In the Shadow of Kafka, a series of documentaries and drama on BBC Radio 3 from Sunday 10 May–Saturday 16 May, will examine one of the most elusive and intriguing figures in 20th century literature, Franz Kafka.
100 years since the publication of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the Czech writer remains one of the most influential writers of the last century, inspiring generations with his novels and short stories, themes of alienation, authority and mythical transformation. In the Shadow of Kafka will re-examine this legacy, exploring Kafka’s life and work through the lens of contemporary writers and dramatists including Margaret Atwood, April de Angelis, Hanif Kureishi, Karen Leeder, Mark Ravenhill and Jeff Young in a week of special broadcasts.
This page lists faculty events that have already happened.
Visit the Events page to see any current and upcoming events.
Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rome
Ian Thomson, University of East Anglia. View poster (PDF)
At the British Library Conference Centre, 29 June 2015 at 6pm. Wine and light refreshments will be served after the lecture.
Attendance is free but registration is required. If you intend to come to the lecture please email Chris Michaelides: chris.michaelides@bl.uk, ISLG Chair, and type ISLG Lecture in the subject line.
Week 1. OCCT welcome lunch
Friday 16 Oct, 13:00-14:00
Radcliffe Humanities Building, Colin Matthew Room
Week 2. Maison Française and OCCT hosted conference: Paris and London 1851-1900
13:30 Friday 23 Oct – 16:00 Saturday 24 Oct
Maison Française, see MFO website for programme
Week 3. Fiction and Other Minds seminar:
Wednesday 28 Oct, 16:30-18:30
Speakers: Peter Garratt (Durham): ‘Mind Bloat and The Lifted Veil’
Helen Small (English/Oxford): 'On the Verification of Mental Experience’
Chair: Ben Morgan (German/Oxford)
Radcliffe Humanities Building, Seminar Room
Why Camões Still Matters: Copies in Search of Originals: inaugural lecture celebrating the appointment of Phillip Rothwell as King John II Professor of Portuguese.
5pm (doors open 4:30pm), Monday 26 January 2015, Main Hall, Taylor Institution, Saint Giles', Oxford, OX1 3NA.
Monday 18 May (4th week) at 6pm, in the Holywell Music Room, Holywell Street, OX1 3BN.
Twenty-five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the poet Volker Braun will give a special reading of old and new work and answer questions with David Constantine and Karen Leeder. Introduced by Ian Wallace.
View poster (Word)
The Sir Robert Taylor Society is a network of Modern Languages Teachers and members of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty at the University of Oxford. As part of the Modern Languages Schools Liaison initiative, we provide links between Higher Education institutions and schools in both the state and independent sectors.
Our next conference will be held in Pembroke College on Friday 25th and Saturday 26th September 2015. Highlights of the programme include a round table to mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, a session on Modernism, a lecture to commemorate the 750th anniversary of Dante, and a performance of Chastity on the Verge.
18th-19th February 2015, 7:30PM, Exeter College Chapel
Director: Lucy Rayfield
Producer: Frey Kwa Hawking
Musical Director: Benjamin van Leeuwen
View Poster
Professor Michael Lucey
(UC Berkeley and Visiting Fellow All Souls College Oxford)
“What you might hear when people talk, or Proust as a linguistic anthropologist.”
Wharton Room, All Souls College, 5pm, Wednesday 17 June
Michael Lucey is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Duke University Press, 2006) and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2003).
Professor Dominique Rabaté
(Université de Paris VII)
Figures de la disparition dans le roman français contemporain
To be given on Wednesday 13th May 2015 at 5pm in the Taylor Institution, St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3NA, followed by a drinks reception. View poster (PDF)
Convener: Michael Sheringham FBA, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature
All welcome
Two of the leading poets from the UK and Germany in conversation, 12 May at 7pm, Keats House, 10 Keats Grove, Hampstead, London NW3 2RR.
View poster (Word)
After a life marked by scandals and decades of imprisonment, the Marquis de Sade died in the lunatic asylum of Charenton on 2 December 1814. On the eve of the bicentenary day, Nicholas Cronk and Manuel Mühlbacher will present their recent edited volume Sade, l’inconnu?, which brings to the fore new aspects of Sade’s multifarious writing. The event will feature responses to the volume by Sade specialists Will McMorran (Queen Mary University, London) and Thomas Wynn (Durham University), followed by a drinks reception in honour of the late Marquis.
