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Center for British Studies

Fall Events 2009

Tea and Larceny: Classic British Crime Films
Pacific Film Archive

September 2 - October 31, 2009

Stills: Night and the City, September 5; Brighton Rock, September 19;
The Long Haul, September 20

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 2
7:00  Obsession
Edward Dmytryk (U.K., 1949, 98 mins)
A very proper psychiatrist plots a “perfect crime” in this acidly
witty thriller, “a first-rate study in suspense.”—N.Y. Times

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 3
6:30  Footsteps in the Fog
Arthur Lubin (U.K., 1955, 90 mins)
New Print
Murderous aristocrat Stewart Granger’s crime is discovered by scheming
servant girl Jean Simmons, who wouldn’t mind becoming the new lady of
the manor. A Gaslight-like Edwardian noir enveloped in London fog.

8:20  I Met a Murderer
Roy Kellino (U.K., 1939, 78 mins)
James Mason stars as a murderer on the run in this early noir, a rare
example of independent filmmaking in 1930s Britain. “Graceful,
gallant, resourceful . . . better than most studio pictures.”—James Agee

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 4
8:30  It Always Rains on Sunday
Robert Hamer (U.K., 1947, 92 mins)
New Print
An escaped convict seeks refuge in London’s dreary East End in this
fatalistic Ealing Studios noir, from the director of Dead of Night and
Kind Hearts and Coronets. “A masterpiece . . . a brilliantly written
choral work.”—Bertrand Tavernier

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 5
6:30  It Always Rains on Sunday
Robert Hamer (U.K., 1947, 92 mins)
New Print
See September 4.

8:25  Night and the City
Jules Dassin (U.K., 1950, 95 mins)
Richard Widmark brilliantly plays a club tout and compulsive striver
in this underworld classic that “turns all of London into a giant
expressionist trap.”—Village Voice

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 6
7:00  Hell Drivers
Cy Endfield (U.K., 1957, 108 mins)
The trucking business is a microcosm of capitalist exploitation in
this full-throttle thriller featuring Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan,
and a young Sean Connery. “An unjustly neglected nail-biter.”—Time Out

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10
6:30  The Snorkel
Guy Green (U.K., 1958, 90 mins)
New Print
A debonair villain turns a piece of scuba-diving equipment into an
unusual instrument of murder in this clever chiller from the Hammer
studios.

8:20  Noose
Edmond T. Greville (U.K., 1948, 95 mins)
A brassy Yankee reporter and her ex-commando fiancé take on British
mobsters who are cornering the postwar black market. “Boldly stylized
direction gives this grippingly black yet bleakly funny thriller an
almost Wellesian edge.”—Time Out

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11
8:40  So Evil My Love
Lewis Allen (U.K., 1948, 112 mins)
Straitlaced widow Ann Todd falls for compelling con artist Ray Milland
in this period melodrama of larceny, blackmail, and murder.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12
6:30  The October Man
Roy Ward Baker (U.K., 1947, 110 mins)
Eric Ambler provided the sardonic script for this murder mystery–cum–
psychological melodrama. John Mills stars as an innocent man whose own
self-doubt makes him a suspect.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 18
6:30  She Played with Fire
Sidney Gilliat (U.K., 1957, 95 mins)
New Print
This rarely seen gem from the great Launder-Gilliat writing-directing
team brings a touch of British Gothic to a complicated mystery of
forgery, insurance fraud, and worse.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 19
8:30  Brighton Rock
John Boulting (U.K., 1947, 92 mins)
New Print
Richard Attenborough stars as a teenage psychopath leading a gang of
toughs in Britain’s seedy Brighton Rock resort. Written by Graham
Greene. “The best film to capture Greene’s seedy world of evil, sin,
and betrayal.”—The Observer

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 20
5:00  The Long Haul
Ken Hughes (U.K., 1957, 88 mins)
New Print
Racketeering is the principal cargo in this well-tuned tale starring
Victor Mature as a trucker in trouble.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 26
8:30  No Orchids for Miss Blandish
St. John L. Clowes (U.K., 1948, 102 mins)
An heiress falls for the leader of a crime syndicate in this Z-grade
gangster noir. “The most sickening exhibition of brutality,
perversion, sex, and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.”—
Monthly Film Bulletin

SATURDAY OCTOBER 31
8:45  The Krays
Peter Medak (U.K., 1990, 119 mins)
PFA Collection Print
Gary and Martin Kemp (of Spandau Ballet) play notoriously malevolent
twin criminals in this brutal neo-noir.

