Seminar archive 2009

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series

Autumn 2009

Jointly run by the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and the Open University Postcolonial Literatures Research Group, the seminars this term have been organised by Ole Birk Laursen (OU), and are designed to provide postgraduate students with an opportunity to present papers on aspects of their current doctoral research. With this series of seminars, we hope to create a forum for discussion amongst postgraduate students.

The seminars will be held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1. The room number will be confirmed nearer the date of the talks.

For further information, please contact Ole Birk Laursen on O.B.Laursen@open.ac.uk

All are welcome; booking is not required.

20 October 2009
17.30-19.00
‘Post-Imperial Life Writing: Race, Gender and Subjectivity in Andrea Levy’s Writing’
Ole Birk Laursen is a research student in the English Department at the Open University. His doctoral thesis focuses on race, gender and subjectivity in post-imperial life writing. He is database assistant on the AHRC-funded project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’ and Postgraduate Representative of EACLALS. He is currently co-organising the PSA Postgraduate Conference to be held in Stirling, Scotland, in the spring of 2010 and the Open University Postgraduate Conference to be held at IES in July 2010.

03 November 2009
17.30-19.00
‘The X Press Model for Publishing Black British Fiction’
Philippa Ireland has a BA in English Literature from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London and an Msc in Information Science from City University. Whilst at City she specialised looking at the implications of revised Data Protection legislation for charitable organisations. After completing her MSc she worked for the charity, Save the Children, and then as a commercial researcher for an IT and business services company. As a result, her research interests have encompassed a broad range of subjects. She is currently writing up her doctoral thesis, ‘Material factors affecting the publication of black British fiction, 1970s-1990s’. Her research is attached to a wider research project, ‘the Colonial and Postcolonial History of the Book’.

17 November 2009 (CANCELLED)
17.30-19.00
‘Inside “The Temple of Modern Desire”: Re-Collecting and Re-Locating Bombay’
Maria Ridda is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Kent. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, concerns the mapping of transnational urban spaces in South Asian diasporic texts, with a particular focus on the reconfigurations of ‘India’ from abroad. Her research interests include South Asian diasporic writing, postcolonial and literary theory, early 20th century English, American and Italian literature. Maria has presented at a number of academic conferences on topics which include intertextuality, memory and the glocal city in postcolonial literature. She is currently teaching a course on American and European Modernist poetry and fiction, and is preparing an article for publication on the subject of this presentation.

01 December 2009
17.30-19.00
‘Bringing Back Every Sita’: The Recovery of Women Following India’s Partition (1947) in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River Turning
Richard Lee is Assistant Principal of Oldham Sixth Form College and a part-time research student in the English Department at the Open University. His research project, entitled Women and Partition: Indian and Pakistani Novels of the Mid to Late 20th Century focuses on the role of literature in supplementing or interrupting ‘official’ histories of Partition. He has recently delivered papers at the University of Kent’sCultural Memory conference (September 2008), at the University of Maynooth’s Ends of Empire conference (June 2009), and at the University of Cardiff’s Partitions and Reunifications conference (July 2009). He has had an article, based on part of his research, published by Quest, the on-line Arts & Humanities journal of Queen’s University, Belfast.

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series: Spring 2009

Making Britain: South Asian Resistances, 1870–1950

This seminar series has developed from the AHRC-funded project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950’. Complicating the common perception that

a homogeneous British culture only began to diversify after the Second World War, the project examines how an early South Asian diasporic population impacted on Britain’s literary, cultural and political life. ‘Making Britain’ is led by Professor Susheila Nasta (Open University), in collaboration with Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) and Dr Ruvani Ranasinha (King’s College London), and Research Assistants Dr Sumita Mukherjee (Oxford), Dr Rehana Ahmed (Open) and Dr Florian Stadtler (Open). Please visit the project website for more details and information about other forthcoming workshops and events.

This series of seminars coordinated by Dr Sumita Mukherjee and Dr Rehana Ahmed will be addressing various forms of resistance by South Asians in Britain during this period. It forms part of the regular series organized by the Open University Postcolonial Research Group in association with the Institute of English Studies.

Venue: NG15 (North Block, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E)

Time: 17.30 – 19.00

Tuesday 13 January
Alex Tickell
‘“Horrorism” in the Heart of Empire: Theorising Violence and History at India House, 1905–1909’
Alex Tickell is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Portsmouth. He has published widely on early Indian fiction in English, contemporary authors such as Arundhati Roy, and Indian literature and Hindu nationalism. He has also researched aspects of literature and terror, and is currently working on an AHRC-funded monograph project titled ‘The Massacre at Night: Violence, Terrorism and Insurgency in Indian Writing, 1830–1947’.

Tuesday 27 January
Anne Kershen
‘The Alien in the Aliens Act: Defining the Outsider’
Anne Kershen has been Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary, University of London, since its foundation in 1995. Based in the Department of Politics, she is currently Director of the Masters in Migration and Masters in Migration and Law programmes. She has published widely, her most recent book beingStrangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields 1660–2000 (Routledge, 2005). She is currently researching the impact of post-accession migrants on communities with no history of previous immigrant settlement, her spatial focus being Shropshire.

Tuesday 10 February 
Prabhjot Parmar
‘Strategies of Containment: Censorship and the Indian Soldiers in Britain During the First World War’
Prabhjot Parmar is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Recovering the marginalized experiences of Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War, her postdoctoral project examines their letters as cultural artifacts within the context of war testimonies. She is the co-editor of When Your Voice Tastes Like Home: Immigrant Women Write and has published articles on the literary and cinematic representations of Partition. Currently she is teaching at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Tuesday 24 February 
Michèle Barrett
‘“Sending them Missing”: Race, Religion and the Imperial War Graves Commission’
Michèle Barrett is Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a noted social and cultural theorist, with expertise in ideology, aesthetics, gender, and post-structuralist ideas. Her recent work has focused on the literature and art of the First World War period. She has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to study shell shock, and a British Academy grant to research the colonial politics of commemoration. Casualty Figures: Five Survivors of the First World War (Verso, 2008) is her most recent book.

For further information, please contact Sumita Mukherjee on sumita.mukherjee@ell.ox.ac.uk or Rehana Ahmed on r.s.ahmed@open.ac.uk