Simon will investigate class and literature ranging across British writers from the early 19th century through to the present day.

Across poetry and fiction, Simon will present works – classic and not so well-known – which foreground issues of social and economic power, work and wealth, language and accent, region and property.

This lecture asks what happens when literary pursuits turn to working-class lives and what happens when working-class people write themselves into these traditions? Is there a continuity, say, between the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare an the Booker-winning Glaswegian novelist James Kelman? Should we even care about class when we read? Is there such a thing as working-class literary tradition?

In such a competitive and fast-moving industry, what measures can publishers take to remain fresh and unique? Today, innovation in publishing goes far beyond the e-book.

From crowdfunding to creating book apps, to interacting directly with book-buyers, digital publishers are doing some inventive and original things to get their books to the top of your reading list. Xander Cansell, Head of Digital at Unbound and Anna Jean Hughes, Founder and Editorial Director of The Pigeonhole join us on the 8th June to discuss the importance of innovation in publishing, and reveal some of the exciting new ways to publish and connect with readers. Come along and discover what the future of publishing looks like!

A one-day conference, with Professor Dame Marina Warner and featuring a rehearsed reading of Roberto Cavosi’s Bellissima Maria (after Phaedra/Hipploytus). Registration is £25, or £20 for students, and includes: lunch, refreshments, a drinks reception and confirms a place at the evening’s rehearsed reading (in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s). See the website for the full line-up of speakers and papers.

Where poetry meets science creative sparks fly, so come along and hear ideas catch fire at SciPo – a day of talks, panel discussions and readings with the distinguished Welsh poet, Tony Curtis, Director of Medicine Unboxed, Samir Guglani, multi-award-winning poet Lesley Saunders and St Hilda’s College’s own resident science poet – Sarah Watkinson. The event will be introduced by Jenny Lewis of the Poet’s House, Oxford.

There is increasing recognition over the last decade that conservation, while conserving biodiversity of global value, can have local costs. Understanding these costs is essential as a first step to delivering conservation projects that do not make some of the poorest people on the planet poorer. Using examples from Madagascar and Bolivia, we explore the challenges of quantifying the impact of conservation on local wellbeing.
Julia Jones is Professor in conservation science at the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University. Julia is interested in how people interact with natural resources and how incentives can be best designed to maintain ecosystem services; for example the growing field of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) and how schemes such as REDD+ can effectively deliver global environmental benefits while also having a positive impact on local livelihoods. She also has a strong interest in the design of robust conservation monitoring using different types of data, and in analysing the evidence underpinning environmental policies and decisions.

Telegraph writer Helen Yemm brings her column Thorny Problems to life by answering your gardening conundrums and dispensing invaluable advice in the picturesque setting of the Botanic Garden.

Local songwriter and Shelley specialist John Webster’s new DVD ‘Shelley’s Golden Years in Italy’ takes Shelley from the printed page and into the flux of contemporary culture. Teaming up with poet, playwright and Shelley admirer Benjamin Zephaniah, who provides context to the Shelley songs performed by John’s group Brindaband, it is an unrivalled guide to the poet, introducing around 20 of his key poems, highlighting important aspects of his thinking and describing his final dramatic years in Italy.

John will be introducing and playing the 43 minute-long film – expect an evening touching on some of life’s ‘fundamental things’, illuminated by a great poet’s unique perspective, and leaving an afterburn of hope.

Light refreshments, with an Italian flavour, will be provided.

To confirm your attendance please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call the Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

A special postcolonial seminar with Professor Brinda Bose and Professor Prasanta Chakravarty (University of Delhi). This event is CHCI funded and supported by TORCH, the English Faculty Postcolonial Seminar, and Rhodes House.

How to stop spending time you don’t have with people you don’t like doing things you don’t want to do.

Are you stressed out, overbooked and underwhelmed by life? Fed up with pleasing everyone else before you please yourself? Then it’s time to stop giving a f**k.

