A one-day symposium at the University of Warwick, in association with the Humanities Research Centre
19th May 2012
Keynote by Professor Seth Koven (Rutgers University)
Roundtable led by Professor Gareth Stedman Jones (Queen Mary, University of London)
Proposals Due 9 Januray 2012
In 1844 Friedrich Engels described the slums of Manchester as ‘unplanned wildernesses’; stating that no ‘human being would willingly inhabit such dens’ (The Condition of the Working Class in England). This emphasis on the bewildering experience of the slum – the ‘maze of lanes, blind alleys and back passages’ – as well as the slum’s contaminating presence in the Victorian city, is part of a wider dialogue concerning working-class neighbourhoods throughout the nineteenth century that incorporated the writings of such figures as Charles Dickens and the sociologist Charles Booth. These narratives of disgust and horror but also excitement and attraction maintained a significant effect on the depiction and treatment of the slum well into the twentieth century.
‘Unplanned Wildernesses’: Narrating the British Slum 1844 – 1951 invites papers from a range of disciplines to address the changing and multiple narrative of the slum from the period between the German publication of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) and the election of Winston Churchill’s Conservative government in 1951 when thereafter Britain’s remaining slums were cleared for high rise council flats. Questions to be considered will include, what do representations of the slum reveal about constructions of class, gender and race? How did public health policy transform our understanding of this space and the lives of its inhabitants? How do we understand the relationship between visitors and residents of the slum?
Papers that address an aspect of Britain’s slum life and culture between 1844 and 1951 are welcome. Contributions may address, but are not condine to:
- The slum and its visitors: nineteenth-century ‘slummers’, social workers, journalists and investigators
- The slum and public health
- The slum clearances
- Family life in the slum
- Women and the slum
- The literary slum: novels, theatre, poetry
- The slum and crime
- The slum and the Other
- Mapping the slum
- Working class slum narratives
Postgraduate and early career researchers are especially invited to submit proposals for 15-20 minute papers to Gabrielle Mearns g.mearns@warwick.ac.uk no later than 9th January 2012. Abstracts should be approximately 250 words.
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Saturday 1 October 2011, 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Wellcome Trust Lecture Hall
One Culture: the Royal Society Festival of Literature and the Arts
Organised by the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature
Gillian Beer and Eva Hoffman
Chaired by John D. Barrow
‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ the Mad Hatter says to Alice, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.’
In this event, three writers well-acquainted with time discuss how it (or he) both controls and captivates us.
Dame Gillian Beer FBA, King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and a leading figure at the interface between science and literature, will shortly publish a study of time in the Alice books. Writer and academic Eva Hoffman’s highly-praised work Time (2009) has been described as ‘a radical exploration of our relationship with life’s most ineffable element’. Professor John D. Barrow FRS is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, an expert on space and time, and the author of The Book of Universes (2011) and the play Infinities.
This event costs £4 per person.
For more information and to book tickets visit:
http://royalsociety.org/exhibitions/one-culture/barrow-beer-hoffman/
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