act.
Howe’s writing, to my eye, is full of references, however veiled and oblique, to a mystery of inheritances, to the “occult ferocity of origin”, as she puts it. I can also report that, to my eye, the writing of Beckett is full of references, however coarsely, even comically stated, to the tyranny of inheritance or influences (“cursed progenitor”; “Abort! Abort!”).
But as interesting as it was to search for evidence of each writer’s unease with the filiation issues, what became equally absorbing, to me, was that a deep immersion in their respective oeuvres forced and allowed other lines of narrative to come into being. I propose that Howe and Beckett’s shared “art of reduction and subtraction” (Adorno) and the kind of conjuration which was termed the “dark arts” of Beckett (Porter Abbott), along with its complement in Howe’s “telepathy of archives”, which is to say her self-described practice of finding ghosts in the stacks of historical papers and libraries, has allowed into Beckett’s Children—ostensibly a memoir—dreams, art criticism and shards of autobiography. “Being is constantly putting form in danger”, Beckett told Lawrence Harvey in 1962: this hybrid text is the form I found.
Michael Coffey is the author of several books of poems, a book of short stories and, most recently, the books Samuel Beckett Is Closed (Foxrock Books, 2018) and Beckett’s Children: A Literary Memoir (OR Books, 2024). After stepping down as co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly in New York in 2014, Coffey has written often about Beckett—in the Journal of Beckett Studies, The Beckett Circle, Estudios Irlandeses, Bomb Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. He has a BA in English from the University of Notre Dame and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature from Leeds University. He lives in New York City.
Friday, 21st February 2025, 18.00-19.00
Prof Corinna Salvadori Lonergan (Trinity College Dublin)
“Dante on Beckett’s Stage”
In a letter of 18 May 1983, Samuel Beckett, approaching the end of his life, wrote to Roger Little of his student encounter with Dante as a “revelation”, and Dante’s presence in his plays can be heard in words or seen in movements and props. To be aware of other authors, Beckett suggests, is not to be a book-keeping exercise, but we can profitably direct ourselves to their “reverberations” and “reapplications”. It is precisely to how Dante reverberates and is reapplied that I paid attention, from the viewpoint of the Dante scholar. “Looking” is the appropriate word, since the presence of Dante appeared to me when, in 1991, I watched twenty-one Beckett plays performed in Dublin within thirteen days: nineteen in English and two repeated in French. It did not surprise me: Beckett excelled in his degree in both Italian and French, and he was awarded a gold medal. That he certainly knew his Dante is clear also from his writings: the stage instructions, the paratext of the plays (stage or audio) and the letters. Dante helps us to see, through a glass, a little more clearly albeit still darkly. One could subtitle the early Waiting for Godot “sanza speme vivemo in disio” [in hopelessness we live in yearning] and see it framed in Inferno 4, while Inferno 10 can provide a text for Endgame, confirmed by Inferno 26 in its starless closure. There is much more—the canto remembered by Mr Rooney, whose name is Dan, has Dante’s own conundrum “qui vive la pietà quand’è ben morta”: it underlies so much of Beckett’s rejection of Dante but, uncomfortable presence, he remains on stage right to the end, emerging with purgatorial echoes—and I will try (fail?) to answer why?
Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College Dublin, is the author of Yeats and Castiglione: Poet and Courtier (Allen Figgis, 1965), editor of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Selected Writings (UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 1992), co-editor of Italian Culture: Interactions, Transpositions, Translations (Four Courts Press, 2006), co-ordinating editor of Insularità e cultura mediterranea nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana (Franco Cesati Editore, 2012), co-editor of Liber Amicorum: Medieval Studies, Translation, Creativity (Nuova Trauben, 2022). Her verse translations include Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Rappresentazione (UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 1992) and Ambra (Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Umanistici, 2004), and Poliziano’s Orfeo (UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 2013). She published on Dante, Michelangelo’s poetry, Ariosto as well as on Dante and Beckett, and on William Roscoe and Lorenzo de’ Medici. Most of her recent writings have been on Dante and Irish authors, including Beckett as well as Seamus Heaney and Bernard O’Donoghue.
Friday, 21st March 2025, 18.00-19.00
Prof Tom Cousineau (Washington College)
“The Ezekias Complex: Samuel Beckett’s Bilateral Ploy in Murphy”
This talk will eventually become a chapter in a book to be called Bypassing the Plot: The Bilateral Ploy of Writing, whose title is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s admission, in her Diary, that “I can make up situations, but I cannot make up plots” (1977-84: 3, 160), and whose subtitle echoes Marcel Jousse’s contention, in L’anthropologie du geste, that “[l]’unité se fait plus unité encore par son dédoublement” (1974, 244) [unity is even more so when it splits]. The title of the talk itself refers to an amphora crafted by the Greek potter Exekias in the 6th century BC, “Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game”, which stages the emergence of the otherwise hidden bilateral design of the Iliad. Following an introductory chapter tracing the disguised return, in Oedipus Rex, Hamlet and Waiting for Godot, of the design already perfected by Homer, this book will have nine chapters on classic works of twentieth-century literature—beginning with The Great Gatsby (1925) and concluding with Murphy (1938)—that testify to the enduring influence of what Edith Wharton called, in The Decoration of Houses, “one of the most inveterate of human instincts”: the desire for balance (1897, 33). The principal focus of my talk will be on the variety of ways—some more visible than others—that Beckett, bypassing the obligation of constructing a work whose unity is generated by a plot (which necessarily depends upon the passage of time), achieves a timeless unity by intuitively crafting one that calls to mind a proverb of the Igbo people, according to which “wherever something is standing, something else will stand beside it”. With the Igbo’s proverb and Jousse’s pronouncement as our guides, we will survey examples of Beckett’s bilateral craft as they appear in the “little world” of Murphy’s sentences—ranging from the celebrated “ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis” (2009, 112) to less-noticed ones, such as Neary winning “on the swings of Miss Counihan” what he loses “on the roundabouts of the non-Miss Counihan” (2009, 39)—as well as in the “big world” of its thirteen symmetrically arranged chapters.
