The Cultural Production and Social Justice seminars will bring together colleagues and postgraduate students working on different themes, media, languages, time periods, and theoretical frameworks relating to questions of cultural production and social justice. Kindly supported by the Faculty Research Workshop scheme, the seminars aims to provide a space for intellectual exchange and for exploring potential collaborations for research, teaching, and funding applications.
Lead Convenor & Contact: Dr Melina Mandelbaum (mmm55@cam.ac.uk)
Co-convenors: Prof. Sarah Colvin, Dr Charlotte Woodford, Dr Tara Talwar Windsor, Alrik Daldrup
Supported by the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
2024-2025
Easter 2025
16 May, 1-2pm, Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
Natasha Kennedy (Brighton): Towards a Heterolingual Poetics – Representations and Recognitions of Linguistic Identities
28 May, 3-4pm, online, joint event with German Graduate Research Seminar
Shoshana Schwebel (University of British Columbia): A Gentle Approach to Studying Trauma in the Work of Emmy Hennings
Lent 2025
28 February, 1-2pm, Selwyn College
Jiayao Jiang (Cambridge, Italian): Rome as a Shared Legacy: The Monuments Men and the Transnational Efforts for Heritage Preservation
7 March, 1-2pm, Selwyn College
Dr Kirstin Gwyer (Oxford): Superposition and Strange Loops: Black Literature and Quantum Physics
Michaelmas 2024
6 December, 1-2pm, in Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
Ruth Murphy (Cambridge, Italian): Reflections on literature and politics in Hannah Arendt's thought
2 December – 4.30-6pm (followed by drinks) in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine's College
Joint event with German Section SRC: Radical Diversity and Cultural Production in Contemporary Germany
Book launch for:
- Jeannette Oholi, Afropäische Ästhetiken. Plurale Schwarze Identitätsentwürfe in literarischen Texten des 21. Jahrhunderts (transcript, August 2024)
- Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz & Tara Talwar Windsor (eds.) Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany: Radical Diversity and Literary Interventions (Camden House, October 2024)
- Joseph Twist (ed.), Cultural Responses to the Far Right in Contemporary Germany. Kunstszene gegen rechte Szene (Brill, June 2024)
- Maha El Hissy (ed.), »Die ganze Geschichte fasse ich an der Hand« Literatur und Kunst zur Einwanderung ins Nachkriegsdeutschland (Verbrecher Verlag, June 2025)
Previous years
Easter 2024
Friday 3 May, 1-2pm, Seminar Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
Dr Anna Richards (Birkbeck): Tutelary phantoms in Marie Espérance von Schwartz’s Gemma, oder Tugend und Laster (1877) and the late nineteenth-century anti-vivisection debate
Lent 2024
Friday 9 February, 1-2pm, Seminar Room 3, Alison Richards Building
Prof. Mark Devenney (Brighton): ‘Fiktionsbescheinigung: Thinking the Violent Fictions of Citizenship with Erpenbeck and Shibli’
Thursday 22 February, 1-2pm, location TBC
Weibing Ni (Cambridge): ‘Reimagining Intimacies between Afro-/Creole and Sino-Caribbeans: Marronnage in Raphaël Confiant, Patricia Powell, and Victor Chang
