October 2023

Welcome to the October 2023 edition of CAMC Curates, the newsletter for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. CAMC Curates provides monthly updates from our postgraduate and staff researchers about recent news, events and publications. 

Juliet Simpson will be representing CAMC at the 3rd edition of the International Conference of Women in the Arts and Society on the topic of 'Amazones to Guerrilla Girls – Warring Women in Art, Architecture, Literature and Culture' on live (from Palazzo Taverna, Rome), 18-20 October.

Carolina Rito is curator of a series of conversations titled 'Critical Curating: Research, Practices and Infrastructures' on the 10th of November from 10am to 4pm, at the Herbert Gallery and Museum in Coventry. 

José Dias will be researcher in residence at the Institute for Jazz Research, University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, from 19 to 26 November. Dias will be delivering a research round table on dialogic ethnography, workshops on practice research in jazz and working with the colleagues in Graz in devising new collaborative research projects.

Carolina Rito participated in the last training event of Spacex RISE project convened by Dr Francesco Chiaravalloti and Prof. Christa-Maria LERM-HAYES from University of Amsterdam, titled 'Values and (E)valuations of or as Cultural Practices? Entering a time of pragmatic experimentation' on Thursday 21 – Friday 22 September 2023. 

Rito was also guest speaker at the Arts Summer School organised by George Enescu National University of the Arts, Iasi, endorsed by ICMA – Institute of Multidisciplinary Research in Art, UNAGE and Vector Studio, Romania, September 13-14. She presented her work on 'The Anatomy of Crises in Curating: Politics of Display and Neoliberalism' exploring the current challenges affecting curating and institutions of display (museums, galleries, etc.), and situating these practices at the intersection of two ongoing crises: colonial and neoliberal. 

Juliet Simpson is part of the editorial team for the special Guest Edited issue on ‘Evaluating Cities of Culture’, latest issue of Journal of Arts and the Market, 13: 3  (2023), eds Oanca, Bianchini, Simpson, Wright and Tommaso. This is the first in a series of 2 guest-edited special issues, showcasing key new research findings linked to the Coventry-Warwick City of Culture Evaluation project (2020-2021) and related AHRC-funded project. The first issue below includes an article by ICC PGR, Charlie Ingram developed from his research project on ‘Theatre Arts in a UK City of Culture’.  

Ben Dew has recently published Polish Culture in Britain: Literature and History, 1772 to the present with Palgrave, a collection of essays exploring the historical, cultural and literary legacies of Polish Britain. Ben’s contribution includes a co-written introduction and a chapter looking at the work of émigré Polish historical writers and campaigners in the nineteenth century.  

Ben Dew has also launched Polish Portsmouth, a new dual-language booklet about the history of Britain’s first Polish community, at two public events in Portsmouth in July. At the first, students from Portsmouth’s Polish School read from the booklet to an audience including Penny Mordant MP and Mateusz Stąsiek, the Consul General of Poland. As part of the second, students performed a play and curated an art exhibition based on the events described in Polish Portsmouth.     

José Dias was guest external examiner for a PhD in Ethnomusicology on music, television, memory and representation, drawing from the case study of the Eurovision Song Contest 1964 – 2020, by candidate Sofia Lopes. The viva took place on 7 July, at the Institute for Ethnomusicology, Music and Dance, Nova University Lisbon. 

Alice Leonard has held two international workshops on ‘Error and the History of Imperfect Reading’. The first, on Thursday 21st September, was held at St Peter’s College, Oxford. The second was online on Tuesday 26th September to enable a strong international participation, including Prof Ros Smith (Australia National University), Dr Claire Bourne (Pennsylvania State University, US) and Dr Michael Edson (Wyoming, US) amongst others. These workshops were supported with £1200 from the Royal Historical Society. Alice is part of an editorial team putting together a special issue on ‘Error’ to be published in the journal, Huntington Library Quarterly. 

CAMC Curates has a new team: José Dias and Melissa Tanti. The new coordinators are now working to introduce a few changes to the newsletter in order to make it even more inclusive and demonstrative of the work conducted by all members of CAMC. This is part of new communications strategy for the Centre, in collaboration with the Engagement and Communications Officer for Research and Innovation, Scarlet Lewitt.

CAMC welcomes Ben Dew and Melissa Tanti.

Melissa Tanti is currently co-editing the Edinburgh Companion to Women's Experimental Literature Since 1900 (Edinburgh UP 2025). Her scholarship focuses on multilingual poetics and considers the potential for multilingual experimental texts to set up innovative terms of engagement that are queer, feminist, transnational, and decolonizing. Melissa regularly collaborates with researchers across colleges, disciplines, and those in public and non-profit sectors on social responsibility projects that take experimental arts-based approaches to community engaged research. She recently co-produced a podcast series called Storied Lives with a local anti-poverty group, The Guelph-Wellington Taskforce for Poverty Elimination. A current collaboration with the Woman Abuse Council of Toronto (WomanACT) co-created digital narratives with survivors of intimate partner violence. These stories will be screened in Toronto for key decision-makers in the violence against women and housing and homelessness sectors during 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women 2023.  ​​​​​

Ben Dew is an intellectual and cultural historian whose work is primarily concerned with enlightenment ideas of memory and history, and their various legacies. He is currently working on a project exploring the cultural heritage of Britain’s Polish communities and a scholarly edition of Anglia Judaica (1738), the first book-length history of Jews and in Judaism in England. Ben’s previous monograph, Commerce, Finance and Statecraft: Histories of England, 1600-1780 (Manchester University Press, 2018), explored the relationship between history writing and economic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is also the co-editor (with Fiona Price) of Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 (Palgrave, 2014) and (with Maggie Bowers) of Polish Culture in Britain: Literature and History, 1772 to the present.   

Madeleine Bracey was awarded the first prize in the Doctoral College’s Tweet Your Thesis competition. The task was for each competitor to describe their thesis in three tweets and three photos, the aim being to engage a non-specialist audience. You can read Madeleine's tweets here.

Earlier this year, Bracey was also made a Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society. This is a relatively new level of membership for the RHS and Madeleine is the first PGR from Coventry University to be elected to the Society.