1 December 2014, 5.30 PM
Ertegun House, 37A St Giles, Oxford
ROMANTIC POETICS
Wednesday, 4 June 2014 (6th Week)
From 4.00 to 6.00 pm
Room 2, Taylor Institution
Chair: Charlie Louth
Speakers:
Ela Tandello (Christ Church/Italian):
‘The Volcano Lover: Leopardi and the Romantic Sublime in La ginestra’
Anna Camilleri (Christ Church/English):
‘Byron’s Lyric Practice’
Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe (Hertford/French):
‘Metaphor and Thought in Victor Hugo’s Visionary Poetry of Progress’
This year, 2014, marks the 25th anniversary of Leonardo Sciascia, who died in November 1989. To kick-start the commemorations of the Sicilian writer, ISO (Italian Studies at Oxford) is holding a workshop on two of Sciascia's most controversial and disturbing works, Il contesto (1971) and Todo modo (1974), and on the two films that were inspired by those two novels in 1976.
Radcliffe Humanities Building, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG Seminar Room
Friday, 2nd May 2014, 2.30pm-5.30pm
For more information and to register, go to:
http://www.italianstudies.ox.ac.uk/Sciascia2014
Twenty-five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the poet Volker Braun will give a special reading of old and new work and answer questions with David Constantine and Karen Leeder on Tuesday 11 Nov. at 5pm, in the Seminar Room, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road.
This will be followed by a reception to mark the launch of Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (2014), to which everyone is welcome. This is the first collection of Braun’s poetry in English and spans 50 years of poems.
Spaces are limited and will be on a strictly first come first served basis. Please register with karen.leeder@new.ox.ac.uk if you wish to attend.
A conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland from 25 to 27 March 2013 (see http://www.hispanists.ox.ac.uk for details).
Week 7, 25th February - 1st March
A presentation at the Taylor Institution on February 6 2013 by Declan Donnellan, the internationally-renowned theatre director, to accompany his production of Jarry’s Ubu Roi at the Oxford Playhouse (see http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com for details).
An EHRC Cross-Faculty Research Seminar
Wednesday, 15 May 2013 (4th Week) from 4.00 to 6.00 pm
Voltaire Room, Taylor Institution
In 1759, Melchior Grimm, editor of the Correspondance littéraire, wrote that ‘La fureur des dictionnaires est devenue si grande parmi nous qu’on vient d’imprimer un Dictionnaire des dictionnaires’ [The feverish demand for dictionaries in our society has now grown so intense that a Dictionary of dictionaries has just been published]. This term’s European Humanities Research Centre seminar will focus on a particularly important phenomenon within the wider culture of dictionaries and encyclopedias: their role as vehicles for translation and dissemination between languages. Specialists from French, German, Italian, and Russian will come together to show us how European and Classical languages were translated, metamorphosed, stretched, or simply used as an excuse for polemic.
Chair: Caroline Warman
Speakers:
15 February 2013 in Room 2, Taylorian Institution, University of Oxford
Session 1: Pessoa the and Romantics (2:00-3:30pm)
Paulo de Medeiros: 'Intimations of Death: Dickinson and Pessoa'.
Mariana Gray de Castro: 'Pessoa and Keats'.
Richard Zenith: 'Shelley, Pessoa and the Spirit of Prometheus.'
Moderator: Claudia Pazos-Alonso
Coffee Break
Session 2: Pessoa and the Irish (4:00-5:30pm)
Bartholomew Ryan: 'Joyce and Pessoa's ruin of all space, shattered glass, myths and
multiplicity'.
Patrícia Silva McNeill: 'Pessoa and Yeats'.
Bernard O'Donoghue: 'Communicators and Frustrators: the Irish heritage of Yeats and
Pessoa'.
Moderator: Thomas F. Earle
Organisers: Mariana Gray de Castro and Claudia Pazos-Alonso
Attendance is free, but it would be helpful if you registered in advance by emailing Mariana at
mariana.decastro@gmail.com
...
On Thursday 27 February, a Bilingual reading and discussion will take place in the Taylor Institution, St Giles, Room 3, at 5pm. This will be followed by drinks. All welcome!