Morrissey once sang "There's more to life than books, you know / but not much more..." ---
In an attempt to investigate this provocative hypothesis, I give you the unofficial blog for PGRs in the School of Arts and Media, University of Salford, and beyond.
News / updates / images etc... please get in touch!
The Salford Lectures: Professorial Inaugural Series Professor Alan Williams
Date: Wednesday 30 October 2013
Time: 5.30pm
Venue: The Council Chamber, The Old Fire StationWe
are delighted to invite you to the first of this year’s Professorial Inaugural Lectures which will be delivered by
Professor Alan Williams on Wednesday 30th October, commencing at 5.30pm in the
Council Chamber at The Old Fire Station.
Professor Williams has been at the University of Salford since 1995 and is currently Professor of Collaborative Composition
within the School of Arts and Media.The lecture, entitled
‘Out of the Garret – the Composer as Collaborator’, will discuss
the historical role of the composer and how social and technological
changes have transformed the relationships involved in the creation of
music. You’ll hear some music in which Professor Williams has taken a
part in creating over the last 5 years, and details of future projects
in which the audience has a hand in the creation of the work.This is a
free event as part of our public series of lectures, which are open to all.
Citizen Media in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe,
China and East Asia, and the Arab World An interdisciplinary doctoral/postdoctoral training workshop
Attendance free of charge, some travel/accommodation funding available.
Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: 22 November 2013
Call for Contributions from Doctoral Students and Early Career Researchers
The
term ‘citizen media’, or ‘participatory media’, covers a wide range of
activities undertaken by ordinary, non-professional citizens who lay a
claim to an area of public life and politics and seek to transform it
in some way. From videos circulated on Youtube to graffiti, street
performance and other forms of street art, and from community radio to
blogging, crowd sourcing, tweeting, flashmob protest and hacktivism,
new forms of civic engagement continue to develop, expand and shape the
relationship between the private and the public, the local and the
global, mainstream and alternative media, corporations and clients, the
state and civil society. The aim of the workshop is to bring together
doctoral students and early career researchers who work on citizen
media in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, China and East Asia,
and the Arab world – areas where citizen media has been at the centre
of political contestations, censorship and everyday struggles.
The workshop will focus on methodological challenges of researching
citizen media, whether these are conceptual, practical, ethical or
political.
We
welcome proposals for 15-minute presentations which discuss any topic
relating to the methodologies of researching citizen media in any of
these regions.Papers should reflect the current research of postgraduates or
early career researchers. The workshop will also include a guided
training session on methods, and several presentations by expert
scholars (detailed below). To apply, please send a title and a 300-word
abstract to gabrielle.hendry@postgrad.manchester.ac.ukby the 22nd of November 2013.
The
event is free of charge and open to doctoral students and early career
researchers. Limited funds are available to cover travel and
accommodation expenses.To apply for funding assistance, please indicate so on your submission, and outline the estimated cost of your travel.
Successful candidates will be notified in December.
Please find below the description of the radical studies
network event that is the event scheduled in conjunction with the Graduate
Programme for next Wednesday the 30th of October.
It will be taking place at the Working Class Movement Library
(opposite Salford Crescent station and the main campus), Wednesday the
30October, 3-5 PM.
Radical Studies Network Event
Chris Witter (Lancaster
University), “Remapping Social Relations in the New American Short Fiction of
the 1960s.”
Stephen Dippnall
(University of Salford), “Hating America? The British Left and the Execution of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
Jen Morgan (University of Salford), “ ‘Occupy This
Wide and Fruitful Plain’: Chartist Fiction as Response to Middle-Class Social
Problem Novels.”
With: Dr Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, Dr Michael Goddard, Dr Benjamin Halligan, and Prof Tony Whyton
This
session will showcase some of the recent research publications by
Sch
ool of Arts and Media colleagues, focusing on the areas of media and
music.
Each speaker will give a short presentation on the book, how it
came about and the critical issues that it raises, before opening up
for a panel discussion and Q and A.
The presentations will be as
follows: Kirsty Fairclough on
The Music Documentary (Routledge 2013), Michael Goddard on The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz
(Wallflower/Columbia UP, 2013), Benjamin Halligan on Resonances (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2013) and Tony Whyton on
Beyond a Love Supreme (Oxford University Press, 2013).
