Archive of Previous Seminars in the IMEMS Series
"Gender and Performance in the Medieval and the Early Modern Period”
19 April 2016
(Round Table Discussion)
Prof. Alison Findlay, Lancaster University
(Hosted by Bangor University)
"Setting Songs: Seventeenth-Century Songbooks and Lyric Identity"
12 April 2016
Dr. Simon Jackson, University of Warwick
(Hosted by University of Wales, Trinity St David, Lampeter)
New projects in medieval and early modern history: a round table for postgraduates and early career researchers
15 March 2016
Bangor, University
(Hosted by Bangor)
"Christian holy war in comparative perspective"
8 March 2016
Prof. Phillippe Buc, University of Vienna
(Hosted by Aberystwyth University)
‘The last days of Owain Glyndwr interrogating the traditions’
9 February 2016
Prof. G A Williams, Aberystwyth University
(Hosted by Bangor University)
"From Pondal (1835-1917) to Cabanillas (1876-1956): Ossian and Arthur in the Making of a Celtic Galicia".
2 February 2016
Prof. Juan Miguel Zarandona, Valladolid University
(Hosted by Swansea University)
Locations
Aberystwyth - Huw Owen Library
Bangor - Cledwyn room
Cardiff – To be Confirmed (see email reminders)
Trinity St David - Conferencing Studio, Arts Building
Swansea: Coleg Cymraeg Studio
Prof G A Williams (Aberystwyth University) ‘The Last Days of Owain Glyndŵr: Interrogating the Traditions’
Thursday 10 December: 2015, Bangor hosts
Professor Paul Stevens, University of Toronto: "Raphael's Condescension: Paradise Lost, Jane Austen, and the Secular Metamorphosis of Grace.”
Tuesday 1 December: 2015, Cardiff hosts
During 2015-16, he will be Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. His primary area of teaching and research is Milton and seventeenth-century literature, especially as that area illuminates colonialism and nationalism, secularism and religious change, and literary theory and history. Among his books are Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost”, Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Professor Stevens is currently working on two projects, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War, co-edited with David Loewenstein, and Sola Gratia: English Literature and the Secular Ways of Grace for which he was awarded a 2012-13 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Associate Professor in History and Heritage, Dr Catherine Fletcher: 'Fashioning a Medici Court: The Material World of Duke Alessandro de' Medici (1531-37)
Tues. 17 November, 2015, Swansea hosts
Dr Fletcher’s research focuses on early modern Europe, including Britain, and particularly on Italy. She has published on the history of diplomacy, on material culture and on political life in this period more broadly. Her first book, Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador, was published in 2012 and explored the diplomacy behind Henry’s first divorce. An academic monograph, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome will be out in 2015. Dr Fletchers’s new project looks at the cultural history of handguns during the early sixteenth century, when they were a new technology.
Alongside her work in early modern history Dr Fletcher is interested in the presentation of this past to the public: in popular literature, films, on TV and at heritage sites. In recent work she has explored the use of performance and narrative to communicate historical research. Her biography of Alessandro de’ Medici, first Medici duke of Florence and said to be the illegitimate son of an African slave, will be out in 2016.
Hywel Griffiths: 'May God bridge Afon Tywi!' Floods and the fluvial landscape in medieval Welsh poetry
Tuesday 3 November, 2015, Aber hosts
Hywel Griffiths is a lecturer in physical geography in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. Although his background is in fluvial geomorphology, particularly the rates and patterns of river processes, he also has research interests in the historical and cultural geographies of floods and rivers. His interest in historical records and representations of floods in medieval, historical and contemporary literature has led him from Welsh rivers to the rivers of Welsh Patagonia via a British Academy-funded project. He is currently Associate Editor of the Welsh-medium multi-disciplinary journal Gwerddon.
‘Gender and Performance in the Medieval and the Early Modern Period’, a round table with guest speaker Prof. Alison Findlay
Tuesday 20 October, 2015, Bangor hosts
Alison Findlay's specialist interests are in Shakespearean drama and women's writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) and A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), a book which uses women's writing to analyse mainstream drama by men. She has published numerous essays and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and reviewed books on Shakespeare's life, times and stage for Shakespeare Survey.
Most recently she has completed Women in Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Dictionary Series published by Arden (Bloomsbury Press) and Much Ado About Nothing: a guide to the text and play in performance (2011) Her most recent essays on Shakespeare have been on Much Ado About Nothing (2010, and 2012) and Comedy of Errors (2012). In the past, she has co-edited volumes of essays with Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson, and written for the Shakespeare section of the electronic journal Compass (Blackwell Publishers), Shakespeare Survey, and the Blackwell's Companions to Shakespeare's Comedies, Renaissance Drama and Renaissance Literature. She has spoken at day schools at The Shakespeare Centre in Stratford and is an invited member of the International Shakespeare Conference at The Shakespeare Institute.
Alison has particular interest in feminist approaches to literature and drama in performance, including practical work on dramatic texts. She is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 (Longman's Medieval and Renaissance Library; Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), and Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Heather Pagan: ‘Nous n'escourterom pas la verité de l'estoire’: Trevet's 'Les Cronicles' and Anglo-Norman Historiography
Wednesday 7 October, 2014, Aber hosts
Dr. Heather Pagan is an editor at the Anglo-Norman Dictionary which is located at Aberystwyth University. Her research interests include medieval chronicle writing, and the use of Anglo-Norman in the fourteenth century. She is also interested in textual editing, both as a dictionary editor as well as the editing of medieval texts. She has published an edition of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut to 1332 with the Anglo-Norman Text Society, as well as edition of an abbreviated Brut and is currently co-editing Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles and the Scalacronica.