Theatricality, Violence and Affect: The Case of the Bacchae

a free evening public lecture by Olga Taxidou.

5.30-7pm, Rm 1.21 (F.21) Psychology Building, University of Edinburgh, No. 7 George Square, Edinburgh .

This event is free but ticketed, please reserve yourself a place via the University's Event booking system: Eventbrite.

About the Speaker:

Olga Taxidou is Reader in Drama in the University of Edinburgh’s English Literature Department. Her work in theatre and performance studies includes adaptations of Greek tragedies, some of which have been performed, and at present she is working on an adaptation of The Bacchae.
Olga’s research interests lie mainly in the fields of theatre history and performance studies, with an emphasis on modernism. In particular her work concentrates on the centrality of performance for the aesthetic and political concerns of modernism. She has published extensively on the work of Edward Gordon Craig and the relationships between Anglophone modernism and the historical avant-garde. She is interested in the relationships between modernist experimentation and tradition, in particular classicism and Hellenism. Within this context her work has focused on theories of tragedy and how these have been reconfigured within the project of modernity (from Nietzsche to Brecht). At present she is continuing this work with a study on the significance of tragedy and ‘the tragic’ for the historical avant-garde.

Intact

a free evening public lecture by Professor Steven Connor.

6-7.15pm, The Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, EH1 1DF, Edinburgh.

This event is free but ticketed, please reserve yourself a place via the galler: call 0131 226 8181 or email bookshop@fruitmarket.co.uk.

Professor Connor will consider the highly ambivalent feelings and values associated with the idea of untouchable things, whether pristine or profane.

About the Speaker:

Steven Connor is a writer, critic and broadcaster, and the Academic Director of the London Consortium. He is the author of books on Dickens, Beckett. Joyce, ventriloquism, flies, and other topics in literary and cultural history, as well as The Book of Skin (2003). His most recent book is The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (2010), and his Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things and A Philosophy of Sport will appear later this year. His website at www.stevenconnor.com includes lectures, broadcasts, unpublished work and work in progress.

Seeing is Caring? Aesthetic Perception, Environmental Concern and Cultural Renewal

a free evening public lecture by Professor Kate Soper.

5.30-7pm, Rm 1.21 (F.21) Psychology Building, No. 7 George Square, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University. Doors Open at 5.20pm. This event is free but ticketed, please reserve yourself a place via this link to Universityof Edinburgh Events at Eventbrite.

Abstract:

Despite the common presumption that aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature’ goes together with concern for its conservation, the links between the two are not as straightforward as might first appear. The history of the aesthetic of nature in European culture gives little ground for supposing that it went together with sentiments of the kind we associate with environmental concern in our own time; and, without denying or decrying the importance of the sense of sight to the experience of natural beauty, the emphasis of this aesthetic tradition on vision and the landscape gaze renders it a problematic legacy. Contemporary consumer culture, it will be argued, has continued to skew environmental experience and understanding by encouraging a too exclusively visual sense of its appeal. But it will also be argued, in this context, that an aesthetic revisioning of material culture will be at least as important to ecological renewal as developing a more proper appreciation of the natural world.

About the Speaker:

Kate Soper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy attached to the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University, and a Visiting Professor at Brighton University.  She has published widely on environmental philosophy, aesthetics of nature, theory of needs and consumption, and cultural theory. Her books include What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Blackwell, 1995), To Relish the Sublime: Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern times (with Martin Ryle, Verso, 2002); Citizenship and Consumption (co-editor,  Palgrave, 2007) and The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently (co-editor, Palgrave, 2008).  Her recent study on ‘Alternative hedonism and the theory and politics of consumption’ was funded in the ESRC/AHRC ‘Cultures of Consumption’ Programme (www.consume.bbk.ac.uk). She has been a member of the editorial collectives of Radical Philosophy and New Left Review and a regular columnist for the US journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.

Smellscapes: The Role of Odour in the Constitution of Selves and Environments

a free evening public lecture by the anthropologist David Howes of Concordia University, Canada.

5.30-7pm, 28 January 2011, at Inspace, University of Edinburgh, Crichton St, Edinburgh.

Abstract:

This presentation introduces the notion of smellscape as a complement to R. Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape and an alternative to the conventional Western notion of the “landscape” (which is so pervaded by visual values). Smellscape refers to an environment as apprehended by the period nose (when the approach is historical) or cultured nose (when the approach is anthropological). The presentation goes on to weigh the evidence for and against the thesis of the “Olfactory Decline of the West” and, finding there to have been a decline, asks whether we moderns would be able to support the olfactory values of premodern times being brought back in. Next, the presentation surveys the social life of smells in a range of non-Western cultures and seeks to determine how our own olfactory experience might be enriched through emulating certain exotic practices, such as the Japanese game of kodo.  The presentation concludes with a plea for the education (and liberation) of the contemporary nose given the threat posed by the advancing commodification of olfaction.

About the Speaker:

David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, and the Director of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (CONSERT). He holds three degrees in anthropology and two degrees in law. His main fields of research include sensory anthropology, culture and consumption, constitutional studies, and the anthropology of law.

Howes has conducted field research on the cultural life of the senses in the Middle Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea, Northwestern Argentina, and the Southwestern United States. This research has significantly expanded understanding of the varieties of sensory experience. He recently completed an ethnographic analysis of current trends in multisensory marketing, and is presently wrapping up a study of the sensory life of things in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. He has just embarked on a new media art project in collaboration with colleague Christopher Salter, which involves constructing a chamber that plays with a wide range of sensory phenomena. The sensory programing of the chamber is inspired in part by models of alternative sensory orders derived from the CONSERT archives.

Howes' research in law has focussed on the elaboration of a methodology for resolving cases that are sparked by the increasing mixity and friction of cultures brought on by transnational migration. In place of using culture as a defense, he advocates the development of cross-cultural jurisprudence. He has also conducted an excavation of the cultural underpinnings of the Canadian and U.S. constititions (www.canadianicon.org)

Howes is the editor of The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991), Cross-Cultural Consumption (1996), and Empire of the Senses (2004); the co-author with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994); and, the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2003). His latest book is The Sixth Sense Reader (2009). He is the Managing Editor of The Senses and Society journal, and a co-convenor of the Sensory Studies website (www.sensorystudies.org)

Eros and Thanatos in the Era of Gluttony

a Public Lecture by C. Nadia Seremetakis, University of Peloponnese, Greece

Unfortunately, this event had to be cancelled.

The anthropologist, poet and translator C. Nadia Seremetakis will give a free public lecture as part of a Sawyer seminar on the sense of taste and the environment. www.seremetakis.com

An Auditorium for Echoes: Inventing Sound Places and the Ethics of Recollection

a Public Lecture by Paul Carter of Deakin University, Australia

6.00-7.30pm, 7 September 2010 Lecture Theatre 175, Old College, South Bridge, University of Edinburgh

Writer, historian and artist, Paul Carter (www.materialthinking.com.au) will give a free public lecture as part of a Sawyer seminar on the sense of hearing and the environment.

David Rothenberg in Concert

7.30-8.45pm, 8 September 2010 Institute Francais d'Ecosse/The French Institute, 13 Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh

Rothenberg will perform his original music based on the sounds of birds and whales, water and wind. Playing the clarinet, along with the computer, the acclaimed jazz musician and philosopher will give a free public concert as part of a Sawyer seminar on the sense of hearing and the environment. www.davidrothenberg.net