Skip to main content

Successful Projects and Partnerships

Successful Projects and Partnerships

HARI has hosted a wide range of collaborative projects and events in central London locations and on Royal Holloway’s campus at Egham. This section offers an introduction to some of the HARI-funded projects and research topics of previous years.

Working Group on Citizenship and Migration after Decolonisation

Dr Antara Datta

In the aftermath of the Partition of 1947 the mass migration of people across the borders of South Asia resulted in a reconsideration of the link between territoriality and citizenship. The existing literature on migration, mobility and citizenship in this period focusses largely on the events of Partition and the migration of Hindus and Muslims between India and Pakistan. This workshop would like to move away from Partition based histories, ethnographies and analyses of this period to consider other mobilities and migrations in the aftermath of decolonisation, and to uncover the evolution of citizenship in South Asia that goes beyond this narrow lens. To that end we have put together a Working Group of seven scholars based in the UK, USA, Singapore and India, trained in the fields of History, International Relations, Politics, Geography and Anthropology. We will be hosting a termly reading group, a regular writing session, two mentoring sessions, a conference and a final workshop which will culminate in a peer reviewed special issue of a journal. Dr Sarah Ansari in the History Department has kindly agreed to mentor this project and it will operate under the aegis of the Centre for Global South Asia based in the History Department.

 

Therese Henningsen

Strangers Within is an interdisciplinary anthology and series of events on the themes of encounter, hospitality and autobiography in artists’ films. Accepted for publication by independent publishing house Prototype, the anthology comprises 14 original contributions from artist filmmakers, writers, and academics. To support the publication, we are organizing a series of screenings and events from 18th-20th June 2022, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and Royal Holloway University. Strangers Within will engage a diverse audience of visual artists and film, literature and geography students at Royal Holloway and beyond, as well as a diverse and inclusive public.

In a society with increasing divisions and distance, Strangers Within explores how encounters with strangers — across the assumed boundaries and binaries of our identities — in the form of artists’ moving image may provide vital reflections on the recognition of ourselves in the Other. Unsettling binaries such as stranger/friend and self/other, the project responds to current efforts to welcome fluidity and diversity of identities.

The project allows for a nuanced exploration of the theme, making an original contribution to the distinctive territory that borders literature and artists’ film practices.

Dr Erica Rowan and Professor Simon Blockley

In antiquity, the Lacus Cutiliensis (Lago di Paterno) in the Reiti basin was considered a sacred lake and the geographical centre of Italy. Located in the Velino valley, the region has a long history of human settlement from the Neolithic onwards. Connected to ancient Rome by the Via Salaria, in the late 1st century BC a monumental villa (the Villa of Titus) was constructed on a terrace overlooking the lake. Despite the region’s proximity to Rome, and the lake’s importance to Roman society and religion, neither the valley nor the lake has never been subject to any sort of environmental analysis. Since 2019, Saint Mary’s University and McMaster University (Canada), have been excavating the villa. In May 2022, a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between Royal Holloway, Saint Mary’s and McMaster universities aims to introduce an extensive suite of environmental archaeological analyses, including archaeobotany, sediment coring and pollen analysis to the villa and the Lago di Paterno.

This project aims:

to test the potential of the archaeobotanical record and the lacustrine sediment records close to the Villa Sant’Angelo in order to determine:
To establish the quality of the recovered material and the scope for future projects connected to the lake and the valley
From the samples we hope to determine:(i) the influence of climate instability during the Homeric solar minima, around 800BC; (ii) the impact of the Late Antique LIA, (iii) the evidence for climate stability during the Roman period; and (iv) changing human impact on the landscape throughout this period.

Dr Rebecca Grose

20th May 2022, Egham Campus

Discussion about gender in the contemporary gaming industry and about the representation of historical gender in video games are often treated separately- the one as a matter for female gamers and members of the gaming industry, the other as a matter for academic historians of ancient and medieval societies.  

Our full-day exploratory event invites participants at all career stages and backgrounds to join experts Katherine Lewis, Jenny Cromwell and Rob Houghton, and members of the wider gaming community, in discussing the relationship between these issues, and how they shape our perceptions of gender in the past and present. We approach these games as both simulation and reception, and will encourage attendees to move from addressing the ‘accuracy’ of games, to acknowledging their role as a platform to approach modern questions surrounding the role of gender and gender representation in both historical and contemporary societies. 

