Events

Professor Isobel Armstrong - Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/emeritus-staff/isobel-armstrong) Abstract Generally dominated by the Aesthetic Movement and Decadent poets, mainly male, in critical discussion, I suggest that late nineteenth-century poetry was more varied and experimental than our customary frameworks suggest. I work with late-century Darwin to provide another model for […]

Professor Johan van der Auwera - Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/johan-vanderauwera/my-website/) Abstract The talk reports on a typological study of negative indefinites, i.e., the counterparts to standard English nobody and nothing, in Englishes, primarily the New Englishes, and in English Creoles. Particular attention goes to "Negative Concord" ("NC"), i.e., the exponence of negation through both a […]

Dr. Johan Siebers - Religious Studies Unit, Middlesex University London (https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/siebers-johan) Abstract One of the most conspicuous aspects of the Dao De Jing is its negative view of language. Language is unable to express the full nature of being, the Dao, which is, rather, open only to an intuitive, direct and ineffable, spontaneous and creative […]

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 […]