It is my pleasure to present
the Graduate Programme for the School of Arts and Media. Seventeen events have
been arranged for this academic year. The programme features a number of
internationally renowned academics and writers, and this year we have assembled
a series of talks that look to timely questions of media, power and digital
activism, film, sound and voice, and creative writing and aesthetics,
reflecting the diverse research make-up of the School of Arts and Media.
These talks are open to all in
the PGR and research communities at Salford, and beyond, and are a forum for
intellectual stimulation, innovation and discussion as well as a chance to meet
and socialise with fellow researchers. As in previous years, I’ll email out
detailed reminders a couple of days before each talk. Very much hope to see you
there!
Dr Michael Goddard, PGR Co-ordinator / School of Arts and Media
Tuesday
the 8th of October, Salford Art Gallery and Museum
Professor
Terri Witek (Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University, US) and
Cyriaco Lopes
Special
Event at Salford Museum and Art Gallery
Professor Terri Witekand new
media artist Cyriaco Lopes present their collaborative visual poetry at the
North Gallery in Salford Museum & Art Gallery Tuesday 8th October 3pm (free
entry).
Terri Witek and Cyriaco Lopes have been collaborating since
2005. While Witek often writes poetry about art, Lopes’ art work often
investigates language. A signature of their collaborations is that their media,
art and poetry, interweave while each retains its identity. By reinventing,
interrupting and restaging each other’s words and images, they create a hybrid
third possibility. Their collaborations so far have extended to video,
performance, photography, drawing, and artists’ books. Their projects have been
featured at Art in Odd Places (Big Bronze
Statues was chosen as one of the highlights of the 2009 season by Time Out
New York), in a solo show at Le Petit Versailles, New York, at the British Film
Festival (finalist in the avant-garde category), and in Contemporary
Flanerie: Reconfiguring Cities (Oakland University, Michigan) among other
venues. The first retrospective of their work to date, but here all dreams equal distance, was shown at Grinnell College’s
Faulconer Gallery in April, 2010 and featured a collaborative multi-media
event, the day you left. In November
2010 their site-specific project, A
Shelter on King’s Road placed the trace of Martin Luther King’s firebombed
cottage in the Markland House, a National Register treasure acquired by Flagler
College in 1966. Current projects include All
Love is Stolen (2013), a 5000
flyer street distribution in South Beach for O, Miami, and The Fernando Pessoa
Game, which they ran in Lisbon in the summer of 2013.
Wednesday
the 16th of October, Media City room 2.36
Kirsty
Fairclough-Isaacs, Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Tony Whyton
(University of Salford)
School of
Arts and Media Book Launch and Launch of the Graduate Programme
This
session will showcase some of the recent research publications by School of
Arts and Media colleagues, focusing on the areas of media and music. Each
speaker will give a short presentation on the book, how it came about and the
critical issues that it raises, before opening up for a panel discussion and Q
and A. The presentations will be as follows: Kirsty Fairclough on The Music
Documentary (Routledge 2013), Michael Goddard on The Cinema of
Raúl Ruiz (Wallflower/Columbia UP, 2013), Benjamin Halligan on Resonances
(Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2013) and Tony Whyton on Beyond a Love Supreme (Oxfrod
University Press, 2013).
Wednesday
the 30th of October, Working Class Movement Library
Radical
Studies Network Event
Chris Witter (Lancaster
University), “Remapping Social Relations in the New American Short Fiction of
the 1960s.”
Stephen Dippnall
(University of Salford), “Hating America? The British Left and the Execution of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
Jen Morgan (University of Salford), “ ‘Occupy This
Wide and Fruitful Plain’: Chartist Fiction as Response to Middle-Class
Social Problem Novels.”
Note: this event takes place from 3 to 5 in the
Working Class Movement Library
Wednesday
the 13th of November, Media City room 2.19 3 to 5PM
Saudi
Media Research PGR forum.
Emerging out of the strong presence of Saudi Arabian PGR researchers
within our school, this forum will present the research work of some of them
namely Mohammad Mesawa, Saeed Alamoudy and Abdullah Abalkhail (more speakers
TBC). Examining such issues as the rebranding of Makkah as a creative city,
online activism and the Arab Spring, this promises to be a lively forum of
interest to the School’s PGR and research community as a whole.
