Spring Events 2010

Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit
March 5 - March 9, 2010

N or NW: A charming and surprising compilation of shorts from Britain’s postal  film unit in the 1930s, featuring works by such talents as Alberto  Cavalcanti, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren. http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/gpofilms

FRIDAY MARCH 5

7:00 Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit (U.K., 1936–39, 80 mins)Restored PrintsInnovative filmmaking might not be the first thing you think of when  you hear the words “post office,” but Britain’s General Post  Office Film Unit, founded in 1933, became internationally renowned as  a center for creative, exciting films. Author J. B. Priestley  recalled: “If you wanted to see what camera and sound could really  do, you had to see some little film sponsored by the Post Office.”  This program of eight new prints from the BFI National Archive  showcases the GPO Film Unit’s sheer range, from quintessential  documentary (Night Mail) to avant-garde animation (Trade Tattoo) and  even musical comedy (The Fairy of the Phone). Made by such varied  talents as John Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Len Lye, Norman McLaren,  and Lotte Reiniger, the films bring alive a revolution in mass  communications as epoch-changing then as the Internet is now.—Adapted from BFI program notes• N or NW (Len Lye, 1937, 10 mins). Love on the Wing (Norman McLaren,  1938, 4 mins). The Fairy of the Phone (William Coldstream, 1936, 10  mins). The Horsey Mail (Patrick Jackson, 1938, 9 mins). Trade Tattoo  (Len Lye, 1937, 5 mins, Color). A Midsummer Day’s Work (Alberto  Cavalcanti, 1939, 13 mins). The Tocher (Lotte Reiniger, 1938, 5 mins).  Night Mail (Harry Watt, Basil Wright, 1936, 24 mins)

TUESDAY MARCH 9

7:30  Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit(U.K., 1936–39, 80 mins) See above.

Co-sponsored with the Pacific Film Archive Theater  (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

US-UK Relations and the Upcoming U.K. Elections

Dominick Chilcott, Deputy U.K. Ambassador to the U.S.

Dominick Chilcott took up post as the Deputy Head of Mission at the
British Embassy in Washington in January 2008.

Dominick is a career diplomatic service officer. He joined the Foreign and Commonweath Office in 1982 and worked on South African issues, before being posted as a press and political officer to Ankara in 1985, having studied Turkish. In 1988, he returned to the FCO for more work on African affairs (Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). In 1990, he moved within the FCO to the then European Community Department (Internal), where he stayed for three years, specialising in Gibraltar. In 1993, he was posted as head of the political section to Lisbon. In 1996, he returned to London to be Private Secretary for European, Transatlantic and Middle Eastern affairs, working successively for two Foreign Secretaries, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and the late Mr Robin Cook.

In 1998, Dominick moved to the UK's Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels, where he served as the Counsellor for External Affairs, focusing on the expansion of the EU, its trade and development policies and the Union's relations with third countries, including the US. After Brussels, in Autumn 2002, he returned to the FCO to become the head of the Iraq Policy Unit, which coordinated the UK's work on the post-conflict reconstruction of Iraq, a job that involved close coordination with the US administration.

In June 2003, Dominick became the Director for bilateral relations with Europe with responsibility for the FCO's resources in over 40 countries. In that capacity, he worked, in particular, in support of the UN Secretary General's efforts to find a solution to the Cyprus problem and on many Gibraltar-related issues, including negotiating a new and more liberal constitution for the territory.

In 2006, Dominick was appointed High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, taking up his post in Colombo in April. He left Colombo in January 2008 for Washington.

Dominick was born in 1959. After school at St Joseph's College, Ipswich, he served in the Royal Navy for a year. He studied philosophy and theology at Greyfriars Hall, Oxford University. He is married and has four children.

Co-sponsored by the British Consulate-General, San Francisco and the Dept. of Political Science, UCB.

March 18, 2010, Thursday, 12:00 - 1:30pm, Barrows Hall 202

The Murder of James I

Prof. Thomas Cogswell, Professor in the Department of History, University of California, Riverside

April 8, 2010, Thursday, at 4pm, Moses 201

Love in the Time of Empire: The Story of Queen Victoria and Munshi Abdul Karim

Shrabani Basu, Author and Journalist

The tall, handsome Abdul Karim was just twenty-four years old when he arrived in England from Agra to wait at tables during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. An assistant clerk at Agra Central Jail, he suddenly found himself a personal attendant to the Empress of India herself. Within a year, he was established as a powerful figure in the court, becoming the queen’s teacher or Munshi, and instructing her in Urdu and Indian affairs. Devastated by the death of John Brown, her Scottish ghillie, the queen had at last found his replacement. But her intense and controversial relationship with the Munshi led to a near revolt in the royal household. Victoria & Abdul examines how a young Indian Muslim came to play a central role at the heart of the empire, and his influence over the queen at a time when independence movements in the sub-continent were growing in force. Yet at its heart, it is a tender love story between an ordinary Indian and his elderly queen, a relationship that survived the best attempts to destroy it.

The reading will include a slide show of images of Victoria and Abdul and will be followed by a book sale and signing.

