2012 EVENTS
2 March 2012
Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds, presented a paper, “Imagining The Place of Home: Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restoration.”
Faculty Room North, David Hume Tower, George Square
Friday, 4.30pm to 6pm
Dr Bennett is from Leeds and her research focuses on American literature, including her most recently published work Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007). This monograph examines the construction of history upon aspects of cultural memory that refuse to be forgotten. Currently, Dr Bennett is conducting research into the relationship between the concept of home and the theme of danger within American culture.
Paper synopsis:
This paper, part of a larger project on the idea of home, uses a focus on Rowlandson's captivity narrative as a way of examining the significance of home as an affective category as well as a specific location. I interpret Rowlandson's account of her captivity and restoration as a text in which complex negotiations between different and sometimes competing understandings of home are constantly taking place. Home as being both 'a place, a site in which we live' and 'a spatial imaginary: a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places' (Blunt and Dowling). As a term, home is also expansive, encompassing what it means to be comfortable "at home" as well as what it means to feel unsettled or uncomfortable "not at home". This is at the heart of Freud's celebrated formulation in his essay on the uncanny as well as being a central assumption of Gaston Bachelard's theorising in The Poetics of Space (1958). As an abstract noun home encompasses not only material ideas, represented by dwelling places and physical structures, but also ideas of belonging usually shaped by factors such as religion, culture, and ethnicity. In some cases these coalesce and are given political shape through the formation of a nation state. By definition, home also circumscribes conditions of non-belonging and 'exclusions' at local (even familial) and national or international levels.
6 March 2012
IASH Seminar Series, Spring 2012: "English Literature 1762-2012"
Deidre Lynch, Chancellor Jackman Professor of English, University of Toronto, presented a paper entitled, “Daniel Wilson, Scotland and Canada: the export of English.”
Faculty Room South, David Hume Tower, George Square
Tuesday, 5.30 pm
A seminar associated with the celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the appointment of Hugh Blair as the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, and 250 years of the study of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.
19 March 2012
Atlantic World Rhetorics
A STAR (Scotland's Transatlantic Relations)/Atlantic World Research Network Joint Colloquium
IASH, Hope Park Square
Monday, 9am to 6pm
An interdisciplinary symposium in collaboration with colleagues from University of North Carolina Greensboro, this event developed issues raised in the successful IASH / STAR meeting on ‘Voices of Moderation in the Atlantic World,’ held in 2011. Historians, rhetoricians and English scholars discussed public and private idioms of engagement in the Anglophone Atlantic World between 1750 and the present. Together, we considered a range of rhetorics – and disciplinary practices for their assessment – across domains from Literature to Philosophy, Politics and Religion. We addressed historical and contemporary languages of moderation, to ask what kinds of vocabulary, verbal structure and stance are deployed to promote the virtues of moderate thought? The symposium was part of our larger inquiry into how analysis of the rhetorics of moderatism help us better understand literary, cultural and political developments historically and in our own time.
Papers from:
Walter Beale (Professor of Rhetoric, UNCG)
Robert Calhoon (Professor of History, Emeritus, UNCG)
Joseph Moore (Assistant Professor of History, Gardner-Webb University)
Alex Murdoch (Scottish History, University of Edinburgh)
Frank Cogliano (Professor of American History, University of Edinburgh)
Andrew Taylor (English Literature, University of Edinburgh)
Allyson Stack (English Literature, University of Edinburgh)
Will Dodson (UNCG Doctoral Student in Rhetoric)
Mark Robson (English, University of Nottingham)
Please download the programme for more information:
Atlantic World Rhetorics Programme