Welcome to the May 2024 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.

RECENT NEWS

Professor Juliet Simpson's paper at Oxford International Sensory Subjectivities Conference

Prof. Juliet Simpson will be speaking in the international line-up, forthcoming at the Oxford 2024 Early Modern Sensory Subjectivities Conference on 6-7 June.

Attracting over 300 submissions, Juliet’s research paper is included in the final line-up in this ground-breaking event, exploring the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and/or olfactory experiences across the globe and cultures between the 1400s-1900s. Juliet’s paper is closely linked to the 2024 conference’s pivotal concern with sensory experiences as instances or reflections of identity, power and artistic alterity. Focusing on a key interest of her Gothic Modern: Munch to Kollwitz international exhibition project (opens Ateneum: Helsinki, 4 October 2024), Juliet spotlights hidden connections between sensory modalities of ‘touch’, practices of art, belief, and entangled identities. She sheds light on why and how sensory emphasis on a haptic register of bodily trauma in the artwork, becomes a pivotal vehicle for a hidden sensorium of the body and new modalities of embodied ‘subjective’ experience.

Dr. Elizabeth Benjamin takes on Co-Editorial Role at Modern & Contemporary France

Following her previous 3-year stint as Reviews Editor for the journal Modern & Contemporary France, Elizabeth has been elected Co-Editor, alongside Editor in Chief Oliver Davis, Warwick University. M&CF is one of the top two journals in the field of French Studies.

Bound copies of the Berrows Journal and Worcester News which form part of the Worcester Civic Society collection of local media archives

Preserving Local Media - Who Cares?

Local Media Archives - who cares? is one-day symposium on the future of local media archives organised by the Local and Community Media network of MeCCSA (the Media, Communication and Cultural Association) and CAMC.

The one-day conference held at Lanchester Library, Coventry University will draw attention to the issues surrounding the preservation of archives relating to the local media. It will include panel presentations from a range of participants focussing on collecting, preserving and using local media archives. Organised by Dr Rachel Matthews, chair of the LCM Network of MeCCSA, it will include contributions from Dr Jose Dias and Dr Ben Kyneswood on their creative responses to media archives.

If you are a member of CAMC and would like to be involved or attend contact Dr Rachel Matthews.

Third Meeting of the Gendered Innovation Living Labs (GILL) Consortium

The third consortium meeting and the fourth meeting of the General Assembly of the GILL project took place this month in Czech Republic. 17 partners from various EU countries gathered in the city of Prague from the 13th - 15th of May 2024 to progress a shared mission for Gender Responsive Smart Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

GILL is an ongoing partnership with European Network of Living Labs (ENOLL) led by Dr. Andree Woodcock and involving efforts across CAMC and Coventry University. The three-day consortium meeting was marked by fruitful collaborations, insightful presentations, and a collective commitment to advancing the goals of the GILL project. Exciting presentations and discussions were led by CAMC staff and leads from the five Coventry University based Action Oriented Experimentations (AOEs) piloting innovative strategies to engage and grow diverse women's participation in innovation and entrepreneurship.

Heading into the second year of the three-year EU-funded project, partners are ready to translate the momentum generated during these sessions into tangible actions.

Gothic Modern Goes Global

Prof. Juliet Simpson is Guest Curating and PI for the international touring exhibition, Gothic Modern: From Edvard Munch to Käthe Kollwitz.

This major global partnership with four world-leading museums and three venues, Ateneum-Finnish National Gallery, Oslo National Museum, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin and the Albertina Vienna, opens Helsinki on 4th October 2024. The exhibition and accompanying book, co-authored Simpson-von Bonsdorff, et al, is a ground-breaking story of modern art between 1870s-1920s pivoting on the centrality of the Gothic as a site of new creativity beyond borders of nation, time and culture. As the pace hots up in the countdown to the opening, Prof Simpson and her international partners have secured stunning loans from global collections. They include iconic modern and rarely seen medieval artworks from the Van Gogh Museum, Tate Britain, Musée d’Orsay, Städel, Frankfurt, Gemäldegalerie and Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin and Munch Museum, Oslo. Together with this outstanding showcase, the Albertina, Vienna has thrown open their print treasures; highlights in Gothic Modern (featuring in all three venues), will include Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse cycle and Holbein (the Younger’s) great ‘Dance of Death’ which has captivated artists and publics alike by its visceral and ever-timely energy.