Co-sponsored by the Center for British Studies

The Pacific Film Archive Theater is located at 2575 Bancroft Way
(between Telegraph and Bowditch) in Berkeley. Advance tickets are
available by calling (510) 642-5249 or visiting
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/tickets

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Robert Burns: A colloquium
1759-2009

Join us for a one-day colloquium on the poetry of Robert Burns at the UC Berkeley Department of English -- part of a world-wide series of conferences, lectures, and other events marking the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth. Afternoon panels will feature leading scholars of Burns and eighteenth-century Scottish literature, including Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, Carol McGuirk, Steve Newman, and Janet Sorensen.  Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St. Andrews, will give the evening keynote lecture.  One of Scotland's leading poets and critics, Crawford is the author (most recently) of Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature (2008) and the widely acclaimed The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (2009).

Co-sponsored by the Center for British Studies, the Department of English, the Dean of Arts and Humanities, and the Doreen Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, and the Saint Andrew's Society of San Francisco. For information contact Ian Duncan <iduncan@berkeley.edu> or Janet Sorensen <jsorensen@berkeley.edu>.

September 11, 2009, Friday, 2pm-5:30pm, 300 Wheeler Hall
Reception to follow.

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Mellon Consortium Conference on
British History
The University of California, Berkeley
(For Conference Participants Only)

September 25-26, 2009

THE STATE IN BRITISH HISTORY

The state is a central organizing principle of British/English historiography, and the precocious development of the state is often seen as one of Britain’s/England’s most significant contributions to European modernity. However, historians of different periods and subjects within British history often locate the state in very different places, gauge its significance using very different criteria, and imagine its significance in very different terms. The goal of this conference is to facilitate discussion among scholars studying the state in British history, to think about our different methodologies and perspectives, and perhaps to produce a more coherent account of the British/English state over the last five hundred years.

Unlike traditional conferences, this conference will have no formal papers but rather will consist in a series of structured conversations. Its main events will be four “roundtable” sessions, each of which will feature a moderator and four prominent historians covering different periods and aspects of British history. The panelists will each have roughly ten minutes to describe their perspective on the subject, and then there will follow a long conversation, based around a series of questions that the conference participants will have received in advance. The four conversations will be organized around the following subjects:

1. Where was the State?
2. Violence and the State
3. Religion and the State
4. When was the State?

In addition, there will be several workshops for graduate students to think about how their own projects fit within the broader issues of the conference, as well as scheduled time for graduate students to receive advice from faculty about their work.

This is the first of three major conferences funded through a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a Mellon Consortium on British History, intended to support research at the University of California, Yale University, the University of Texas, and the University of Chicago.

N.B. Please submit papers in advance to ctrbs@berkeley.edu. They will be posted for conference participants. See our Conference page here.

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Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates since 1880

The conference will be organized around three principle sessions divided chronologically. Each session will consist of three speakers. Each speaker will present a paper on developments in one of three overlapping traditions of pluralist theory, namely, the liberal/constitutional, radical/socialist, and empirical traditions. All the speakers are encouraged to consider transnational exchanges between political theorists in the US and the UK. There will also be a closing session addressing the future prospects for pluralist thought.

Co-sponsored by the Political Science Dept., Institute of Governmental Studies

October 10, 2009, Saturday, 9:30am-5:30pm, Moses Hall 223

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99 Bottles of Beer
Global Brewing Traditions 2500 B.C. – Present

99 Bottles of Beer includes a moderated discussion on beer and brewing led by distinguished professors and renowned beer experts.  Topics include the history of beer and its rituals, the process of beer brewing, and the traditions of beer consumption.  Vendor workshops and a vendor fair with beer tasting will follow the discussion.  Ticket holders must be 21 years old.