This is a History department event in cooperation with Royal Holloway’s Humanities and Arts Research Institute, The Institute for Classical Studies, The Bedford Centre for the History of Women & Gender, and the ERC CONNEC project.  

Organisers: Dr. Markus Mindrebø & Dr. Becca Grose, Department of History 

Professor Stehen Rose

 

This project aims to create an arts and humanities cluster that contributes to the Transformative Digital Technologies catalyst. We will run three workshops to develop the theme of Digital Authenticity, as preparation for larger grant-scoping events at a multidisciplinary level to be funded by R&I or the Digital Technologies catalyst.


Notions of authenticity are diverse and contested. The term is central to constructions of modern selfhood and individuality. Within the creative arts ‘authenticity’ is invoked by creators and performers seeking to communicate identity, sincerity and personal style. In the heritage sector and in historically informed performance, ‘authenticity’ carries connotations of historical fidelity.


Our project explores how notions of authenticity are being transformed by digital technologies, such as immersive technologies used to recreate multisensory historical experiences, digital mediation of musical performances, and AI algorithms for searching and curating archives. We will explore the ethical concerns that arise in these digital transformations, for instance from algorithmic bias in programming and data-mining tools, or how user-centred digital design may lead to the presentation of sanitised or distorted versions of history. We will also explore the creative and critical potential that may occur through these digital appropriations and translations. Overall we hope to develop a nuanced understanding of how notions of truth and authenticity are being redefined in disciplines ranging from the arts and humanities to STEM subjects such as Computer Science.

Dr Carlotta Paltrinieri

This project aims to create a new Research Group that would connect staff and students across Schools, focused on Digital Humanities (DH). The underpinning understanding of DH would be broad in order to encourage the widest and most diverse participation and engagement possible. DH is a field that is growing exponentially, as the increasing number of DH Centres and MA Programs across then UK attests. The development of a strong DH profile would also better position RH to be more competitive in bidding for the growing number of DH funding opportunities.

The initial core group would be scholars from the School of Humanities, which would then be expanded to the School of Performing and Digital Arts, and the School of Engineering, Physical and Mathematical Sciences. UG and PG students would also play a fundamental part in the development of the Research Group, and would actively participate in workshops and conferences.

The DH Research Group would meet regularly in person (if possible) and would keep in touch through a clear and structured web presence: a School webpage; a dedicated Teams channel (potentially including a forum space); and social media profiles. This would be a low-cost infrastructure that would be enriched and maintained by both the Research Group Coordinator and an appointed Research Assistant (preferably a PhD student from the School of Humanities).

The overall aim of the DH Research Group would be to foster cross-School collaboration on highly interdisciplinary projects, and to provide training sessions (workshops) to both staff and students.

Dr Will Montgomery

This event forms a key part of the strategic development of a multidisciplinary collaborative project, Walking in Air, which began in January 2021. It will lead to the creation of high-quality research outputs and their dissemination. The three partners involved in the event are Royal Holloway, the University of the Creative Arts, and the centre de livres d’artiste (CDLA) in Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, France.

The Walking in Air is a practice-based project that aims to regenerate the encounter between poetry and music through walking and the text score.

Each of the axes of our project – site-walking, score generation and realisation – is underpinned by a sustained reflection on air: as element, as weather, as the vehicle of sound, as breath. Building on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold (2010), we use theoretical, literary and musical methods to investigate walking as a mobile, embodied and immersive encounter in the world and the ‘groundless ground’ (Irigaray, 1999) around us.

The scores that emerge from the project function as a particularly dynamic form of documentation of individual and collective activities. Each immersive experience is translated into a form of notation that can be re-enacted in-situ as well as made available for re-interpretation elsewhere by other artists, poets and performers. In generating these scores we are building on the existing work by both lead researchers on the relationship between minimal text scores and literary texts. Our participants – poets, composers, artists – share our interest in the relationship between text and landscape, and the reconsideration of the element of air against the backdrop of our current crisis.

The proposed in-person event at the CDLA in May 2022 was initially scheduled to take place in September 2021. Instead, because of the pandemic, we ran a virtual event: ‘Walking in Air de chez soi’. Participants walked separately, generating various kinds of text, audio and visual material. The results were shared in a closing symposium, and will be disseminated in early 2021 on the CDLA website. The response from participants was very positive and the same individuals will take part in our May 2022 event:

Stefan Thut (composer, CH); Carol Watts (poet, UK); Ryoko Akama (composer, UK); Leni Dipple (artist, FR); Marianne Schuppe (artist/ singer; DE); Sandra Schimag (artist, DE); Antoine Beuger (composer, DE), Astrid Verspieren (landscape artist, Fr).