Wednesday
27th of November
Dr Milla
Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin University)
“Ventriloquism and convulsion: Voice, aesthetics, and
paradoxes of agency in Anton Corbijn’s Control”
As recent returns to this topic in media and
cultural theory highlight, attempts to think about the voice soon gravitate on
several paradoxes. Vocal emissions performatively produce the very
(self-)articulating being and bodily presence that presumably act as their
source. Whilst delivering selves and bodies as part of the world, vocal
expressions at the same time inevitably depart from their emitters. As
projection, the voice both exposes and replaces its source. Whether in a ‘live’
situation or when engaged in cinematic/other mediatised experience, we arguably
strive to attach vocal sonorities to a visible origin. Yet, to elaborate on
Steven Connor (2000) there is always something ‘ventriloqual’ in the voice’s
ultimate incompatibility with such visually ensured origins. In sum, the
relations of voice to agency, embodiment, space, perception, power, and
technical media are expandingly complex. My intention in this talk is to
explore and further conceptualise these complexities in conversation with Control (2007), the film directed by
Anton Corbijn about Joy Division, particularly the band’s late lead singer and
lyricist Ian Curtis. This film, I contend, harnesses some of the above-sketched
paradoxes of voice through its narrative but especially audiovisual and
aesthetic presentations of Curtis’s character and vocal performances. I will
inspect the voice as part of Curtis’s diegetic agency, but also as an agency in
its own right in excess of its emitter’s control. This takes place in relation
to such other distinctive audiovisual aspects of the film’s portrayal of Curtis
as the dancing, convulsing body and the (still) face in close-up. This talk
aims to address three areas that intertwine in my current research: the study
of the ethico-aesthetics of voice in contemporary artistic practices and media
culture; the return in the analysis of media to the political potential of
sensory, aesthetic arrangements to shape our feelings, experience and thought
processes; and the examination of non-normative media cultural masculinities
from these two perspectives.
Milla Tiainen is
Lecturer and Course Leader for Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University.
During 2013-2014, she is working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Academy of
Finland funded project “Deleuzian Music Studies”. Tiainen’s current research
interests include the voice in contemporary artistic practice, media culture
and theory, theories of affect, rhythm and the body in movement, sound and
performance studies, and new materialist approaches in cultural/media studies
and feminist thought. She has published widely in the areas of music
scholarship and cultural theory. Her work has recently appeared or is
forthcoming in such publications as the edited volumeCarnal Knowledge: Towards a New
Materialism through the Arts (IB Tauris, 2013), Body&Society,
and NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies. She is finishing a book
about a new Deleuzian approach to musical performance (under contract with
University of Minnesota Press).
Thursday
5th of December, Meida City room 2.20
Internal Speaker: Mik Pienazek (Design)
Three Themes of Impactful
Research in Design
This presentation will present a
number of successful research projects in the field of design:
1.SME Innovation strategies:
with reference to graduate business start ups
2.Co-design as a strategy for
advocacy, representation and inclusion of marginalised groups
3.Future 'assisted living'
scenarios: with reference to the applications of ambient technology
Each of the research themes have
been driven by a rigorous process and disparate methodologies. In addition, the
3 themes have achieved quantifiable impact relative to user groups, enterprises
and curriculum.
External Speaker: Benjamin Noys (University of Chichester)
Avant-gardes have only one time”: The Situationist
International, Communisation, and Aesthetics
In this intervention I wish to probe the
relationship between the Situationist International (SI) and ‘communisation’
through the question of aesthetics. I take up Roland Simon’s critical
reflections on the SI and what he identifies as the central contradiction of
their project: between the affirmation of workers’ identity (such as in
worker’s councils) as the condition of revolution, and the negation or
abolition of that identity as the true revolutionary moment. He argues that
this tension is also reflected in the ‘aesthetics’ of the SI, as the tension
between the realisation of art, which sees artistic practice as a possible
critical mode under capitalism, and the suppression of art, in which ‘art’ can
only occur ‘in’ the revolution. For Simon the SI indicates the outer limit of
affirmative ‘programmatism’, and presages the abandonment of any ‘positive’
identity of the proletariat in communisation. The irony I want to consider is
that it is precisely the ‘side’ of the SI – affirmative, artistic, humanist and
vitalist – that should have been rendered passé that is the one that has most
persisted in contemporary discussion and valorisation of the SI’s legacy (from
Greil Marcus to MacKenzie Wark). While Debord recognised the necessary finitude
of the avant-garde aesthetic model, it seems that it is this model that we are
called to affirm when discussing the SI. I want to consider if it is possible
to truly suppress art in relation to the SI.
