Seminar archive 2008

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series: Autumn 2008
Irish Writing

Tuesday 7 October: Wilde in America
Neil Sammells is Professor of English and Irish Literature, and Dean of Academic Development at Bath Spa University. He is the author of Tom Stoppard: the Artist as Critic (1998), and Wilde Style: the Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde (2000), and co-editor – with Paul Hyland – of Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (1992), Writing and Censorship in Britain (1992), among others.

Tuesday 18 November: Troubled Times: J.G. Farrell writing Ireland
John McLeod is Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, and author of Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007), and J.G. Farrell (2007).

Tuesday 9 December: Irish Criticism and the Political
Conor McCarthy is a Lecturer in the Department of English at NUI Maynooth. He has published essays and reviews in the Yearbook of English Studies, Interventions, Textual Practice, The Field Day Review, and others, and is the author of Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (2000).

For information on the present series, please contact Glenn Hooper (G.Hooper@open.ac.uk); all lectures take place in Room NG15, and begin at 5.30, in the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, London WC1

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series
Interdisciplinary Travel
Spring 2008

Jointly run by the Institute of English Studies in collaboration with Professor Susheila Nasta of the Open University Postcolonial Literatures Research Group, the seminars this term have been organised by Dr Glenn Hooper (OU) and will focus on the theme of travel.

The seminars will be held at the London University Institute of English Studies, Senate House, North Block, Malet Street, London WC1, 5.30pm Tuesdays. All are welcome.

Tuesday 15th January 2008
Professor Alison Blunt
Home and Diaspora: Geographies of Dwelling and Mobility
Room: NG16

Alison Blunt is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, where her research interests include feminist and postcolonial geographies, geographies of imperial domesticity, and gender, travel and imperialism. She is co-editor of Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (Guilford, 1994), author of Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (Guilford, 1994), co-author of Dissident Geographies: An Introduction to Radical Ideas and Practice (Prentice-Hall, 2000), and co-editor of Postcolonial Geographies (Continuum, 2002). Her Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home was published in 2007 (Oxford: Blackwell).

Tuesday 5th February 2008
Charles Forsdick
Travellers in Dialogue: Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart
Room: NG15

Charles Forsdick holds the James Barrow Chair of French at the University of Liverpool, where his research and teaching interests include exoticism, travel literatures, postcolonial literature in French, and the contemporary French novel. He has published in numerous journals, including Paragraph, Romance Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, and New Comparison, and he is author of Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (Oxford UP, 2000) and Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford UP, 2005), co-author of New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literatures in French: Genre, History, Theory (Peter Lang, 2006), and co-editor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (Arnold, 2003).

Tuesday 26th February 2008
Professor Graham Huggan
Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization
Room: NG15

Graham Huggan is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, and Co-Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at the University of Leeds. His research interests include comparative postcolonial literature and cultural studies, postcolonial film, and contemporary travel writing, and his publications include Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 1994), Peter Carey (Oxford University Press, 1996), Tourists with Typewriters: Critical reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (co-author; University of Michigan Press, 1998), The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (Routledge, 2001), Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford UP, 2007), and Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2008).

Tuesday 18th March 2008
Debbie Lisle
Securitization and Tourism: the curious case of Thomas Cook in Khartoum
Room: NG15

Debbie Lisle is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests include contemporary travel writing and world politics, tourism and security, and she has contributed to The Review of International Studies, Cultural Politics, and The Journal of Cultural Research, among others. Her The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing was published in 2006 (Cambridge University Press).