The event accompanies the new exhibition on view in the museum gallery.  Curated by Dr. Ira Jacknis, the Museum’s Research Anthropologist, the exhibition presents 130 beer-related objects from many eras and broad geography, in a breadth of media.  This rich display reveals the striking unities and diversities of human cultures as they come together to celebrate the fruit of the grain.

Co-sponsored by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

October 10, 2009, 12pm-6pm, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

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Algernon Sidney’s Calvinist Republicanism and the End of the Long Sixteenth Century
Michael P. Winship, E. Merton Coulter Professor of History, University of Georgia

Algernon Sidney’s masterwork Discourses Concerning Government, was one of the most popular books on political theory in the ighteenth century and inspired luminaries of liberty as various as Montesquieu, Franklin, and Jefferson. It has long been assumed that Sidney, active in the Rump Parliament’s republic, was a proto-Enlightenment figure in his religion. He was, in fact, a Calvinist and his Calvinism was integral to his republicanism. While many historians argue that Calvinism and republicanism were incompatible, this paper places Sidney and the Discourses in the context of arguments about liberty and tyranny that radical puritans had been having with their opponents since the Elizabethan presbyterian Thomas Cartwright’s debate with John Whitgift.

Michael P. Winship is E. Merton Coulter Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He has written numerous books and articles on American and English puritanism. His most recent essay “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570-1606" appears in the current issue of the English Historical Review.

November 9, 2009, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

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The Price of a Life: Toward a History of the Valuation of Human Life, ca. 1600-ca.1800
Edward Gray, Prof. of History, Florida State University

This paper is a very early foray into a moral and legal history of the monetization of human life from roughly the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. What I hope to do with the paper is gain a little clarity about what exactly the pricing of a person, in this case a Œfree¹ person, meant to 17th and 18th century jurists and moral philosophers. To that end, the paper focuses on two things. The first, the definitional matter of just what Œprice¹ meant with respect to person. And the second, legal and moral debates associated with life insurance and ransom insurance. One of the questions I hope to address is, Why was life insurance outlawed in Europe but tolerated in England? That question is, I think, central to a question that animates the larger study, namely, What explains the correspondence between abolitionism and the humanitarian embrace of life insurance.

Edward Gray is professor of early American history at Florida StateUniversity and was, until January of 2009, editor of Common-place, the interactive journal of early American life. He is the author and editor of several books including, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in EarlyAmerica (1999), and The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (2007).

November 23, 2009, Monday, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

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Mind and World in the Winter's Tale
Richard Strier, Prof. of English, University of Chicago

December 3, 2009, Thursday, 5pm, Moses Hall 201

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Risk and the ‘Stock-jobbing Globe’: British Speculation in California and South Africa
Maura O’Connor, Prof. of History, University of Cincinnati

Making a profit in a hurry which speculation boasted of, whether digging for gold or investing in equities, was aided and abetted by innovation in communication and an expanding industrial infrastructure to service and facilitate the growth of finance capitalism in nineteenth century Britain from limited liability laws to the laying of railroad and telegraph lines. Not only was there a re-imagining of space and the geography of the city, the creation of the first modern financial center with the City of London, but a re-imagining of the geography of making money and of risk itself. Risk became increasingly diversified in the second half of the century and spread around the globe. With the altering of space and time, new attitudes and ideas arose with regard to risk and chance in general.  The speed at which money could be made and lost with finance capital accelerated in contrast to industry, for example, which witnessed a more gradual accumulation of wealth and presupposed, for so many, hard work and diligence.

While this paper is concerned with the geography of making money from California to South Africa and with what I have come to call the emotional economies of investment and speculation, it is most concerned with explaining how finance capitalism worked on the ground. To that end, it aims to explore the human relationships that were enacted upon in stock transactions, a demystifying of the arcane language and circumstances that surrounded political economy’s vocabulary, theories, and practices.  Its very abstractness, at the same time, made possible in so many ways the expansion of finance capitalism and a belief in its naturalness and inevitability. 

Maura O'Connor is Associate Professor of modern European history at the University of Cincinnati and the author of The Romance of Italy and the English Imagination (1998) and with Deborah Cohen, contributor and co-editor of Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (2004). This paper will also be presented on a panel titled "Boom and Bust" at the AHA in January and is part of her larger book project, "Risking the World: The London Stock exchange and the British Financial Empire, 1798-1910."