Benjamin Noys (Bsc, MA, Dphil) is Reader in
English at the University of Chichester, and the author of Georges Bataille: A
Critical Introduction (Pluto 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg 2005), The
Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh
University Press 2010), and editor of Communization and its Discontents (Minor
Compositions 2011). Benjamin has published widely in contemporary theory,
aesthetics, psychoanalysis, film, literature and cultural politics. He is on
the editorial boards of Film-Philosophy, S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle
for Lacanian Ideology Critique, and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies,
and is also a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism. He directs the
interdisciplinary Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester (http://theoryresearchgroup.blogspot.com/).
Wednesday 11th of December, Media
City 2.20
Professor
Jonathon Green (Independent researcher)
(title
TBC)
I am a
lexicographer, that is a dictionary maker, specialising in slang, about which I
have been compiling dictionaries, writing and broadcasting since 1984.I have also written a history of
lexicography. After working on my university newspaper I joined the London
‘underground press’ in 1969, working for most of the then available titles,
such as Friends, IT and Oz. I have been publishing books since the mid-1970s,
spending the next decade putting together a number of dictionaries of
quotations, before I moved into what remains my primary interest, slang. I have
also published three oral histories: one on the hippie Sixties, one on first
generation immigrants to the UK and one on the sexual revolution and its
development.Among other non-slang
titles have been three dictionaries of occupational jargon, a narrative history
of the Sixties, a book on cannabis, and an encyclopedia of censorship. As a
freelancer I have broadcast regularly on the radio, made appearances on TV,
including a 30-minute study of slang in 1996, and and written columns both for
academic journals and for the Erotic Review.
Wednesday
the 29th of January
Dr Emma
Rees (university of Chester)
Vulvanomics:
How We Talk About Vaginas.
In Vulvanomics, Emma considers why British and US culture has such
a problem when talking about the female body; she maps the long history of
advertising that profits from the taboo of the vagina, and she reflects on how
writers, artists and filmmakers have been influenced by, or even perpetuate,
this ‘shame’.
Dr Emma L. E. Rees is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Chester. Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare studies; early
modern literature and culture; film theory; and gender studies. Her new book is
The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History. Her first book was Margaret
Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile, and she has many other publications on
Cavendish, and on gender and representation. She has also co-authored an essay
on Led Zeppelin, and has published on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Wednesday
12th of February
Internal
Speaker: Dr Scott Thurston
Language
and Motion: Postmodern Poetry and Dance
Poets have been fascinated by dance for centuries, seeing in its
expressive, yet elusive, gestures an analogue for their own handling of language.
In the twentieth century, this fascination led to a series of encounters
between poets and dancers, such as those which took place in the
multi-disciplinary milieu of the Judson Dance Theater in New York City
(1962-66). Judson, however, is only part of a larger story of how poets and
dancers on both sides of the Atlantic in the postmodern period sought ways to
bring their respective art forms into dialogue with each other in order to
create new and exciting works of the imagination. My current research hopes to
shed light on how we relate to, and seek to express, our embodied self in
language and movement, and will explore how the tension between the constraints
on our being and the possibilities for overcoming these constraints becomes the
subject of groundbreaking artistic endeavour.
External
Speaker: Professor Des Freedman (Goldsmiths College, London)
Reflections
on Media Power
Media power is a crucial, although
often taken for granted, concept. Does it express the economic and political
prowess of particular ‘media moguls’? Does it refer to the media’s capacity to
modify attitudes and beliefs, transform social circumstances and exert
influence over other social institutions? Does it refer to the ability of media
to provide other state or corporate actors with a valuable resource to assert
their own dominance? Does it point to a concentration of symbolic influence
that is mobilized in quite personalized contexts or to the growth of economic
blocs that are all the more significant in 21st century ‘knowledge’
and ‘information societies’? Are we to believe that the media are increasingly
the locus of power or, as Castells argues, that ‘the media are not the holders
of power, but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided’?
As a way into thinking through some of these issues, the paper identifies four
paradigms of media power. As with any conceptual model, it is filled with holes
and probably fails to address all the complexities of media power. However, in
thinking through different frames through which to assess the dynamics of media
power, it may be a useful starting point.
