Hilary term: Schedule of Speakers

The series takes place in Room 0.09 Aras an Phiarsaigh at 5.15pm on Wednesdays.

We are delighted to announce an exciting line-up of speakers for Hilary term.

Jan 14th: Professor Francis O'Gorman (University of Leeds): "Victorian Literature and the Dead"

Jan 21st: Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton University): "Milton and Shakespeare"

Jan 28th: Dr. Maria Johnston: ""I tap my feet to Fats Waller and look out the window": Music in the Poetry of Michael Longley"

Mark O'Connell: "Missing Twins, Real and Imagined, in John Banville's Birchwood and Mefisto"

Feb 4th: Reading week: no seminar

Feb 11th: Alison Lacivita: "'refuses to
sacrifice SD': Shem's Incestuous Origins in Joyce's Finnegans Wake."

Alexander Runchman: "The Innovation of Delmore Schwartz"

Feb 18th: Professor Jeremy Smith (University of Glasgow)

Feb 25th: Guy Woodward: "Strange Openings: the Second World War in paintings by Colin Middleton"

Ailise Bulfin: "Colonial revenge: Guy Boothby’s response to the ‘Egyptian Question’ in the vengeful mummy narrative Pharos the Egyptian (1899)"

Mar 4th: Dr. Andrew Power: "Seneca is for Everyone: The Art of Manipulating a Senecan Plot to any Political Purpose in Sixteenth-Century England"

Kate Roddy: "‘Martyrdom is not for Everyone’: The Art of the False Recantation in Sixteenth-Century England"

This seminar will be followed by a wine reception

Visiting Speaker: Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton)

Nigel Smith is currently Chair of the Renaissance Studies Committee at Princeton, to which he came from the University of Oxford, England, in 1999. He has published mostly on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century; his work is interdisciplinary by inclination and training. His interests have included poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women’s writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; the history of linguistic ideas. The authors he has covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Marvell. New work involves the comparison of English with literatures in other European and some oriental vernaculars in the context of political and scientific transformation between 1500 and 1800, notably as authors and texts migrated from one place to another often in order to escape persecution. His major works are the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell’s Poems, a TLS ‘Book of the Year’ for 2003, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994) and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford UP, 1989). He has also edited the Journal of George Fox (1998), and the Ranter pamphlets (1983). A biography of Marvell, a study of Milton’s poetry and prose, and (with Nicholas McDowell) an extensive anthology of 17th-century radical literature, are forthcoming. He is a Senior Behrman Fellow at Princeton, has been the recipient of British Academy and NEH Research Awards, and was the British Academy Chatterton Lecturer for 1998. He gave the inaugural senior lecture at the Nicholson Center for British Studies, University of Chicago, 2004, an Anniversary Seminar at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters at the University of London in 2003, and has been active in radio and TV broadcasting in the UK and the US since 1989. He is Princeton’s representative at the Folger Shakespeare Library Institute.


We are delighted to announce that this week's distinguished guest speaker is Professor Nigel Smith. He will bepresenting a paper on Milton and Shakespeare. The seminar will takeplace at 5.15 pm on Wednesday January 21st in room 0.09 Aras an Phiarsaigh.

Visiting Speaker: Prof. Francis O'Gorman

We are delighted to announce that the first seminar of 2009 will see Prof. Francis O'Gorman speak on ‘Victorian Literature and the Life of the Dead.’ The seminar will take place at 5.15 pm on Wednesday January 14th in room 0.09 Aras anPhirasaigh.

Our distinguished guest speaker is Head of the School of English at the University of Leeds. He is currently writing a book on the subject of this lecture, while also completing the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture, editing The Victorians and the Near East, and writing essays for the Cambridge History of the English Novel. Prof. O'Gorman is an advisory editor for the forthcoming Oxford Companion to English Literature. He is a Companion of the Guild of St George and a Visiting Professor at the Ruskin Centre of the University of Lancaster. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Victorian Culture and Victorian Review.

Prof. O'Gorman is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Victorian Literature and Finance (Oxford University Press, 2007), Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell, 2004) and Ruskin and Gender (Palgrave, 2002).