Shrabani Basu was born in Calcutta and grew up in Dhaka, Kathmandu and Delhi. She moved to London in 1987, since when she has been the correspondent of the Calcutta-based newspapers Ananda Bazar Patrika and The Telegraph. She is the author of Curry: the Story of the Nation’s Favourite Dish, and the critically acclaimed biography Spy Princess: the Life of Noor Inayat Khan.

Co-sponsored with the Center for South Asia Studies

April 12, Monday, 5-7 pm, Stephens Hall 10, CSAS Conference Room

The Collier Code: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age

The media revolution of the end of the 17th-century can be described as “Print 2.0”, invoking obvious parallels to the present. The era of durable books did not end, but was suddenly overshadowed by a new economy of information, circulating much faster, farther and more broadly than ever before. But at what cost? This talk will tell theunknown tale of one extraordinary turn-of-the-eighteenth-century artist who took on this question with unusual insight. For this purpose he developed a whole secret language – replete with minutely coded messages, witty games and private jokes – in a striking sub-genre of still life painting. Combining the powers of observation of a Sherlock Holmes, the methodical pedantry of a Phileas Fogg, the preoccupation with the passing of time of a Nostradamus, and a rather unusual sense of humor, he embedded in his paintings perceptive observations about contemporary revolutions in print/media culture, the social life of information, and the fate of monarchical politics -- as well as of art itself -- in a modern information age. Indeed he hid these messages so ingeniously that his work remained unnoticed for three hundred years, and thus few have ever heard of Edward Collier.

Prof. Dror Wahrman is the Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University, and Director, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

DATE CHANGE: May 6, 2010, Thursday, at 4pm, Moses 223

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

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.

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 2009 Mellon Consortium Conference exploring the State in British History is now online as both video and audio podcasts. Scholars of the period from UC Berkeley, U. of Texas, Austin; U. of Sheffield, U. of Washington, Vanderbilt University, U. of Oxford, U. of Dundee, Yale, Stanford, Dalhousie University, U. of Connecticut, and U. of Chicago discuss this broad topic from both historical and theoretical points of view.

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.

See our Conference page here.

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

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

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

Mind, Nature, Heterodoxy, and Iconoclasm in “The Winter's Tale”
Richard Strier, Prof. of English, University of Chicago

The thesis of the paper is that in “The Winter's Tale” Shakespeare is systematically exploring two topics, one an epistemological fact, the other a claim about this fact.  The epistemological fact is that which makes skepticism possible:  that the realm of belief is not determined by the realm of reality.  The claim about this fact is that it, this fact, is the source, the sole source, oftragedy in human affairs.  I will try to show that the distinctive features of the play -- especially its language, its genre, its religious heterodoxy, and its astonishing ending -- flow from its, as I said, systematic exploration of these topics.

Richard Strier is Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the College at the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching English and Humanities since the '70's. 

Books:  Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (U. of Chicago Press, 1983; pap. 1986); and Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (U. of California Press, 1995 ["The New Historicism" series]); pap. 1997.

Co-edited collections:  "The Historical Renaissance:  New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture"  (U. of Chicago Press, 1988) [with Heather Dubrow]; "The Theatrical City:  London's Culture, Theatre and Literature, 1576-1649"  (Cambridge UP, 1995; paper 2002) [with David Bevington and David L. Smith]; "Religion, Politics, and Literature in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688"  (Cambridge UP, 1996) [with Donna Hamilton]; and "Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England" (Cambridge UP, 1999) [with Derek Hirst].

Articles on Donne, Shakespeare, Luther, Montaigne & Descartes, formalism, etc.

He is currently completing a book entitled "The Unrepentant Renaissance:  from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton."

December 3, 2009, Thursday, 4pm, Moses Hall 201

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

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

PAST EVENTS

Spring Events 2009

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

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)

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. 

Co-sponsored with the Political Science Dept.

Fall Events 2008

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

At Yale University

September 11-13, 2008

Northern California Renaissance Conference

Wheeler Hall (Room 315, Maude Fife Room)

Co-sponsored with the English Dept.

September 28, Sunday

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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/

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

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.

''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

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

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.

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.

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

'In the late 1880s, a brothel club movement had become popular in the Straits Settlements colony in which colonial surgeons appointed by the British government entered into private arrangements with the brothel keepers to provide regular medical supervision of their employees. The system had begun at a time when the legal regulation of prostitution in the British Empire was under attack, and turned into a considerable scandal early in the 20th century when the clubs were found to have persisted in the wake of the wholesale abolition of regulation under mainly feminist pressure. The upset over the system was about a great deal more than the apparent flouting of the will of the British Imperial Parliament, although it certainly was also about that. This paper takes as its starting point this upset in the Malay Peninsula as a means of discussing readings of Asian sexualities, and particularly of the sex trade, at a time of imperial expansion and deep racial differentiation. Its intent is to read sexuality through the critical and central lens of colonialism, and seeking to critique universalist understandings of the history of sexuality.

Professor Levine studies race and sexuality in the British Empire, with a particular focus on sexually transmissible diseases and prostitution. She has published extensively on Victorian feminism and the development of professional history in nineteenth-century Britain.