Heidegger and Classical Thought: The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides

Weekly reading group (7th Oct 2021-May 2022) 

Every Thursday in Room 0-03, 11 Bedford Square, London at 4-6pm.
The meeting will also be accessible online for international participants.
The Humanities & Arts Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London is organising a weekly reading group to study Martin Heidegger’s lecture course, delivered in 1932 (five years after the publication of Being and Time), and published in English translation as The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides. The reading group will take place over the Autumn and Spring terms of 2021/22.  

Heidegger’s thought is often divided into ‘early Heidegger’ and ‘later Heidegger’. The transitional phase between these two periods that takes place in the 1930s is questionably defined as a Kehre (‘turn’ or ‘reversal’) in his thinking. Heidegger himself conceived of this Kehre as an Ergänzung (‘fulfilment’) of the schema he announced (but did not complete) in the pages of Being and Time.  The reading group will examine some little-understood aspects of the underpinnings of Being and Time, especially Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides, the sources of Greek philosophy, and Heidegger's radical redescriptions of history and historicality to show how the Kehre unfolds in Heidegger’s thought. This will illustrate, too, the extent to which Heidegger’s work was, from the outset, driven by a reading of Aristotle and Plato that relied on examining them in the light of these earlier philosophers.  This reading group will be of interest not only to readers of Heidegger, but also classicists interested in Plato, Aristotle, and the Presocratics, and Heidegger’s understanding of truth in its relation with being.

11 Bedford Square: https://intranet.royalholloway.ac.uk/staff/campus-life/bedford-square-and-senate-house/bedford-square-and-senate-house.aspx

Online details: by request to Aaron.Turner@rhul.ac.uk

Supporting Caroline Harris (RHUL)

The AWW-STRUCK virtual day seminar on 21 May 2021 focused on Cute Studies in the Arts and Humanities, aiming to develop interdisciplinary and intercollegiate discussions and establish the collaborating institutions (Royal Holloway and the University of Birmingham) as a hub for this growing field. The seminar hosted three panels and a film screening, with papers from international professors, ECRs and PGR students based in the UK, Japan, Nigeria, Sweden, Canada and the USA, including four from Royal Holloway. 

The event was co-organised by Caroline Harris (RHUL) and Dr Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham), with a linked online exhibition curated by RHUL graduate Astra Papachristodoulou. The day was introduced by Professor Redell Olsen (Poetics Research Centre, RHUL) and Dr Megan Cavell (Animal Studies Reading Group, University of Birmingham) and began with papers from Professor Joshua Paul Dale, co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and Professor Lesley Millar, who introduced her exhibition ‘Kawaii: Curating the Japanese Culture of Cute’. A recording of the second panel is available on the AWW-STRUCK website.

The online exhibition features work by 20 visual poets and includes pieces by three Royal Holloway PGRs. The exhibition is available to view on Poem Atlas, while these poetic pieces, alongside critical and creative texts by the seminar contributors, are collected in the AWW-STRUCK book.    

The event was enthusiastically received, with highly positive feedback on its breadth and importance for attendees’ research. One commented: ‘I loved hearing from both academics and poets/artists. The cross-conversation was very stimulating.’ Another said: ‘‘The atmosphere was really brilliant; participants were genuinely excited to be there, engage, and get into conversation, and the speakers were so passionate about each other’s work as well as their own…’ 

For more information see the AWW-STRUCT website:

https://awwstruckseminar.wordpress.com/

Organisers: Ruth Cruickshank (LLC), Judith Hawley (English), Andrew Jotischky (History), Stella Moss (History), Erica Rowan (Classics)

Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th May 2021 on MS Teams

This HARI-funded online symposium explored constructs of the inedible, indigestible and unpalatable across historical periods and contemporary cultures, across the School of Humanities and across College. It explored the value judgements, power relations and cultural and economic imperatives that fuel perceptions of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable, raising questions of sustainability, integration, conflict and competition.