December 9, 2009, Wednesday, 5pm, Moses Hall 201

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PAST EVENTS

Spring Events 2009

Authorizing Dissent, Attempting Godly Rule, Dismantling Central State Power: The Political History of Early (1630-1650) New England Revisited
David Hall, Prof. of New England Church History, Harvard Divinity School

To situate the political culture of early New England in the context of English politics of the 1630s and 1640s is to expose the radicalism of the colonists; and to recover the practice of scribal publication among them is to expose the possibilities for political dissent and debate.

David D. Hall is Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School.  He has written widely on religion and culture in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, most notably Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989), and has also written widely in the field of book history, co-editing with Hugh Amory The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2000). His most recent book is Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (2008).

Co-sponsored by the History Dept.

February 23, 2009, Monday, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

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Filing the Raj: Political Technologies of the Imperial British State
Patrick Joyce, Visiting Professor of History, University of California Berkeley, Emeritus Professor of History University of Manchester, UK, and Visiting Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

The talk takes up the historical application of concepts and methods drawnfrom governmentality studies, science studies and the new cross-disciplinaryinterest in materiality, relating these to the analysis of the state. It is drawn from a forthcoming book, "The State of Things: Political Technologies of the Imperial British State". In the light of recent reinterpretations of the state it seeks to understand the state as a site of intersecting powers and agencies, human and nonhuman.  It is concerned with the formation of bureaucracy and the bureaucrat, and therefore bureaucratic power.  These are understood in terms of what bureaucracies and bureaucrats did, namely, and chiefly, paperwork. It therefore takes up the question of the relationship between centre and periphery in the imperial state in relation to systems of paperwork management, including the filing, classifying, and archiving of documents.

Patrick Joyce has published a large number of works in British cultural and social history, and has contributed to debates on the nature of history in the light of the cultural turn. His interests have moved from the history of work and of popular politics and culture, to the history of the city, the history of the state, and in new work the history of freedom.  For further details see his website: patrickjoyce.info

Co-sponsored by the History Dept. and the Center for South Asia Studies

March 3, 2009, Tuesday, 5pm, Moses Hall 223

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Early Modern / Post Modern Conference
March 6-7, 2009, 370 Dwinelle

Friday March 6, 10-noon, 2-4pm
Saturday March 7, 10-12, 2-4 pm

The conference is designed to bring together a group of scholars whose work on the medieval and early modern periods engages questions about the genealogy of modernity, periodization, secularism, theories of cognition and aesthetics.

Speakers include Bruce Holsinger (Virginia), Maura Nolan (Berkeley), Jane Newman (Irvine), Jonathan Sheehan (Berkeley), Nancy Levene (Indiana), Jonathan Kramnick (Rutgers), Victoria Kahn (Berkeley), Angela Capodivacca (Yale), David Bates (Berkeley)

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Ireland Between Britain and Europe in the Age of Reformation : Two Interpretations
March 17, 2009, Tuesday, 4pm- 5:30pm, 3335 Dwinelle

Reception to follow.

Speakers:
Steven G. Ellis, Prof. of History, NationalUniversity of Ireland, Galway;

Ute Lotz-Heumann, Professor in LateMedieval & Reformation History, University of Arizona.

Co-sponsored by the History Dept., the Institute for European Studies, and the Peder Sather Chair of History

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Lucianic Humour in Philosophy: Hobbes, His Critics and a Paradox of Contextualisation
Conal Condren, Emeritus Scientia Professor, University of New South Wales

Histories of philosophy are largely trajectories of doctrine and proposition leading to and judged by current standards of philosophical propriety; in them, the historical importance of the persona of the philosopher in early modern debate has been largely overlooked as it is not overtly important now. One consequence of trying to render histories of philosophy less anachronistic has been to uncover the significance of serio laudere satire in philosophy, embracing argumentative reduction of doctrines and ad hominem denigration of the philosophers associated with them.