Des Freedman is a professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths,
University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Media Policy,
co-author (with James Curran and Natalie Fenton) of Misunderstanding the
Internet and co-editor (with Daya Thussu) of Media and Terrorism: Global
Perspectives. He is the chair of the Media Reform Coalition and is working
on his new book, The Contradictions of Media Power.
Wednesday
26th of February
Allen
Fisher (Emeritus Professor, MMU)
Articulating
a Research Practice.
A personal summary of the tactics,
plans and methods used in my
poetics and artistic practice, in the facture of poetry and visual imagery. The
talk will discuss some of the conceptual and pragmatic ideas involved and will
include examples.
Allen
Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, editor and art-historian and has produced
over one hundred and twenty chapbooks and books of poetry, graphics and art
documentation. A major figure in British Linguistically Innovative Poetry, he
worked for over thirty years on two massive projects in multiple books, Place
(now published in a complete edition from Reality Street, 2005) and Gravityas a consequence of shape, now collected across three volumes: Gravity
(Salt, 2004), Entanglement (The Gig, 2004) and Leans (Salt,
2008). He has intensely engaged with the history of ideas, science, art and
architecture.
Wednesday
the 12th of March
Double
external session on Digital/Social Media and Activism
Dr Paolo Gerbaudo (King’s
College, London)
Social
Media Activism and the Generic Internet User, between Homogenisation and
Disintermediation
Paolo
Gerbaudo is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.
Previously he had been an Associate Lecturer in Journalism and Communication,
at the Media Department at Middlesex University, and an Adjunct Professor of
Sociology at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Apart from his academic
work Paolo has also acted as a journalist covering social movements, political
affairs and environmental issues, and as a new media artist exhibiting at art
festivals and shows. He holds a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths
College.
Dr Fidele
Vlado (King’s College London)
Online
Activism and Electronic Civil Disobedience
Fidele
Vlavo joined the Department of CMCI in January 2012. She was previously
lecturing at the department of arts and media at London South Bank University
where she completed her doctoral research. Fidele holds a BA (Hons) in Arts
Management (London South Bank University) and a degree in Film studies
(Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris). Her PhD examined the concept of electronic civil
disobedience and the practice of online activism. It provided a discursive
analysis of the use of cyberspace as an exclusive site for political protest.
Prior to her PhD, Fidele worked on digital projects at the Courtauld Institute
and the British Museum.
Wednesday
the 26th of March
Internal
Speaker: Professor Seamus Simpson (University of Salford; English and Journalism directorate and head of
CCM)
Public Service Journalism and
Converging Media Systems
Concepts and practices of public service have been an integral part of the
evolution of communication media systems for decades in Europe and beyond.
However, the process of media convergence has called forth an examination of
the place of public service in communications. Ideas of public service have
been an important part of the development of journalism and have too come under
increasing pressure in the era of media convergence. This session will commence
with an exploration of some of the key ideas that have shaped articulations of
public service in media systems and journalism. It will then go on to explore
some of the challenges and opportunities for public service journalism which
have arisen from the development convergent media platforms and services. It
will conclude by exploring the extent to which public service journalism is
relevant today in our diverse-yet-converging, highly commercialised, digital
multi-media systems.
External
Speaker: Professor James Curran (Goldsmiths College, London)
Mickey
Mouse Squeaks Back
What are the main grounds for dismissing media and cultural studies as a
‘Mickey Mouse’ subject? What underlies these attacks? Are they justified in
full or in part? A media studies academic surveys the field, and responds to
its critics.
James
Curran is Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and
Professor of Communications. While at Goldsmiths, he has held a number of
visiting appointments including McClatchy Professor (Stanford), Annenberg
Professor (UPenn), Bonnier Professor (Stockholm University) and NRC Professor
(Oslo University). He has written or edited 22 books about the media, some in
collaboration with others. These include Media and Democracy, Routledge,
2011, Power Without Responsibility (with Jean Seaton), 7th edition,
Routledge, (2010), Media and Society, 5th edition, Bloomsbury, 2010 and Media
and Power, Routledge, 2002 (translated into five languages). His latest
book is Misunderstanding the Internet (with Natalie Fenton and Des
Freedman), Routledge, 2012, arising from Leverhulme funded research. His work
falls mainly into two linked areas: media history and media political economy.