By addressing the objectives of the College’s Sustainable and Thriving Communities catalyst, the symposium acted both as a scoping exercise and as a showcase for current and prospective research, bringing together, celebrating and cross-fertilising intersecting research interests across the Royal Holloway community. The Keynote address was made by Professor Klaus Dodds (Geography), College Lead on the Sustainability and Thriving Communities catalyst.

supporting The Institute for Modern Languages Research in London

The Mediated Memories of Responsibility seminar series brought together scholars working on the cultural representation of the violent past of the twentieth century across a variety of media and cultures. The seminars examined the contribution of cultural products to exposing the crimes of perpetrators and disseminating a sense of responsibility for the past in relation to events such as colonialism, wars, and dictatorships. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series explored the construction of the idea of responsibility for past wrongdoings across textual and visual media while addressing ethical questions stemming from the study of past atrocities. Bringing together scholars working across the disciplines, the event aimed to foster a cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches in Modern Languages, History, and Memory Studies.

Programme of the series:

Session 1: 18 November 2020 3.00 pm

Max Silverman (University of Leeds): Impure Memory

Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku): Non-Subsumptive Memory and Jenny Erpenbeck’s «Gehen, ging, gegangen»

Donald Bloxham (University of Edinburgh): Beyond Neutrality: Historianship and Moral Judgement

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 2: 20 January 2021, 3.00 pm

Claire Gorrara (University of Cardiff): Family Legacies: Taking intergenerational responsibility for the crimes and losses of the Second World War in the graphic novel

Emiliano Perra (University of Winchester): End of Empire (Channel 4, 1985) and public memory of decolonisation in Britain

Stephanie Bird (UCL): ‘A tacit agreement’: Responsibility and perpetration in the work of Imre Kertész

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 3: 10 March 2021, 3.00 pm

Uilleam Blacker (UCL): ‘The colonisers decided everything’: Responsibility, victimhood and the Holocaust in Ukrainian memory culture

Federica Mazzara (University of Westminster): Mediating memory of migration: The role of art and activism

Damien Short (School of Advance Study UoL): Culture, genocide and (in)justice in Australia

Click here to watch the recording!

Session 4: 19 May 2021, 3.00 pm

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (University of Warwick): Developing a Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War: Public History and Memory

Diana Popa (Tallin University): Spectacular provocations: Spectatorship and Responsibility in Radu Jude’s Historical Films

Charles Burdett (IMLR) and Gianmarco Mancosu (University of Cagliari): Ghosts of Empire: Transnational legacies of Italy’s colonial past

Click here to watch the recording!

supporting The Centre for the GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway

The Centre for the GeoHumanities was delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham) to give the 5th Denis Cosgrove Lecture.

Geography and Vision are key words in the works of Denis Cosgrove, together the title of his Inaugural Lecture at Royal Holloway in 1996 and that of a career framing collection of essays published in 2008.  This lecture explored meetings of material and imaginative worlds in the works of painter and poet William Blake (1757-1827), and their implications for landscape as a field of vision. It addressed Blake’s representation of London and its environs in the early nineteenth century as it was transformed into a major imperial city, as well as images of cottages, cornfields and cathedrals.  Visionary Geography located Blake’s work in relation to wider currents of book and image making in his own time, including topography and cartography, and in terms of its long standing influence, for envisioning English landscape and its possible worlds.          

The lecture was supported by the RHUL Department of Geography, The Humanities and Arts Research Institute and the Leverhulme Trust. 

Supporting Agnieszka Studzinska & Edward Brookes in the Departments of English and Geography 

In an exploration of urban politics and city spaces, ‘In the Absence of Visible Walls’ discussed urban regeneration through the lens of ‘the wall’. The wall is visceral and fundamental element of architecture, a 3D representation of the line. It demarcates, it is a boundary, it is architecture making a mark, a point of transition, a division. The wall creates space, it creates community, it is a device of control and power. We therefore position the wall as an architectural device that can be used to explore how we engage in notions of memory, loss, homes, demolition and boundaries. The project aimed to bring together the historical narratives of erasure, destruction and gentrification of ‘Robin Hood Gardens’, a housing estate in East London and the space of ‘Manufaktura’ and the boundaries of Litzmannstadt Ghetto in the city of Lodz in Poland (a ghetto that was created by the Germans during the Second World War in the Old Town and Baluty districts of Lodz) through the notion of ‘the wall’. It fused a dialogue between cultural geography and creative writing, text, film and image in an attempt to highlight the stories of sites, areas/spaces that have undergone and/or are currently undergoing change.