This irreverent and practical book explains how to rid yourself of unwanted obligations, shame and guilt-and give your f**ks instead to people and things that make you happy. Sarah’s simple ‘NotSorry Method’ for mental decluttering will help you unleash the power of not giving a f**k and will free you to spend your time, energy and money on things that really matter. This wise and humorous guide to modern living is a must read. Sarah is visiting from America and will be discussing the ideas and fantastic flow-charts in an evening talk and signing.

This is a FREE event and will take place in the philosophy department in the Norrington Room. For more information, or to register call 01865 333623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

What can be learned from three sketchbooks, a family commonplace book, a handful of letters, an essay notebook, and a few other “scraps, orts and fragments”? The Hopkins “remains” at Balliol, although comparatively few, have much to teach us about his controversial practices as self-curator, the posthumous (and precarious) disposition of his poetry and papers, and the way in which reading Gerard Manley Hopkins is always an exercise in textural counter-point.

Lesley Higgins, a Professor of English at York University (Toronto, Canada), is the co-general editor of the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She has produced three volumes for the series, has published extensively on Hopkins and Walter Pater, and is the author of The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Gender and Aesthetic Politics.

Unlocking Archives is a seminar series about current research in Balliol College’s special collections. All welcome, no booking required.

Art historian, novelist and journalist Iain Pears discusses his latest book ‘Arcadia’ whilst highlighting how technology is changing the way we tell stories today.

Ludo, snakes & ladders and draughts are all popular pastimes, but in the past couple of decades a new generation of board games from designers with backgrounds in maths and science has begun to break the Monopoly monopoly. Perhaps the most successful of these is multi award winning Reiner Knizia, who joins mathematician Katie Steckles and board game lover Quentin Cooper to discuss how you develop a game which is easy to learn, hard to master and fun to play time after time. With a chance to have a go at some of Reiner’s latest creations and other top games afterwards.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/tuesday.html

Shakespeare lived in one of the most unhealthy times and places in history. Disease was rife and hygiene poor, physicians could only be trained abroad, and there was no such thing as a public medical lecture. Most of Shakespeare’s own insights into science were learnt through friends who would tell (or show!) him their discoveries.

This event will bring together professional actors from Creation Theatre with medical historian Leah Astbury and modern day researcher Martijn van de Bunt to explore some of the medical references in Shakespeare’s plays and how they relate to contemporary science. From epilepsy to astrology, malaria to anaesthesia, compare the science of 400 years ago to the cutting edge research we have today and discover what has changed and what has stayed the same.

Join us for a sensational evening of cabaret – an alchemy of acts delivered by Science Oxford’s network of creative science performers. If you love science, stage and stand up, you’ll be in your element with our periodic table-themed cabaret including science presenter and geek songstress Helen Arney and compered by award-winning science communicator Jamie Gallagher. See the everyday elements that make up the world around us in a new light, watch in disbelief as gold is created before your eyes, and learn about their origins and how they behave inside our bodies. Get your tickets now – once they are gone they argon!

Imagine constantly worrying about something that you know is not real, or feel a deep anxiety that only repetitive (and often embarrassing) behavior can diminish. Now imagine this happening 24 hours a day for 365 days a year and you can begin to understand what it might be like to suffer from OCD. Join scientist Paula Banca who will discuss the OCD brain and why psychopaths never suffer from it, followed by artist Dan Holloway’s performance poetry inspired by his own experience. This event is part of the Storytelling Science project.

To coincide with the current exhibition by Isao Miura and Chris Beckett, ‘Sketches from the Poem Road (after Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North)’, which runs from 20 June to 15 July, the Poetry Centre presents a stimulating evening of talks and discussion on the subject of artistic and literary translation. It will feature John Nicoll (Chelsea Foundry), Nathalie Aubert (Professor of French Literature, Oxford Brookes), David Constantine (poet and translator), Sasha Dugdale (poet and editor of Modern Poetry in Translation) and Thomas McAuley (Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Sheffield and translator of many Japanese poems), chaired by Niall Munro, director of Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre.