Abstract: As part of a larger work that explores the formative role of reading in the emergence of Victorian homosexual identities, this paper begins with a consideration of the relationship between hermeneutics and early forms of gay world-making in the work of Walter Pater.  Against the phenomenological backdrop of Paterian impressionability, it examines the role that readerly identification played in what Christopher Nealon has recently called “feeling historical”—an interpretive strategy taken up by Pater and other gay Victorian writers and readers to reanimate historical forms of (mainly Greek) same-sex desire.  Taking Pater’s dialogic correspondence with his (putatively) gay readers as a cue, this essay elaborates on the affective and identificatory transactions that take place within the penumbra of what critics have only inadequately theorized as the gay “code of reading.”  This paper complicates such a proposed semiotic by taking a closer look at readerly dynamics that cut across the idea of codedness itself—namely, the hermeneutic distance between reader and text that is "traversed" in the “moment” of readerly identification.  As a formal strategy of world making, gay reading would seem to duplicate Pater’s own efforts to theorize historical forms of feeling in the coded language of homosexual experience.

For a copy of the paper, download here.

Ryan McDermott is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English.  His dissertation is entitled The Gay Hermeneutic: Victorian Genealogies of Homosexuality and the Practice of Reading.

November 30, 4 pm, 2005, 201 Moses Hall

November 16, 4 PM 201 Moses Hall
Professor Michael Mascuch, Chair, Department of Rhetoric, U.C. Berkeley
" The Godly Child’s “Power and Evidence” in the Word: Orality and Literacy in the Ministry of Sarah Wight"

Discussion will be based on a pre-circulated paper. To view pdf file, click here.

Abstract: This paper looks at the functions and effects of orality and literacy in the representation of the extraordinary experience of the fifteen year-old female “child” Sara Wight who, in 1647, after at least four years of profound anxiety about her spiritual condition as the “chief of sinners,” collapsed blind, deaf, and motionless, spending three months in bed. Despite her physical incapacities Wight remained conscious and discursive throughout her convalescence; she spoke avidly and at length about her spiritual condition with a multitude of bedside visitors, both high- and low-born. Her conversations were written down verbatim and published by the then-Baptist minister Henry Jessey, in a book entitled, The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by the Spirit of Grace to an Empty Nothing Creature, Mistress Sara Wight, which appeared in seven editions between 1647 and 1658. In the experience of Sarah Wight we encounter a powerful and historiographically undervalued alternative to the Reformation’s own preoccupation with writing, and literacy in general, as the cornerstone of true religion.

November 1, 4 PM, 201 Moses Hall
Workshop on "The New Governance: Interpreting Situated Agency"

Professor Mark Bevir (Pol Sci, UCB), on
"Interpretation and Its Others" and
Professor R.A.W. Rhodes on "Everyday Life in a Government Ministry"

Abstract: This talk seeks to answer two questions. What do we know about the work of the elected politicians (or ministers) and the officials (permanent secretaries) who head British government departments? How do we know what we know about ministers and permanent secretaries? To do so, it describes a research project on life at the top of British government departments and discusses the issues raised by trying to do research and to write a political anthropology of the daily life of ministers and civil servants.

November 3, 4 PM, 201 Moses Hall
Professor R.A. W. Rhodes, "Blair, Prime Ministerial Power and Iraq"

Rod Rhodes is Professor of Political Science and Head of Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is an authority on policy networks, governance and British government. He is Australia’s foremost expert on the comparative study of public policy and administration. His most recent books include: Understanding Governance (1997); and Interpreting British Governance (2003). He is editor of Public Administration: an international quarterly. His research interests include: comparing Westminster systems and a political anthropology of government departments.

Abstract:This talk focuses on the debate about the ‘Blair Presidency. I ask the deceptively simple question, ‘'how do we understand the relationship between the prime minister, ministers and the rest of Westminster and Whitehall?’ The prime minister wins, loses and draws as one might expect given the volatile nature of high politics. Prime ministerial practice is equally varied. And the best way to understand this volatility and variety is through decentered studies of the beliefs and practices of politicians and civil servants.

Irish Poetry Reading by Greg Delanty and Liam Ó Muirthile
October 14, 11-12:30; Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler

April 27, 2005, 4PM, 201 Moses Hall

'Worth Seeing, Worth Living In, Only Not for Long': Women, Education, and Cross-Channel Exchanges in the First Half of the 19th Century
Christina de Bellaigue , PhD, is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and an Affiliated Scholar, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University.

Abstract:

Constitutional Justice in Northern Ireland
Shane O'Neill, PhD, Professor of Political Theory, Queen's University, Belfast, currently the Fulbright Scholar and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, University of Pennsylvania.

May 5, 2005,  5-6 PM 109 Moses Hall

General Election Night Coverage
The Institute of Governmental Studies Center on Politics and the Center for British Studies at UC Berkeley will be hosting a British General Election Night Event on May 5. We will have live t.v. coverage (including election data, news analysis, and t.v. political commercials used in the election cycle) as well as commentary, provided by Simon Hix (LSE) and Mark Bevir (UCB). Light refreshments will be provided. The event  is Open to the Public.