Julia Kuehn – Professor, University of Groningen (https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.c.kuhn/)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

||

Biography

Tara Lee – Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/people/Faculty/291/Professor_Tara_Lee)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

||

Biography

Peter Kennedy – Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/people/Affiliates/104/Dr_Peter_Kennedy)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

Stoppard’s biographer, Hermione Lee, writes that he has been “typecast as a wit, an apolitical entertainer”. I wish to take issue with this view. I will consider first his play Indian Ink (1995) and the politics/ethics of colonialism. Next, I will look at his treatment of politics/ethics in the Soviet Union & Czechoslovakia in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Professional Foul (1978), Doggs’ Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) and Rock N Roll (2006). Finally, I will consider what he says about politics/ethics and the artist in Travesties (1974) and The Invention of Love (1997).

||

Biography

Dr. Peter Kennedy has taught in Hong Kong since 1988. At HKU, he teaches C20th poetry, C21st English poetry as well as a Ulysses course. He holds degrees from the universities of Bristol, Sussex, Wales, Essex and Trinity College Dublin. His five books and his journal articles have been mainly concerned with adult learning and learning English through literature. He also writes poetry that has been published in HK, Ireland, the USA, UK and Germany.

Nicholas Luke – Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/people/Faculty/86/Professor_Nicholas_Luke)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

Bottom, the unwitting butt of a cruel, fantastical fairy prank, experiences a moment of transcendence that echoes some of the most famous scriptural words about the promises of the hereafter. This talk considers why Shakespeare takes up the key biblical text on the doctrine of resurrection, Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, at this critical point of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and what this says about Shakespeare’s approach to imaginative power. It suggests that the mysterious resurrection envisaged by Paul informs both the preposterous change experienced by Bottom (with his ass’s head) and the perspectival shift the play prompts in its audience. The play’s references to both Paul and to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly help us to understand why it is the base and foolish Bottom that opens an imaginative gateway to newness of life.

||

Biography

Nicholas Luke is an Associate Professor in the School of English at HKU. His work includes Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character (Cambridge, 2018), Shakespeare’s Political Sprit: Negative Theology and the Disruption of Power (Cambridge, 2024), and papers in journals such as Modern Philology, Shakespeare Survey, Law and Literature, and Literature and Theology. He is currently working on a third monograph, “Resurrection Events in Late Shakespeare” (funded by the UGC), which re-examines the vexed question of Shakespeare’s engagement with religion through the idea of resurrection.

||

Additional Content

Sign up here

 

 

Andrew Ross – Associate Professor, University of Canberra (https://www.canberra.edu.au/about-uc/faculties/education/staff/andrew-ross)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

This talk examines an instance where digital fandom operates as a site of participatory meaning-making and collective intimacy through a discourse analysis of comments responding to the YouTube short based on Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters titled Do NOT Interrupt Our Mukbang! Drawing on a corpus of nearly 1,800 comments, the study explores how fans collaboratively negotiate humour, identity, and cultural knowledge in response to a global popular culture phenomenon. Utilising the concepts of participatory culture, parasocial interaction, and interdiscursivity, the analysis demonstrates how online fandoms blur boundaries between fiction and reality, animated characters and real-world idols, and entertainment and everyday life.

||

Biography

Andrew Ross is an Associate Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia. His research focuses on the use of (multimodal) critical discourse analysis in social media discourse. His work has appeared in Language & Communication, New Media & Society, Communication and Sport, Poetics, and World Englishes. His most recent books are Innovations and Challenges in Socia Media Discourse Analysis (2025, Routledge – with Michele Zappavigna) and Understanding the Language of Virtual Interaction: Communities, Knowledge and Authority (2025, Cambridge University Press – with Antonio Reyes). Andrew also serves as Associate Editor for the journal Discourse, Context & Media.

||

Additional Content

Sign up here

 

Ben Moore – Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam (https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/m/o/b.p.moore/b.p.moore.html)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

This talk brings together two contexts prominent in Charles Dickens’s work where the economic circulation of things and people is suspended: the pawnbroker’s shop and the debtors’ prison. Reading these two settings together, I suggest, allows us to recognise a homology in the way things (in the case of the former) and people (in the case of the latter) are withdrawn from circulation, with their existence equated to money in both cases. In a strange modification of Marx’s circuit of capitalist profit, the commodity character of both people and things is highlighted precisely when they cease to circulate. At the same time, in texts such as ‘The Pawnbroker’s Shop’ (1835) and Little Dorrit (1855-7), affective and symbolic economies continue to operate in the place of inactive or hindered economic ones, as people and objects come to stand in for or refer to each other even as they are prevented from working or being used. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of symbol and allegory, I argue that these two contexts in Dickens’s writing should be read as allegorically referring to one another.

I position these readings in relation to my wider project, which argues that the specific spaces in which money operates (or fails to operate) in the nineteenth century shape its cultural and affective entanglements more deeply and thoroughly than has been previously recognised.

||

Biography

Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam. His research areas include nineteenth-century literature, cities, money, modernity, childhood and the figure of the human. He is the author of Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2024) and Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895 (Palgrave, 2023). His work has appeared in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/modernity, Modern Language Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as in various handbooks and edited collections. He is Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal and Secretary of the Dickens Society.

