Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra - School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey (https://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/staff_list/complete_staff_list/adeline_johnsputra/) Abstract Some have recently argued that the age we now call the Anthropocene demands new understandings of human ontology and thus of history. I ask what such a renewed sense of history might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in […]
Dr. Chris Patterson - Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University (http://hum.hkbu.edu.hk/staff.php?staff_class=ts&staff_id=41) Abstract This presentation will discuss the major concepts of Dr. Patterson’s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, which traces forms of racial governance from colonial-era racial pluralism to contemporary global multiculturalism through an exploration of Asian migrant narratives […]
Dr. des. Nicole Eberle - School of English, The University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/staff/neberle.htm) Abstract In this presentation, I discuss results from both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Bermudian English, which form part of a research project on the origins, dialect contact history and typological relationships of this “lesser-known variety of English” (Schreier et […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