Supporting Victoria Mapplebeck in the Department of Media Arts

The Waiting Room is a VR Journey which tells the story of a breast cancer diagnosis (from the perspective of patient and film-maker) from treatment to recovery. 

In 2017, Victoria Mapplebeck was diagnosed with breast cancer. As part of her research project, she gained access to her tumour samples. Looking though the microscope at her own cancer cells inspired her to create a film and VR project which would challenge the language of illness and the cultural myths that surround this disease.

Using 360 video, real time audio and CGI, the audience experienced the emotions of a cancer diagnosis from the outside in. 360 sequences capture waiting rooms, operating theatres and chemo bays. The Waiting Room explored illness and mortality from a patient’s POV, putting under the microscope what we can and what we can’t control when our bodies fail us.

Victoria Mapplebeck is a Professor in Digital Arts. Her research explores how multi-platform documentary has evolved since the late 1990s, from online interactive narratives to the immersive experiences offered by non fiction VR. Over recent years,  Victoria has begun to specialise in smartphone production and making short form online video with impact. 

Supporting Media Arts

18 June 2019, Senate House, London

Organiser: Prof Olga Goriunova

A Day with Rosi Braidotti brought together Royal Holloway researchers, both established and junior, who engage with Braidotti's work, followed by response by Braidotti herself. 

Rosi Braidotti emerged in the early 1980s as one of the strongest voices in feminism, philosophy, cultural politics, epistemology and ethics. Her book Nomadic Subjects established the project of nomadism that reformulated the notions of identity and subjectivity and engaged with transformative politics. Feminist nomadism critiqued the unitary subject, Euro-centrism, and acted to reactivate the dynamics between empowerment and entrapment through engaging with different levels of power and desire. The philosophical project of nomadism, further developed in Metamorphoses and Transpositions to engage with cultural politics and ethics connected to further work in eco-feminism and science and technology studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Her cartography of the human condition in the times of advanced capitalism evolved into her contribution to the development of the posthumanities, where The Posthuman continued to unfold the transversal and relational vision of the subject, while affirming an empirical project of transformative ethics based on such ontological relationality. Posthuman ethical subjects suggest a transformation for the human sciences - humanities today. Offering a political - and an institutional - programme, the new humanities emphasise the potential of the posthuman. Braidotti’s work has reactivated disciplines, arguing for a new form of knowledge and ethics and has had lasting influence on generations of researchers in numerous fields of study. 

Supporting The Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway

26th-27th April 2019

This project drew together colleagues across disciplines within the Centre for Victorian Studies (CVS) to examine how we research radicalism and reform in the long nineteenth century (1776-1914). Activities focused particularly on how digital technologies can help researchers excavate and analyse radical and reformist texts, networks and activities, presenting their findings to academic and non-academic audiences. Central to these activities has been a project to digitize the correspondence of Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a founder of Bedford College. Reid is a central but neglected figure in Victorian reform networks in Britain and transnationally. The College holds between 500 and 1000 letters, mostly to Reid from correspondents in Britain, Europe and the US that illuminate the complex connections within Victorian reform culture. 

Supporting the departments of Geography, and Drama, Theatre & Dance

Organisers: Dr David Overend and Professor Danielle Schreve.

This project (2017/18) was a cross-disciplinary encounter with Britain’s ‘wild geographies’. Its focus was a creative exploration of time-dependent elements of habitat change in the context of rewilding initiatives. By engaging various publics in an enhanced scientific understanding of environmental change in urban and rural environments, a series of events prompted participants towards performative interventions in the British landscape. This collaboration brought artistic and scientific research together to reshape the imaginaries of conservation. It considered the efficacy of Performing Arts in enhancing public engagement with Quaternary Science, and applied specialist scientific knowledge to the development of site-based performance practice. The project’s proposal was that an enhanced understanding of Quaternary history (the last 2.6 million years), along with a creative sensibility to possible futures in wildlife conservation, can have a significant impact on the way that present publics engage with concepts of wildness and wilderness.

Supporting Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Organisers: Prof Giuliana Pieri, Prof Eric Robertson

For as long as art has existed, so too has the question of where and how it is experienced.