In media history, he has sought increasingly to relate the development of the
media to wider changes in society, while in media political economy he has
turned to comparative media research, drawing on quantitative methods.This has resulted in three comparative
studies, two funded by the ESRC (for outputs see ‘publications’ above). More
recently still, he has been evaluating the impact of the internet and new
communications technology.
Wednesday
9 April
Internal Speaker: Michael Goddard
(University of Salford, Media and Broadcast directorate)
Media Ecological Approaches to
Alternative and Radical Media
This presentation
will explore some of the issues in approaching alternative and radical media
drawing on and extending the work of Downing et al (2000) on Radical Media
and Atton on Alternative Media and An Alternative Internet (2001,
2004). In particular it will use the concept of media ecologies as developed by
Matthew Fuller (Fuller 2005), as a way of approaching a range of case studies
drawn from both analogue and digital media. Using examples ranging from free
and pirate radio and guerrilla television to cyber-activism, this talk will
look at how media ecologies and approaches to self organisation can shed light
on both small scale media and activist use of larger media forms (television,
social media etc).
External
Speaker: Dr Joss Hands (Anglia Ruskin University)
Collective Idiocy: Of Digital Multitudes and Mobs
One of the most revisited concepts
in critical and media theory is that of ‘general intellect’, as originally
outlined by Karl Marx in his celebrated ‘Fragment on Machines’. The concept is
often framed as containing a liberatory promise via the destruction of the
value of labour power, and thus the capacity of capital to generate surplus
value. While autonomist theories have speculated that this concept pre-empts
characteristics of the digital revolution and the creation of cooperative
common, there is a potential dark side of a digitally enhanced general
intellect. The paper will ask whether such intelligence is indeed
‘intelligent’. This paper explores the question of whether this is actually
closer to a general ‘idiocy.’ It will explore the idiotic tendencies embodied
in such thinkers as Clay Shirky, James Surowiecki and Charles Leadbeater and
the likely decomposition of the common into what Heidegger refers to as the
‘they’. The paper will ask whether such collective idiocy is part of our
technical condition and what, to use a pointed phrase, is to be done?
Joss Hands teaches Communication
and Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, where he is also
director of the Anglia Research Centre in Media and Culture. He is author of @
is for Activism: Dissent Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture
published by Pluto Press.
Wednesday
the 7th of May
Dr Susan
Smith (University of Sunderland)
From
Child to Adult Star: an exploration by video essay of the film career of
Elizabeth Taylor
The death of Elizabeth Taylor on 23rd
March 2011 prompted a global outpouring of tributes to the actress right across
the various sectors of the media, some of which highlighted the need for a
reappraisal of her achievements as an actress. This video essay will offer my
own reflection on Taylor’s distinctiveness as a film performer, the
significance of her early career and the contribution of both to her enduring
stardom. In doing so, it will draw upon my AHRC funded research project on the
actress’s work in film, exploring the crucial role played by Taylor’s
star-defining performance in National Velvet (1944); her later collaborations
with actors such as Montgomery Clift and Richard Burton; and the dynamic ways
in which she made use of her eyes, voice and body in her performances. I also
hope to open up for consideration the role that the video essay can play in the
detailed analysis of performance and some of the challenges and benefits
arising from scholarly engagement with this form.
Susan
Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK.
Her most recent book - Elizabeth Taylor - was released in summer 2012 as part
of the launch of the new Film Stars series that she co-edits for the BFI
(published by Palgrave Macmillan). She is also author of Voices in Film
(in Close-Up 02, 2007), The Musical: Race, Gender and Performance (2005)
and Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (2000).
Wednesday
the 21st of May
Internal
Speaker: Professor George McKay
Popular
Music and Disability
External
Speaker
Dr Liz
Greene
Music and
Montage in Punk Films
Liz
Greene is a sound practitioner and academic whose main research interests are
in the theory, history and practice of film sound. I teach film and television
studies in the School of Cultures and Creative Arts at the University of
Glasgow. She teaches and writes about film sound design and specialises in
sound effects, the voice and sound archiving. Liz also creates sound art,
music, and radio shows. She is currently creating the sound design for a
documentary film on women’s experience of Long Kesh/The Maze prison during the
Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Wednesday
the 4th of June Mark Cote (Kings College, London)
Data
Motility: Life, Labour and Debt in the Age of Big Social Data
Mark Coté
is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College, London. He has
published extensively on Social Media, Digital media culture, Media theory,
Autonomist Marxism, and Foucault. He is further exploring the relationship
between the human and technology by developing the mobile phone as a research
tool to examine the changing parameters of mobility, location, and information.
