News

This week’s events at the CCL: Postcolonial Dance, and Music & Translation

This week we’re in for some treats at the CCL!

Our Postcolonial Performance series returns this week, and this year it is dedicated to dance. We start on Tuesday 13 May at 6PM BST with Jeleel Ojuade (Ojaja University, Nigeria), who will talk about ‘Reclaiming Dance in Africa: Ancestral Heritage and Political Agency’

Click here for more information on Prof. Ojuade’s talk and the registration link.

And click here for the full series ‘Body-thoughts’: The CCL Postcolonial Dance Series, 2025, which in the next weeks will also feature Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India), ‘A Manifesto to Decolonize Dance and Movement Discourses in South Asia’ (20 May, 3 PM BST); María Regina Firmino-Castillo (University of California, Riverside, USA),’“Dancing the Pluriverse” redux: (Indigenous) Performance as ontological praxis or anticolonial poiesis?’ (27 May, 6pm BST); and ‘Performance, Memory, and Resistance: A Talk by Palestinian Performance Artist Riham Isaac,’ (University of Exeter, UK), on 2 June, 6PM BST. All talk are online, and are free to attend.

 

On Thursday 15 and Friday 16 May we host the conference Music to my Ears: Creative Practices in Music and Translation​, supported by the Modern Humanities Research Association. The conference is in person.

We look forward to seeing you!

 

This week at the CCL: The Auto / Bio / Fiction seminar, with Beverly Frydman & Rochelle Robshaw, and Xiyuan Tan

Join us on Thursday 6 March 2025 at 5.30pm UTC (London time) for the Auto / Bio / Fiction series, when we’ll combine a practical writing workshop with with an autoethnographic study reflecting on autofiction through the use of digital game-making:

Beverly Frydman and Rochelle Robshaw, ‘Writing the Ordinary’

and

Xiyuan Tan, ‘Defeating the ‘boss characters’ of my life: Representing life turning points and adversities in an autofiction RPG’

For more information and to register: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/the-auto-bio-fiction-series-beverly-frydman-rochelle-robshaw-and-xiyuan-tan/

We hope to see many of you there,

With best wishes from the Centre for Comparative Literature

This month’s London Beckett Seminar at the CCL

Join us for this month’s London Beckett Seminar, on Friday 21 February at 6pm UTC (UK time), online:

Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, “Dante on Beckett’s Stage”

For more information and to register, please go to: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/london-beckett-seminar/.

Best wishes from the Centre for Comparative Literature

Today at the CCL: Olympoetics: Bodies, Minds, Athletics and Aesthetics

Join us today at 5pm GMT at Goldsmiths College, RHB 137, for a creative & critical soirée, jointly organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre.

The evening will start with a talk on ‘Olympoesis: Revisiting Public Poetry at the 2012 London Games’ by Dr Michael Simpson, Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the CCL, and will be followed by readings and/or performances of creative writing, in poetry or prose.

See the full Programme and speaker information at: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/olympoetics-bodies-minds-athletics-and-aesthetics-programme/

Book a ticket (Goldsmiths staff and students do not need to book)

The Olympic and Paralympic Games may have a claim to be the greatest show on earth.  Geographically global and historically ancient and modern, they move from city to city and divide time into determinate intervals.  As theatre, they are amphitheatrical, encompassing track and field, gymnastics and team sports, and much more; and they figure powerfully in international and national media.  The plots are compelling and instantly scrutable: phenomenal performance and intense competition issue into sweet victories and gnawing defeats, often in photo-finishes.  But there is also an imposing cultural dimension, beyond the sports and excitable commentary on them: the ancient Olympics included orations and readings, while the modern Games involve a Cultural Olympiad, or festival, which the host nation of the next summer Games initiates and promotes for four years before those Games themselves.  Each Cultural Olympiad duly takes some of its characteristic tone and theme from the cultural life of the host nation.

As Paris now equals London in having become the only other city to have hosted the modern Games three times, and as images from this most recent Olympic gathering are fresh in our minds, collective memories of the 2012 Games in London may be recalled, and clarified.  That Olympiad, and the Games concluding it in 2012, was characterised, perhaps above all, by poetry: Simon Armitage organised an international ‘Poetry Parnassus’, which was launched with a ‘poetry bombing’, by helicopter, of the South Bank; Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Games featured Kenneth Branagh reciting Shakespeare; and numerous poems by eminent poets past and present, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lemn Sissay, were installed in the Olympic Park at Stratford, where they still stand.