This paper takes the case of Thomas Hobbes and the hostile reception of his work and suggests that there were intelligible philosophical grounds for Hobbes and his critics to have been arguing in ways that now seem philosophically improper. The paradoxical consequence is that better contextualization can make interpretation not less, but more problematic than is often thought. 

Conal Condren was educated at The London School of Economics. He is an Emeritus Scientia Professor at The University of New South Wales and an honorary Professor at The Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and The Social Sciences in Australia, a Member of Clare Hall and Churchill College, Cambridge and an associate scholar of The Erasmus Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Rotterdam. His most recent book is Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (2006). He is currently working on a volume of essays on Shakespeare’s use of the political arguments of his own day; a study of the philosophic persona in English satire, and a theoretical model of  language change and concept formation in politics.

Co-sponsored with the Political Science Dept.

April 7, Tuesday, 4pm, Moses 201

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Fall Events 2008

Regional Mellon Conference on British Studies
(For Conference Participants Only)

At Yale University

September 11-13, 2008

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Northern California Renaissance Conference

Wheeler Hall (Room 315, Maude Fife Room)

Co-sponsored with the English Dept.

September 28, Sunday

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The Early Modern Roots of the Postmodern Condition:
The Reformation, Modern Philosophy, and the State
Brad Gregory, Associate Professor, University of Notre DameAdequately to understand the heterogeneity of the Western world today requires that historians take a longue-durée perspective of interrelated ideological and institutional developments. The modern liberal state provides the political and legal protection that incubates contemporary hyperpluralism, the latter-day heir to the unanticipated outcomes of both the Reformation and modern philosophy.

Brad S. Gregory is the Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), where he joined the history faculty in 2003 after seven years on the history faculty at Stanford University. He specializes in the history of Christianity in Europe during the Reformation era. Before teaching at Stanford, he earned his Ph.D. in history at Princeton University and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows; he also has two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999) received six book awards. He is also the editor of The Forgotten Writings of the Mennonite Martyrs (Brill, 2002). In 2005, he was named the winner of the inaugural Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, a $50,000 award given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States.  

Co-sponsored by the European Union Center of Excellence

November 20, 2008, Thursday, 4:30pm, Moses Hall 223

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Spring Events 2008

World in a Tea Cup: Tracing the Journey of Tea
Erika Rappaport, Prof. Of History, UC Santa Barbara

Other speakers:
Eliot Jordan, Director of Tea, Peet’s Coffee and Tea
Winnie Yu, Tea Buyer and owner of Teance
Gregory Levine, UC Berkeley   (Japanese, Zen and Buddhist Art)

The Hearst Museum of Anthropology will host a special event exploring the trajectory of tea ― in its many forms― from ancient origins in Asia, through its spread to Britain, India and the rest of the world, to contemporary manufacture and its modern role in popular culture.

Experts will discuss the history and trends of production, preparation, consumption and retailing of tea and related goods. Attendees will then enjoy opportunities to sample tea and other products from select Bay Area purveyors.                

Location: The Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way at College, Berkeley, CA 94704

Admission:   $20.00 general admission; $18.00 for museum members, UCB faculty, staff, and students

For more information: http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/outreach/public_programs.html

Co-sponsored by the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology

March 1, 2008, Saturday, 1pm-5pm

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Canons of Children’s Literature
Key Note Speaker: Dr. Paula Fass (UC Berkeley)

The conference will explore the paradoxical position of children’s literature and its criticism in relation to the dominant paradigms of literary and cultural studies in Great Britain and the United States. The primary focus of the conference is twofold: first, to examine and question the place of children’s literature within the adult-oriented canon of texts currently taught and studied widely in academic settings; second, to interrogate how and why canons have been and are being constructed within the category of children’s literature.