A major Gothic Modern press campaign begins this month (May) with global coverage in the UK press (main broadsheets) and internationally with Global Art News, the Art Newspaper and the New York Review. This thrilling partnership is distilled in Prof Simpson’s et al.’s major book, Gothic Modern, published Hirmer-Chicago UP, August 2024.

CAMC Fellow Joins Brepols Editorial Board

CAMC Research Fellow Dr. Victoria Leonard has joined the Editorial Board for the newly established book series Gendered Violence: A Cultural History of the Gendering of Violence from Late Antiquity through the Late Nineteenth Century, published by Brepols and edited by Prof. Martha Rampton.

The book series maintains a wide geographical, chronological, and methodological approach and welcomes submissions for monographs and edited volumes on topics from Late Antiquity to 1900 in Eastern and Western Europe, including works on European colonization.

BBC Radio 4 - Arts & Ideas, "New Thinking: Exploring the Local" podcast available

Dr Rachel Matthews discusses her research into the history of the local newspaper and the future of local news provision on Radio 4 in a new podcast.

"New Thinking: Exploring the Local" is produced by the BBC and features academics Dr Anna Muggeridge from the University of Worcester, Dr Sarah Ward-Clavier from the University of the West of England and is hosted by Dr Joan Passey from the University of Bristol.

Listen here

PGR news

Congratulations to PhD student Jen Elvy for passing her viva with no corrections!

Jen's use of theories of grief, early modern women's manuscripts and creative practice in her thesis, "Early Modern Women's Manuscripts and Contemporary Practice as Re-vision" is truly innovative.

‘Criing quiet’ are the first two words of Elizabeth Isham’s autobiographical manuscript IL3365, completed in 1648, now housed in the Northamptonshire Records Office. This project explores the restorative potential of autobiographical manuscript writing and creativity. Elizabeth’s texts document her bereavement after the loss of her mother. Jen mirrors Elizabeth’s textual memorial to commemorate her own mother. Her practice constructs a theatre of medicine using craft, text, objects, film and music as a tribute to her mother and Elizabeth Isham. This collaboration transcends centuries of time to shape a contemporary restorative writing practice. Jen's ‘re-visioning’ of Elizabeth’s manuscript is a recycled literary inheritance, an inosculation, devised to sustain an ecology of commemoration.^{^[1]}

[1] Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/375215.

Asemic Writing with Adeola Eze

Postgraduate researcher, Adeola Eze, presented work at The 2024 Contemporary Artists Books Conference (CABC)

CABC focuses on “Artists’ Books as Expanded Literacy.” The CABC planning committee asks: How can the artists’ book expand upon ideas of information and visual literacy, conceptions of language, data visualization, methods of presenting research, and beyond?

In her presentation, "Disrupting Conventions: Asemic Writing and its Connections to Ancient Textual Forms," Adeola revealed a deeper historical background for asemic writing, tracing its roots back to antiquity. Building on the first critical study on asemic writing by Peter Schwenger, Asemic: The Art of Writing (2019), which links asemic writing mostly to the experimental calligraphy of eighth-century China and twentieth-century avant-garde movements and its roots to influential figures like Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly, Adeola underlined the ancient foundation of asemic writing and argued that asemic writing's illegibility challenges conventional notions of meaning, introducing ambiguity inherent in its polysemic nature as it inhabits a liminal space between legibility and illegibility, significance and insignificance.

JOIN our dynamic group of scholars and practitioners.

Applications now open for a variety of funded PhD studentships. Click here to scroll through exciting CAMC research projects with research opportunities.