This presentation explores the discourse of adoption through an analysis of how adoption is linguistically and visually delineated in a corpus of picture books. The aim is to understand how adoption is portrayed, and what the concerns and viewpoints of the three main participants are: child, adoptive parents, and birth parents, as well as those of the voices that surround them.

The study combines a quantitative and qualitative analysis, in which computer-based software is combined with the closer analysis of the individual texts.

The project lies under the umbrella of the major enterprise of understanding how adoption is conceived, the words and patterns used to talk about it, how it is visually represented, and in what ways these choices depict, challenge, and reshape society’s understanding of parenthood and families.

Dr Coral Calvo Maturana is English Lecturer at the University of Cádiz in Spain. Her research interests include stylistics, (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and multimodality. Her doctoral thesis: ‘Motherhood and Poetic Voices in The Adoption Papers by Jackie Kay: a corpus stylistics study’, resulted in her special interest in the discourse of adoption, and its multimodal representation in both literary and non-literary texts.

Literally and figuratively, what was time for Shakespeare?
When the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet announces that the performance will last two hours, what does Shakespeare mean?
Professor Tiffany Stern (English, Oxford University) will explore hourglasses, sundials and mechanical clocks to consider the options for measuring time that were visible or audible in the early modern playhouse. Questioning what hours, minutes and seconds might have meant to a playwright in the 1500s and 1600s, Professor Stern examines how the art of describing time shaped Shakespeare’s writing.
Doors open at 6.30pm.

Originally located in a small room in Norham Gardens, St Hugh’s Library moved to the Main Building in 1916 and then to its current location in 1936. Packed with treasurers such as John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, The Howard Piper Library tells a hidden story of Women and Oxford at the dawn of the twentieth century. This guided tour will unlock its secrets and offer a unique glimpse into a long-lost world.

Ms Nora Khayi was Assistant Librarian at St Hugh’s College in 2009 before becoming Librarian in 2013. She previously worked at the Taylor Institution Library and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and a member of various library committees in the South East of England.

Originally located in a small room in Norham Gardens, St Hugh’s Library moved to the Main Building in 1916 and then to its current location in 1936. Packed with treasurers such as John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, The Howard Piper Library tells a hidden story of Women and Oxford at the dawn of the twentieth century. This guided tour will unlock its secrets and offer a unique glimpse into a long-lost world.

Ms Nora Khayi was Assistant Librarian at St Hugh’s College in 2009 before becoming Librarian in 2013. She previously worked at the Taylor Institution Library and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and a member of various library committees in the South East of England.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries.

Acclaimed poet Alice Oswald returns to the APGRD. Free, all welcome, no booking required.

This summer St Anne’s College and The Danson Foundation jointly supported an Incubator Project to help three teams of students start their own businesses. As well as receiving working capital and accommodation, the teams were offered dedicated mentoring from The Danson Foundation and St Anne’s alumnae. At the Incubator Showcase on Thursday 20 October, the teams will present their business’s progress to date and discuss their plans for the future. All St Anne’s alumnae are very welcome to attend and learn more about the student’s projects. The event will also include time for networking.

The convenors of the American Literature Research Seminar at Oxford
invite you to attend:

Anna Despotopoulou, Associate Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,

“‘Terrible Traps to Memory’: National Monuments and Women in Henry James”

Examining the struggle between personal and collective memory expressed in James’s autobiographical and fictional writings (e.g. The American Scene, The Bostonians, and “Pandora”), this paper will focus on the ways in which his female protagonists confront the patriotism inscribed in monuments, challenging the grand narratives of nation and democracy from which they are often excluded.

Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and is an Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the RAI in 2016-7. Her research focuses on Victorian fiction, Henry James, and women’s studies. Her most recent book is Women and the Railway, 1850-1915 (Edinburgh UP, 2015). Her work on Henry James includes articles in the Henry James Review and other journals, as well as two edited volumes: Henry James and the Supernatural (with Kimberly Reed; Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011) and Transforming Henry James (with Donatella Izzo and Anna De Biasio; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

Denis Bridoux (past editor of Mallorn, founder of the 1992 Tolkien centenary conference committee, convener of the Amon Sul branch of the Tolkien Society) will be visiting Oxford to give his talk entitled “Laketown, or How a mythology for Switzerland came to contribute to a Mythology for England”

Refreshments will be served after the talk

Synopsis:
“Laketown is one of the most iconic places in The Hobbit, but where did Tolkien get the idea? The concept of palafites (lacustrian dwellings), whereby people lived on platforms built on wooden stakes and piles above lake waters in prehistoric times, was first identified in Switzerland in the 1850s. It was soon included in all history schoolbooks , and it is indeed most probably the source for Laketown, but might not Tolkien have had a more personal inspiration? Denis Bridoux’s slideshow entitled Laketown, or How a mythology for Switzerland came to contribute to a Mythology for England, will attempt to answer those questions.”

Once there was a girl called Harper who had a rare musical gift. She heard songs on the wind, rhythms on the rain and hope in the beat of a butterfly’s wing.

Children’s TV presenter Cerrie Burnell talks about her wonderful new series following the adventures of Harper and her scarlet umbrella. Told with Cerrie’s trademark beauty and wonder, prepare to be whisked away to a very magical world of stories.

Cerrie is a CBeebies presenter. She was named in The Observer’s top ten children’s presenters and was in The Guardian’s 2011 list of most inspirational women. She is also author of three children’s picture books, Ballet Dreams, Snowflakes and Mermaid. Snowflakes is this year’s BT Christmas show, click here for more details.

Martin Barker (Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Director of the Global Hobbit Project) will be visiting Oxford to discuss the results of the landmark Global Hobbit Project, a research initiative examining the popular reception of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Film trilogy.

Synopsis:
“Tolkien aficionados may have disagreed somewhat among themselves about the value and achievements of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But any frustrations – or celebrations – over the 2001-3 films were nothing compared to the overwhelming sense of let-down occasioned by the Hobbit trilogy. But your disappointments are, I am afraid, grist to the mill of an audience researcher like me. In 2014 I led a consortium of researchers in 46 countries across the world, to gather responses to Peter Jackson’s second trilogy. We managed to attract just over 36,000 completions of our questionnaire. Of course, when we conceived and planned the project, we couldn’t know what the films would be like, or what range of responses and debates they might elicit. In this presentation I will (briefly) explain why and how we carried out the research, and offer some of its major findings. These can act, I hope, as a kind of mirror to the depths, and also the significance, of the sense of disappointment experienced by even the most hopeful and forgiving viewers. And they open an important agenda about the changing role of ‘fantasy’ in our contemporary culture.”

Please join us at 7pm on Thursday of 7th Week (November 24th) for a presentation by Daniel Castro Garcia and Thomas Saxby on their recent publication ‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’.

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“The photographs are a protest against those who so
readily attack refugees and migrants entering Europe
without taking into consideration the dangers faced
during the journey.” (Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–16 by John Radcliffe Studio www.johnradcliffestudio.com)

For more information please read the press release below:

‘Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016’, is a photography book that documents the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on migration to Italy from North Africa, migration to Greece and through the Balkans from the middle east, and the migrant camp in Calais known as ‘The Jungle’. Alongside the photography, written texts serve both as a context, and a means to share the stories of the people we met during the project.
The book was created in response to the imagery used in
the media to discuss the issue of migration, which we felt was
sensationalist, alarmist and was not giving people the time and
consideration they deserved. We wanted to approach the subject from a calmer perspective, using medium format portrait photography as a means of meeting the people at the centre of the crisis face to face – and of learning something about their lives.

John Radcliffe Studio is the creative partnership of Thomas Saxby and Daniel Castro Garcia. We specialise in photography, film and graphic design and have spent the last year documenting the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe.

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The Moser Theatre is fully accessible, with access to gender netural toilets, and the event will be **FREE** to attend. Oxford for Dunkirk will be collecting donations before and after the event in aid of La Liniere Refugee Camp, Dunkirk, France: please see our page for more details! (www.facebook.com/oxfordfordunkirk)