Co-sponsored with Children’s Literature Working Group, Dept. of English and IES

March 15, 2008, Saturday

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"The State of the Literary: Form after Historicism" (an event in honor of Professor Anne Middleton)

Co-sponsored with the Dept. of English (UC Berkeley)

April 19, 2008, Saturday

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Liberated Africans As Human Legacy of Abolition: An international workshop to mark the bicentennial of British and American abolitions of the slave trade

For more details on the conference, including the program please go to:

http://africam.berkeley.edu/events/Liberated_Africans.html

University of California at Berkeley
Hotel Durant, 2600 Durant Ave., Berkeley, CA 94720

Co-sponsored with Department of African American Studies & The Center for Race and Gender (UC Berkeley)

May 1-3, 2008, Thursday-Saturday

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Center for British Studies
2006-07 Past Events

Irish Studies Lectures Online
The Western Institute of Irish Studies has kindly posted videos of two Irish Studies lectures given at Berkeley in Fall 2006 -- one on old Irish histories by Jane Ohlmeyer and the other on the contemporary Irish economy by Paul Sweeney (see below) . Go here to view the videos (Real Player is required and can be downloaded free).

Spring 2007

Neuropolitics: To Define True Madness
Nikolas Rose, Professor of Sociology and Director, BIOS Research Centre for the study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics and Political Science

What is mental disorder in a neurochemical age? What is it that calls for psychiatry? The title of this presentation is, of course, from Shakespeare: in Hamlet, published in 1602. Polonius, having told the King that his noble son is mad, continues: "Mad call I it; for to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad? But let that go." But it has proved difficult to "let that go". Debates over the proper scope and limits of psychiatry can be seen at the time of the inauguration of the discipline in the nineteenth century, and have continued ever since, having been most vociferous in the 1960s. But today they take a new form, in the context of an international public health discourse on the rising burden of mental ill health, alarming epidemiological data seeming to show that one in three Americans in the general population suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in any one year, and a reciprocal epidemic in the prescription of novel psychopharmaceuticals, many of those for conditions that would not previously have come within the remit of psychiatry. In this talk Professor Rose will consider some of the factors that have produced these phenomena and their implications for ideas of pathology, and for normality itself. He suggests some ways in which we might characterise our contemporary psychiatric system, and the role of biological and neurochemical psychiatry in governing conduct today.

Co-sponsored by: The Science, Technology, and Society Center and The Center for British Studies
 
February 28, 4 pm, 223 Moses Hall

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Stanford History Department Presents:

The Most Expensive Form of Illness:
Counter-Insurgency and the End of the British Empire
Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian, Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor, Harvard University

At Stanford University, open to the public

March 6, 4:15pm, Building 200, Room 205

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The Twenty-ninth Annual California Celtic Conference -- Berkeley campus
March 8-11, 2007

The conference is one of the three principal Celticconferences in the United States, attracting the attention and the participation of the most distinguished scholars in the field from North America and Europe.

For the conference program go to http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/celtic/

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Blair and Britain: Tough Times and Hard Labor

In 1997, Tony Blair became Prime Minister with a huge parliamentary majority and a promise of rejuvenating Britain. Since then, Blair has won three successive general elections and a nearly 10-year term as
prime minister. What was the New Labor vision? Has Blair succeeded in transforming Britain? Is New Labor now facing tough times? Examine these questions and consider the immediate future for Blair and Britain

March 13, 4:30-6 pm, Faculty Club, Berkeley campus

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21st Century Enlightenment Conference
March 16-17, 2007

This conference will work to lay the ground for a novel engagement with the Enlightenment from the perspective of our own newly troubling, but also promising, century. Bringing together scholars from a number of different disciplines, the conference will address contemporary developments that have forced us to confront Enlightenment anew. Political and legal problems, new scientific paradigms, theoretical questions, all have opened up fruitful and often surprising approaches to eighteenth-century intellectual life and the world it helped to create.

For the program go here.

For the list of participants go here.

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''Radical re-dating' of St. Patrick
Daniel Melia, Prof. Of Rhetoric and Celtic Studies,
UC Berkeley

Recent research on writings by St. Patrick, undertaken by Professor of Rhetoric and Celtic Studies Daniel Melia, supports a radical re-dating of Patrick's life, and thus of the Christianization of Ireland. Melia's research shows that Patrick's knowledge of Latin technical idiom and formal rhetoric was more sophisticated than previously believed.

Melia will outline his arguments in "The Real St. Patrick," a lecture which is free and open to the public. For information, contact Melia at melia@berkeley.edu or (510) 540-1941.