Peter Kennedy – Adjunct Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/people/Affiliates/104/Dr_Peter_Kennedy)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) had a lifelong love of the writing of James Joyce (1882-1941).  He read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at 16. He took Ulysses and Finnegans Wake with him into the army in 1940. He wrote two critical studies of Joyce: Here Comes Everybody (1965) and Joysprick (1973) as well as many articles about him. He produced A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1966), presented a film on Joyce for the BBC (1965) and on Finnegans Wake for American television (1973). In 1982, he wrote a musical version of Ulysses called The Blooms of Dublin. His novels were heavily influenced by Joyce’s writing. In this paper, I will trace Joyce’s influence through a few of his 33 novels: Napoleon Symphony (1974), Nothing Like the Sun (1964), the Enderby tetralogy (1963-84) and his most well-known novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962). 

||

Biography

Dr. Peter Kennedy has taught in Hong Kong since 1988. At HKU, he teaches C20th poetry, C21st English poetry as well as a Ulysses course. A passionate Joycean, he inaugurated the annual ‘Bloomsday’ celebrations in HK 25 years ago. He continues to deepen his understanding of Joyce (see, for instance, his piece in the James Joyce Quarterly, 2021). He holds degrees from the universities of Bristol, Sussex, Wales, Essex and Trinity College Dublin. His five books and his journal articles have been mainly concerned with adult learning and learning English through literature. He also writes poetry that has been published in HK, Ireland, the UK (e.g. in the London Literary Review) and Germany.

Reto Winckler – Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong (https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/ewinckle)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

This paper investigates a long line of bio-fictional texts that portray Shakespeare as a comical character. The paper is grounded in the observation that the two earliest historical documents that seem to give some personal insight into Shakespeare's life and character are jokes. Robert Greene satirizes Shakespeare as a preposterous ‘vp=start Crow’ with a ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’ (1592); John Manningham's anecdote about Shakespeare's affair with a fan in which Shakespeare impersonates William the Conqueror (1602), meanwhile, makes Shakespeare the protagonist of a mini-comedy that ends in a one-night-stand. Both texts already exhibit the comingling of fact and fiction that would come to characterize all later Shakespeare biofiction, and indeed all Shakespeare biography. Equally remarkably, the two different modes of humour employed by the two anecdotes, the satirical and the romantic, both closely reflect how humour operates in Shakespeare's comedies and foreshadows the use of humour in later biofictional comedic visions of Shakespeare.

Building on this perspective, this paper analyzes Alexandre Duval’s Shakespeare Amoureux (1804), George Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910), Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Ben Elton’s Greene-inspired television sitcom Upstart Crow (BBC Two, 2-16-2020). The comedic biofictional engagements with Shakespeares discussed in this paper open up unique routes of engagement with historical facts as well as popular and academic conceptions of Shakespeare.

||

Biography

Reto Winckler is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Shakespeare, adaptation studies (particularly in television series, digital media and AI) and contemporary popular culture. His articles have been published in Adaptation, The Journal of Popular Culture, Shakespeare, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Cahiers Élisabéthains, among others. He is the co-editor of Television Series as Literature (Palgrave, 2022) and the forthcoming “This America, Man:” The Literary and Cultural Origins of 21st-Century American Television Series (Brill, 2026)," and the editor of the forthcoming special issue of Adaptation, "Adaptation Machines/Machine Adaptation: Adaptation Studies and Generative AI" (2026). He is a member of the editorial boards of Shakespeare and Adaptation.

Anya Adair – Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/people/Faculty/84/Dr_Anya_Adair)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

In The Adventure of the Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes' account of 'the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime' epitomises the imaginative leap of circumstantial reasoning: probable meaning is deduced from what physical evidence remains (or is conspicuously absent) after the crime. This talk traces the pre-history of such methods of reasoning in the legal culture of early medieval England. Old English law codes and poetry alike, I argue, disclose a subtle but consistent interest in traces, signs, and probabilities: what we would now call circumstantial evidence. Commentators on early English legal history typically emphasise the primacy of oaths and ordeals in fact-finding. These ritualised procedures, it is claimed, centralise God’s judgement, and explicitly exclude human deduction and 'fact-finding' from the processes of law. Yet the Old English law codes preserve signs of a broader evidentiary culture: traces of stolen animals, collateral facts of behaviour, and expectations about likelihood and proof. Old English poetry, too, shows this intellectual habits at work. Narrative scenes in Beowulf pivot on the careful weighing of signs, and on conclusions drawn from material traces. Early English law and literature together point to a legal imagination alive to the interpretive potential of circumstantial evidence, anticipating by many centuries the processes of fact-finding that drive the modern jury trial, and the genres of detective fiction that bring these processes so vividly into the modern cultural imagination.

||

Biography

Dr. Adair is Assistant Professor in Law and Humanities with the Faculties of Law and Arts at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale. Her present research seeks to unite more closely the fields of medieval law and literature, and to provide insight into the intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of legal and literary production across the period.

Vincent Pak – Assistant Lecturer, The University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/people/Affiliates/321/Dr_Vincent_Pak)

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.

Abstract

In societies where explicit homophobic discourses are met with pushback, they must evolve to eschew mainstream criticism. They recently arrived, in the case of Singapore, as religionbased discourses that carry logics of change and transformation, now observable as neohomophobia. These discourses coax change through the Christian idea of metanoia – spiritual transformation – that encourages an individualised transformation of the self.

This talk considers how language, specifically discourse, can be deployed as a corrective for nonnormative sexualities. Discourses in three forms – multimodal, narrative, and metapragmatic – are analyzed to demonstrate how correction can be achieved without relying on traditional modes of animus. Stories of ex-gay Christians, circulated by a young, non-denominational organization in Singapore, are examined for their audiovisual and narrative qualities, and ethnographic interviews conducted with religious queer individuals in Singapore evince language as a powerful technology for correction.

||

Biography

Vincent Pak is a sociocultural linguist at The University of Hong Kong, working in the fields of gender, sexuality, and race. His work intersects with linguistic anthropology and discourse studies, and his monograph, Queer Correctives, was recently published with Bloomsbury Academic. His articles can also be found in journals such as Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, and Signs and Society.