Wednesday
the 18th of June
Internal Speaker: Dr Benjamin Halligan
(Performance Directorate)
Title TBC
External Speaker: Dr Gavin Hopps (University
of St Andrews)
Too Much Heaven: The Kitsch Epiphany
A talk
based on Gavin Hopps current research into popular culture and radical wonder
Gavin
Hopps is Lecturer in Literature & Theology and Director of the Institute
for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. He has
been a Lecturer in English at the universities of Aachen, Oxford and Canterbury
Christ Church and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has
published numerous articles on Romantic writing, a collection of essays on
spectrality in Byron, and a monograph on the singer-songwriter Morrissey. He is
currently working with Jane Stabler on a new edition of the complete poetical
works of Lord Byron (to be published by Longman in 6 volumes), a monograph on
popular music and radical wonder, entitled The Kitsch Epiphany, and
another on the levity of Byron’s Don Juan.
Professor Terri Witek (Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University, US) and Cyriaco Lopes
Special Event at Salford Museum and Art Gallery
Professor
Terri Witek and new media artist Cyriaco Lopes present their
collaborative visual poetry at the North Gallery in Salford Museum
& Art Gallery Tuesday 8th October 3pm (free entry).
Terri
Witek and Cyriaco Lopes have been collaborating since 2005. While Witek
often writes poetry about art, Lopes’ art work often investigates
language. A signature of their collaborations is that their media, art
and poetry, interweave while each retains its identity. By reinventing,
interrupting and restaging each other’s words and images, they create a
hybrid third possibility. Their collaborations so far have extended to
video, performance, photography, drawing, and artists’ books. Their
projects have been featured at Art in Odd Places (Big Bronze Statues
was chosen as one of the highlights of the 2009 season by Time Out
New York), in a solo show at Le Petit Versailles, New York, at the
British Film Festival (finalist in the avant-garde category), and in
Contemporary Flanerie: Reconfiguring Cities (Oakland University, Michigan) among other venues. The first retrospective of their work to date,
but here all dreams equal distance, was shown at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery in April, 2010 and featured a collaborative multi-media event,
the day you left. In November 2010 their site-specific project, A Shelter on King’s Road
placed the trace of Martin Luther King’s firebombed cottage in the
Markland House, a National Register treasure acquired by Flagler
College in 1966. Current projects include
All Love is Stolen (2013), a 5000 flyer street
distribution in South Beach for O, Miami, and The Fernando Pessoa Game,
which they ran in Lisbon in the summer of 2013.
Date:
Wednesday 30 October 2013 Time: 5.30pm Venue: The Council Chamber, The Old Fire Station
We are delighted to invite you to the first of this year’s Professorial Inaugural Lectures which will be delivered
by Professor Alan Williams on
Wednesday 30th October, commencing at 5.30pm in the
Council Chamber at The Old Fire Station.
Professor Williams has been at the University of Salford since 1995 and is currently Professor of Collaborative
Composition within the School of Arts and Media.
The lecture, entitled
‘Out of the Garret – the Composer as Collaborator’,
will discuss the historical role of the composer and how social and
technological changes have transformed the relationships involved in
the creation of music. You’ll hear some music in which Professor
Williams has taken a part in creating over the last 5 years, and
details of future projects in which the audience has a hand in the
creation of the work.
This is a free event as part of our public series of lectures, which are open to all. Please register your
attendance via
our website, or alternatively reserve a place by contacting the Events Team on 0161 295 5275 or
events@salford.ac.uk.
Professor Williams has been at the University of Salford since 1995 and is currently Professor of Collaborative Composition
within the School of Arts and Media.The lecture, entitled
‘Out of the Garret – the Composer as Collaborator’, will discuss
the historical role of the composer and how social and technological
changes have transformed the relationships involved in the creation of
music. You’ll hear some music in which Professor Williams has taken a
part in creating over the last 5 years, and details of future projects
in which the audience has a hand in the creation of the work.This is a
free event as part of our public series of lectures, which are open to all. 