March 16, 5:30 to 6:30 pm, 242 Dwinelle

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Buckingham Does the Globe: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and the Origins of the Personal Rule
Peter Lake, Prof. of History, Princeton University

The paper deals with a special performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII put on at the behest of the Duke of Buckingham. It uses that occasion and the particular political context that produced it to address the relationship between court and ‘popular’ politics and uses a contextualized reading of the play to discuss the origins of the personal rule of Charles I. 

Peter Lake was born in Essex and lives in New Jersey. He teaches early modern English history at Princeton, having spent twelve years before that at the University of London. He works on post-reformation English religion and politics. This year he is at the Huntington Library working on a book about Shakespeare’s history plays and the confessional, dynastic and court politics of the 1590s.

April 11, 4pm, Moses Hall 119

Co-sponsored by the English Dept, UC Berkeley

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Irish Speakers Series Mini-Conference

April 24, 2pm, Moses Hall 201

How the Irish Won the West
Myles Dungan, Irish Fulbright Scholar, UC Berkeley

Dungan will be looking at the Irish experience in the West in contrast to the East - how the Irish have been represented  by Hollywood and the career of Thomas Fitzpatrick - Indian agent at the beginning of the end of the Indian Frontier.

Myles Dungan is an Irish TV/Radio journalist and author. He has presented daily news/current affairs and arts programmes as well as working widely in TV. He is the author of eight books, including two works on the Irish experience in the Great War and a study of the theft, in 1907, of the Irish Crown jewels. He is also the author of two plays.

Managing the Transition in the Northern Ireland Peace Process
Paul Arthur, Irish Fulbright Scholar, Stanford

Paul Arthur will examine the problems encountered at the end of a long and intractable conflict in relation to victims and survivors. The lecture will be concerned less with institutional reform than with the conceptual difficulties encountered in times of transition. Besides dealing with policing, security, decommissioning and the democratic agenda it will focus on reparations and reconciliation.

Paul Arthur is professor of politics and course director of the graduate program in peace and conflict studies at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He has been a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development.

 

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Graduate Seminar in Modern British History
Columbia University
Prof. Susan Pedersen, and visiting faculty

May 9-June 29, 2007

With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, Prof. Susan Pedersen will be offering a seminar for graduate students in the process of completing dissertations in the field of Modern British, or British imperial, history. As graduate programs downsize, many graduate students find that they rarely have the opportunity for sustained intellectual interaction with other students at the same stage and in the same field. At the same time, successive waves of theoretical innovation and field redefinition have combined with shifting student interests to place new (and sometimes greater) demands on beginning faculty. This seminar thus aims to bring together graduate students who are in the last year or two of their doctoral programs to discuss both their own research and the problems they face defining, mastering and teaching British history today.

The seminar will meet twice weekly for eight weeks. There will be a set of introductory sessions discussing recent work in British political, imperial, cultural and social history. Half of the remaining sessions will be devoted to presentations of the students’ current research, and half will be on teaching. Deborah Cohen (Brown), Seth Koven (Rutgers) and Robert Travers (Cornell) will come in to discuss their own strategies for teaching. All students will circulate and present one piece of research (whether in the form of an article, a dissertation chapter, or a job talk) and will develop one course syllabus.

Students participating in the seminar will receive stipends of $3800 for this 8-week period. Students coming from outside the New York area are expected to find their own accommodation, but additional stipendiary support is available to help meet those housing costs, or to help pay for extensions on university or other leases for students already in the New York area.

Graduate students interested in taking part in the seminar should send a dissertation prospectus and a c.v., and arrange for their advisor to send a short nomination letter explaining the student’s suitability for the seminar, by January 15, 2006 to Prof. Susan Pedersen (sp2216@columbia.edu). Email is preferred, but hard copies can be sent to: Prof. Susan Pedersen, Dept. of History, Columbia University, 1180 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10025. Please direct any queries to Susan Pedersen at the email address above. Some preference will be given to students at New York area institutions. The seminar is intended primarily for students who have substantially completed their research and are in the process of writing their dissertations.

 

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Fall 2006

Scottish Romanticism in World Literatures:
A Conference
Co-sponsored with the Dept. of English, UCB, and in collaboration with Arts, Histories and Cultures, The University of Manchester