Interdisciplinary Conferences
OVID 2000: AN OXFORD CELEBRATION
An exhibition, an afternoon of talks and an 'Ovidian trail' to celebrate the life and works of Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, Sulmo, 20th March, 43 BC - Tomis, AD 17) 2000 years from his death.
PRISMATIC TRANSLATION CONFERENCE (1-3 October 2015) St Anne's College, Oxford.
Translation is prismatic when it produces multiple variants. This can happen in the process of a single translational act, or when a text is translated into different languages, or when it is translated into the same language several times. Our conference will explore all these aspects of the prism of translation in order to assess their origins, their effects and their potential. Our conference will bring together scholars, theorists, translators, writers and artists to explore these questions. The aim will be to generate productive – indeed, prismatic – discussion.
With keynote presentations from Emily Apter (NYU), Philip Terry (Essex), John Cayley (Brown) and Rocío Baños Piñero (UCL).
Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) in collaboration with the European Humanities Research Centre (EHRC)
Translating European Languages: History, Ideology and Censorship (2013)
This workshop, organized by Martin McLaughlin and Javier Muñoz-Basols, is part of the EHRC's three-year project on European Languages in Translation, financed by the John Fell OUP research fund and currently entering its second year. This event will be followed by two more workshops, in the autumn of 2014 and 2015, which will explore other aspects of European translation. Details of these will be announced on this website. For the full programme of the 2013 event, click here.
The Politics of Opera: Centre and Periphery - Conceptualizing Music, Voice and Nation (2009)
This is the fourth in a series of one-day interdisciplinary colloquia on "the politics of opera", convened by Dr Suzanne Aspden and Dr Rosamund Bartlett. The series was launched in 2000, under the aegis of the late Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature (1992-2002), and founding Director of the EHRC. Each colloquium brings together musicologists, historians and modern linguists to discuss questions pertaining to the patronage, production, performance, reception, and ideology of opera. For the full programme click here. For details of the 2008 colloquium The French Revolution and its Consequences see below.
National Identity in Eurasia (2009)
Two conferences, part of a large-scale international project (‘National Identity in Russia from 1961: Traditions and Deterritorialisation’) sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explore the institutions, ideologies, and practices that have shaped identity in the countries that once formed part of the Soviet Union and in the states and cultures that border the former superstate. The first conference (Identities & Traditions, New College, 22-24 March) traces the history of ‘Eurasia’ as a concept, and analyses the role of political interest groups, religious beliefs, museums, education, and everyday experience (whether under direct state control or governed by what are believed to be autonomous ‘traditions’ in evolving concepts of ethnic, national, and transnational culture). The second conference (Migrancy & Diaspora, Wolfson College, 10-12 July) explores late-Soviet and post-Soviet migration trends in the former Soviet Union, tackling migration policies, national, migrant and diasporic identity, problems of memory, gender, labour, education, integration, social mobility and networking. Both conference gather together anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and specialists in cultural studies from the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia, Europe and the USA. They present a uniquely wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary forum for informed discussion of issues that are of enormous topical significance.
Remembering the Soviet Union: Memory, Traditions, and Identity, 1917-1991 (2008)
This one-day conference, organised as part of the project ‘National Identity in Russia from 1961: Traditions and Deterritorialisation’, and to be held at the European University, 3 Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg, explores several themes in the history of memory and traditions in the Soviet era (including both the early Soviet and the late Soviet periods). These include: the role of memory in establishing revolutionary legitimacy; the struggle with the ‘backward’ past; and, on the other hand, the celebration of pre-revolutionary ‘Great Russian’ traditions; the heritage of pre-Soviet cultural institutions in the Soviet period and the institutionalisation of memory; cultural practices connected with the preservation and dissemination of tradition; and recollections of the past in the post-Soviet period.
The Politics of Opera: The French Revolution and its Consequences (2008)
This is the third in a series of one-day interdisciplinary colloquia on "the politics of opera" convened by Dr Rosamund Bartlett. The series was launched in 2000, under the aegis of the late Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature (1992-2002), and founding Director of the EHRC. Each colloquium brings together musicologists, historians and modern linguists to discuss questions pertaining to the patronage, production, performance, reception, and ideology of opera. For the full programme click here.
Remembering 1956: De-Stalinization and Suez after Fifty Years (2006)
The conference, convened by Professor Jane Caplan and Professor Catriona Kelly, addressed two key historical events with global resonance that took place in 1956: Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Suez crisis. Both these events dramatically reshaped the world in the decades following, and their effects can still be felt in international relations today. The conference brings together political and cultural historians working on a range of European and non-European cultures. The conference concludes with a session at which eyewitnesses of the events of 1956 speak about it, and where the status of eyewitness testimony as a historical source is discussed. For the conference website click here.
Generations in Europe (2005)
The conference, convened by Professor Catriona Kelly and Dr Stephen Lovell, brought together leading historians, anthropologists and sociologists dedicated to the study of generations in modern Europe. The sessions were organised around seven themes – conceptualising generational history; generations and historical experience; generations and politics; narrating generational experience; generations and memory; generations and social units; generations, work and leisure. Each session paired together two scholars working on different areas of Europe, but addressing similar topics. The aim was to bring different intellectual communities into contact and interaction. Without erasing distinctions between different research traditions, the conference brought them together in order to confront all the theoretical and methodological difficulties thrown up by the subject. The discussion considered general issues, as well as particular cases, establishing cross-national patterns for relationships between generations at a given historical moment, and in the attempt to grasp how such patterns have changed over time, both in particular societies, and in ‘Europe’ more broadly. For the conference website click here.
The Future of the Humanities (2004)
The aim of the conference, organised by Martin McLaughlin (Director of the European Humanities Research Centre) and Catriona Kelly (Co-Director) was to assess the changes that have taken place in the Humanities in the last thirty-five years and to consider what the future of the humanities might be in the 21st century. The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), founded in Cambridge in 1918, organised the first such conference in 1968 as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the proceedings being published in J. C Laidlaw (ed.), The Future of the Modern Humanities (1969). This follow-up conference, organised in co-operation with the MHRA, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) examined the enormous changes that have taken place in the Humanities since 1968, outlining the implications for the future. Major authorities on the Humanities were invited to speak, and a wide range of topics was covered in the five different sessions over two days. Financial support came from the Europaeum, the Modern Languages Faculty of Oxford University, and from the MHRA. For a full report click here.
The Yiddish Presence in European Literature (2003)
For the programme for this event click here.