In a sense, this Cultural Olympiad was picking up a poetic tradition associated with the Olympics ancient and modern, ranging from Pindar’s odes to the literary competitions of the modern Games in the early twentieth century. Diverse and highly intermittent as this ‘tradition’ may be, it is a significant part of the cultural dimension of the Games.  Yet such proximity does not mean that this poetry only idealises the Games and related official values, such as peace through sport; rather, this poetry can also articulate economic and political realities underlying ideals like competition and level playing fields.  So, where will the next poetic, creative instalments originate?

Olympoetics is in person, and takes place in collaboration with the Writers’ Centre events.

This week at the CCL: The Auto / Bio / Fiction seminar, with Lellida Marinelli and Elisa Russian

Join us on Thursday 6 February 2025 at 5.30pm UTC (London time) for the Auto / Bio / Fiction series, when our focus will be on the essay as dialogical mode of reading and thinking and on the relationship between lived experience, storytelling, and critical theory in British cultural studies. 

Lellida Marinelli, “Reading, writing, being writerly selves through essayistic practice. Deborah Levy’s trilogy on writing and Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects

and

Elisa Russian, “Landscapes with Social Figures: On the Autobiographical Mode of British Cultural Studies“

For more information and to register: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/the-auto-bio-fiction-series-lellida-marinelli-and-elisa-russian/

We hope to see many of you there,

With best wishes from the Centre for Comparative Literature

This week’s event at the CCL: The London Beckett Seminar

Join us for the first London Beckett Seminar of 2025, on Friday 24 January at 6pm UTC (UK time), online:

Michael Coffey (Independent), “Beckett’s Children: Intertextuality and the Mysteries of Inheritance”

For more information and to register, go to: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/london-beckett-seminar/.

Best wishes from the Centre for Comparative Literature

This week at the CCL: The Auto / Bio / Fiction seminar, with Kim Adrian and Karen Ferreira-Meyers

Join us on Thursday 9 January 2025, at 5:30pm UTC (London time) for the Auto / Bio / Fiction series with writer Kim Adrian – author, among other works, of Dear Knausgaard and the memoir The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet – and Karen Ferreira-Meyers (University of Eswatini), and critic of autofiction and autobiography. 

Kim Adrian, “On Script-Flipping Genres

and

Karen Ferreira-Meyers, “Unveiling Truths: The Bold Art of Women’s Autofiction”

For more information and to register: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/the-auto-bio-fiction-series-kim-adrian-and-karen-ferreira-meyers/

We hope to see many of you there,

With best wishes from the Centre for Comparative Literature

This week at the CCL: The Auto / Bio / Fiction seminar, with Monica Latham and Bethany Layne

Join us on Thursday 28 November 2024, at 5:30pm UTC (London time) as the Auto / Bio / Fiction series resumes for this academic year, with biofiction specialists Monica Latham (Professor of British literature in the English Department at the Université de Lorraine, Nancy) and Bethany Layne (Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University):

Monica Latham, “Virginia Woolf in the French Imagination”

and

Bethany Layne, “‘As your Queen, and as a grandmother’: Elizabeth II’s tribute to Princess Diana in two works by Peter Morgan.”

For more information and to register: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/comparative-literature/the-auto-bio-fiction-series-monica-latham-and-bethany-layne/

Looking forward to seeing many of you there,

Best wishes from the Centre for Comparative Literature

The CCL events are back!

Dear colleagues and friends of the Centre for Comparative Literature,

After some serious disruption due to more redundancies and restructure at Goldsmiths, we have finally been able to start planning our programme for 2024-25.

We start on 24 October at 5pm with “Methodologies in Comparative Literature: Printed and Electronic Resources, a Model from Uzbek Comparatists”, a seminar organised jointly with LINKS (the London Intercollegiate Network of Comparative Studies), hosting professor Gulnoz Khallieva, Head of the Department of World Literature at the Uzbek State University of World Languages. The seminar will take place at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies at Senate House, and online. To register, please visit the ILCS event page and click on “Book now”

We are in the process of finalising the programmes for the Auto / Bio / Fiction series, the Post-Colonial Theatre series, the Sing in Me, Muse series, and other events, including Olympoetics, which had to be postponed last year. Please look out for the announcements, and thank you for your patience!

Looking forward to seeing you soon, online or in person,

With very best wishes,

Lucia, Clare, Isobel and Marie-Claude