Art institutions, from the major national collections to regional museums, and university galleries, play an important role in reflecting, and in shaping, cultural identity. The practice and the reception of art are constantly evolving, and so the role of curating has diversified to engage with the changing nature and growing diversity of artistic practices.

This seminar series, which ran for four years (2014-2018), explored the relationship between curating, display, and space, and examined the ways in which different practices of curating can shape our understanding of physical as well as cultural environments. A range of invited speakers represented a wide cross-section of different types of art space with contrasting imperatives, objectives and priorities. The organisers’ aim and hope was that engaging in dialogue helps to generate debate on the myriad ways of shaping our encounters with art.

Supporting Media Arts

Organiser: Amanda Murphy

The 2014-2018 research project ADAPT TV History researched and documents the history of British Broadcast Television technology between 1960 and the near present. It’s primary research method was to reunite veteran TV crew with TV kit they once worked with and to film that reunion, and indeed the veteran crew ‘re-using’ the old kit in order to learn more about why and how TV was made the way it was in the past.

Led by ADAPT Digital Producer Amanda Murphy and co-funded by HARI and the Being Human Festival 2017, ADAPT presented a series of events offering participants the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in how television was made in the early days. ADAPT Live brought together some of the most extraordinary television pioneers and veteran TV crews, demonstrating the great skills that brought us the first colour TV shows and the first documentaries shot on film and on location in the 1960s/70s.

Participants had chance to get hands-on with some of the original kit and view unique footage filmed by the ADAPT team at Royal Holloway. Q&A sessions gave the opportunity to find out exactly what making early TV was like, and a Memory Booth was chance for participants to tell the team what television in the early days meant to them.

Supporting English

Alan Moore is a major UK contemporary writer: perhaps the world’s leading writer of graphic novels credited with revolutionising the medium; the ‘original writer’ for several major science fiction or historical (or, in one case, both) films, the author of a novel, Jerusalem (2016) and a major (counter-) cultural figure.

The aim of this academic conference was to attend to Moore’s writing as writing: to examine what core ideas influence him; what tropes reoccur and why; his influences and antecedents; questions of form, mode and genre; and about his wider role as writer.

Supporting English and Media Arts

In collaboration with Professor Juliet John in the Department of English, HARI Project Lead Adam Ganz coordinated a series of events at the British Library looking at screenwriters who have worked in other fields, with screenwriters or filmmakers talking about the work of their peers who are now in the British Library archives.

This built on a very successful event during the Screenwriting Research Network Conference at the Library where Oscar Winning screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood (whose work is in the Special Collections) was interviewed by Christine Geraghty about his career.

A series of talks explored the interrelationship between screenwriting, fiction, and playwriting as literary form and creative practice - and as one of the activities a professional writer of the twentieth and twenty-first century explored in their quest to earn a living. They focused on screenwriting as an important and neglected form of literary practice, created new links between scholars of Literature, Drama, Film and TV Studies and developed a holistic approach to texts and writers where the focus is fundamentally interdisciplinary. These events concentrated on the screenplay as a tool whose aim, as Professor Jonathan Powell has said is “to create as vivid a memory as possible of something which does not yet exist”.

Supporting English and Languages, Literatures & Cultures

This 2016-7 project was led by Dr Joseph Harris (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures) and Dr Deana Rankin (English).

This project established a network of academics and practitioners from a wide range of practice-based, critical and theoretical backgrounds. Its participants explores the complex aesthetic, political, ethical and psychological questions raised by violence on the early modern stage. It revisited the received ideas that French drama ‘tells’ of violence while English ‘shows’ it; that the latter pushes the boundaries of the spectacular, while the former reinforces neoclassical decorum.

Both contextualising and challenging these assumptions, the project investigated the particular qualities of ‘liveness’, rehearsal and representation both in the early modern period and in contemporary stagings. It took as its primary focus a clear and familiar canon of work stretching from Marlowe through Shakespeare and Webster to Congreve and from Garnier through Hardy and Corneille to Racine.

The network combined close textual and historical analysis with workshops exploring theatre practice and technologies, old and new. Through an investigation at once philosophical and practical of theories of response (from catharsis to mirror neurons), it sought to re-examine the journey from page to stage, and from stage to audience.

Please see links to a selection of podcasts and videos from events supported by HARI. Video and audio archives of HARI events and conferences from 2008-2010 are available from the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Selected speakers:

Explore Royal Holloway