• Samoan ghost stories: John Kneubuhl and oral history

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Otto Heim - School of English, The University of Hong Kong Abstract Hailed as "the spiritual father of Pacific Island theatre" (Balme 2007: 194), John Kneubuhl is best known as a playwright and a Hollywood scriptwriter. Less well known is that after his return to Samoa in 1968 he also devoted much of his […]

  • Building Memory: Digital Place-Making in Zuni Icosahedron’s Architecture of the City

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Joanna Mansbridge - Department of English, City University of Hong Kong (https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/joanna-gwen-mansbridge(976997ed-c96f-4ba4-9053-ed96c55ff62c).html) Abstract This talk emerges from two central questions: How do performance and performance technologies participate in constructing alternative spaces and building collective memory? How does the city itself – its architecture, interactions, artefacts – perform? With Zuni Icosahedron’s two recent productions, The Architecture of the City (Dec. 2017) […]

  • ‘An act of welcome’: writing as hospitality in Refugee Tales (2016)

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Harriet Hulme - Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The University of Hong Kong (https://englishhkuhk.foarts.hku.hk/people/Faculty/90/Dr%20Harriet%20Hulme) Abstract In Refugee Tales, its editor David Herd suggests that the asylum process symbolically dehumanises asylum seekers by restricting their ability to narrate their story on, and in, their own terms. Refugee Tales is itself an attempt to remedy this situation: mimicking […]

  • “At Last It Arrested Her”: The Historical Portrait in Pride and Prejudice

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Ms. Xu Lingyi, Olivia - School of English, The University of Hong Kong Abstract When characters pause to look at portraits in nineteenth-century English novels, they often learn key information about the depicted subjects. One of the most memorable examples is Elizabeth’s encounter of Mr. Darcy’s portrait at Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice. The painting softens […]

  • Why Verse? Aurora Leigh and the Rise of the Verse-Novel

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Mr. Chan Man Long Johnson - RPg, School of English, The University of Hong Kong Abstract In 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her masterpiece Aurora Leigh, her “novel-poem” conceived as early as 1845. This decade-long work remains as one of the few examples of a little-researched literary genre in the Victorian era - the verse-novel. […]

  • Language and The Problem of Women’s Authority

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Prof. Deborah Cameron - Faculty of English Language & Literature, University of Oxford (https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-deborah-cameron) Abstract The under-representation of women in public discourse and public life—in politics, in the corporate world, in the academy and in many parts of the media—is a significant real-world problem, which has persisted in spite of the removal of formal barriers […]

  • Modernity and Mechanical Reproduction in Gift-Annual Poetry

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr Clara Dawson - The University of Manchester Abstract This paper addresses the absence of gift-annual poetry from critical accounts of the transition from Romantic to Victorian aesthetics. The close analysis of a number of gift-annual poems demonstrates that they are fundamental to our understanding of the literary history of the early-nineteenth century. It argues […]

  • Internationalising Drama

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr Peter Jordan - City University of Hong Kong (https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/peter-edward-rees-jordan(8c512b7d-e06c-441f-a886-528f7d22580f).html) Abstract Live drama performance encompasses many forms not only as an art, but also in diverse applications, such as, public speaking, counselling, psychotherapy, corporate training, professional role play, and education. In this sense it is a highly transferrable skill. This presentation will outline and discuss the speaker’s […]