Tom Cousineau, Professor of English (Emeritus) at Washington College in Chestertown (MD), Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest (Romania) and Fulbright Specialist at Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu (Romania), edited the newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society for several years and co-directed the “Présence de Samuel Beckett” celebration of the Beckett centenary at Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy (France). He is the author of Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement (Twayne Publishers, 1990), After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (University of Delaware Press, 1999), Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction (University of Delaware Press, 2004), Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard (University of Delaware Press, 2008), An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013; recipient of an “Outstanding Title” citation from The American Library Association) and The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing (Editura ULBS, 2022).
Friday, 18th April 2025, 18.00-19.00
Dr Luz María Sánchez Cardona (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
“Sounds in Samuel Beckett’s Listening Productions: How to See. How to Hear”
Beckett wrote a concise corpus of works for electronic media, which is to say for radio and television. Basing on my recently published monograph Objeto · Beckett · Sonoro. Los sonidos en las producciones para la escucha de Samuel Beckett [Object · Beckett · Sound: Sounds in Samuel Beckett’s Audio Productions], this presentation will focus on two subjects. On the one hand, I will revisit Beckett’s audio works through a methodology which allows us to visualise that corpus basing on its sound morphology. I will focus on the concept of object-sound, formulated by Michel Chion and drawing on Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of sound objects, which at the time implied a new way of conceiving and working with sound, from which a wide range of practices evolved and which, in terms of both theory and practice, was fundamental in the conceptualisation of new artistic practices mediated by technology. On the other hand, by revisiting Beckett’s corpus, I will propose to recover an “audible” Beckett: a Beckett that, in order to be experienced, must be heard. In my publication, I call for new ways of experiencing his audio works, advocating for a contextualisation of “radio” or “television” productions in relation to twentieth-century medullar communication platforms which were already evolving into a different media ecosystem.
Luz María Sánchez Cardona is an artist, researcher and scholar. She is currently Professor Agregat at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Associate Professor at the University of Bergen/Art Academy. She has written extensively on Samuel Beckett, with three monographs focusing on his work for electronic media: Objeto · Beckett · Sonoro. Los sonidos en las producciones para la escucha de Samuel Beckett (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2023), Samuel Beckett electrónico: Samuel Beckett coclear (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2016) and The Technological Epiphanies of Samuel Beckett: Machines of Inscription and Audiovisual Manipulation (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Futura, 2016). Sánchez has exhibited widely in Europe and the Americas. She is a member of the editorial board of the academic journal Beckettiana (University of Buenos Aires) and is part of “Vértice”, the network of Spanish-speaking artistic researchers and creators focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett. She founded the initiative “Beckett-Mexico” and organised two international conferences (2019 and 2020). Sánchez hosted, organised and chaired the 4th International Conference of The Samuel Beckett Society: the first conference in a Spanish-speaking country with a transdisciplinary approach (Mexico City, 2018). From 2019 until 2023, Sánchez served on the executive committee of The Samuel Beckett Society.
The Organisers
Derval Tubridy is Em. Professor of Literature and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and former Dean of the Graduate School and Associate Pro-Warden for Research and Enterprise. She is Co-Director of the London Beckett Seminar and Vice-Chair of the British Association of Irish Studies. She works on modern and contemporary literature, philosophy, performance and the visual arts with a particular focus on the intersections between language, materiality and process. Author of Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems (University College Dublin Press, 2001), she has published widely on Modernism and Irish Studies. Her work has been funded by the Fulbright Commission, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She can be contacted at d.tubridy@gold.ac.uk.
Stefano Rosignoli received an MA in Modern Literature (2006) and an MPhil in Publishing Studies (2008) from the University of Bologna. He worked in publishing for several years before focusing on his PhD, which he completed at Trinity College Dublin (2024). In 2018, he was a James Joyce visiting fellow and J-1 short-term scholar at the Humanities Institute, State University of New York at Buffalo, and a visiting research scholar at Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Cornell University. His academic training is grounded in textual studies at large, from philology to genetic criticism, integrated with formalism, structuralism and the semiotics of the text, and his main field of enquiry is the philosophical exogenesis of Irish literature in English. He has recent or forthcoming publications dedicated to Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce; he teaches modern literature and cinema at Trinity College and University College, in Dublin; and he serves as review editor for Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. He can be contacted at stefano.rosignoli@tcd.ie
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