You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2008.
Be quiet unhappy man, and consider that pleasure pulled you out of nothingness
Jouissance (Enjoyment) entry from Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie
A post by Laputan Logic on Robert Recorde’s invention of the equals sign in 1557, in The Whetstone of Witte.
In the last week, immersed amongst a stack of books, oftentimes weird but always wonderful, I have come across references to earlids; or rather I have come across references to an absence of earlids. Of these references, here is one, in the opening of the Preface in Gregory Whitehead Douglas Kahn’s Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 1992: ix):
The human ear offers not just another hole in the body, but a hole in the head. Moreover, the absence of obstructive anatomical features such as earlids would seem to assure a direct and unmediated pathway for acoustic phenomena, with sonic vibrations heading straight into the central nervous system. Yet the privileged access afforded to sound waves has left little impression on one conspicuous area of brain activity: it remains almost unheard of to think about sound.
Below is a fantastic opening to an acknowledgements section by Janine Barchas, in Graphic Design, Print Culture and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (CUP: 2003):
Book acknowledgements are not just frank tallies of debts. For better or worse, acknowledgements – like other paratexts placed conventionally at the threshold of a book – mediate the book’s relationship with the reader. Modern readers tend to read such an opening inventory of names as a code shortcut to a book’s authority – as brand. Read the rest of this entry »
In a piece of shameless promotion, here is the website and blog of Out of the Wings, an AHRC-funded collaborative project exploring the past, present and future of Spanish drama.
Not Just for Christmas Research Workshop and Town Meeting (Call for Papers)
The Glasgow School of Art, 15th-16th December 2008
‘Not Just for Christmas’ is an AHRC-funded research workshop which engages academic and non-academic participants in the discussion of issues surrounding ethical responses to visual culture, consumption, and their embedding in moral and religious narratives at Christmas. The overlapping layers of this debate, intensified during the festive season of Christmas, will be related to sustainability and ethical consumption in daily life.
The workshop will, using a mixture of academic and non-academic participants, object-led and online discussion, discursive publication and public feedback, reveal flashlight issues which will offer new areas of research and inquiry, as well as provide a necessary reappraisal of Christmas in light of changing societal impulses and needs. Such debates cover the commercialisation of Christmas and other religious festivals in the context of ethical consumption practices including Fair Trade, charity donations, gift-giving alternatives and greeting cards. Read the rest of this entry »
I was lucky enough to be one of the presenters at last year’s symposium. It was fantastic, the location is beautiful, and would recommend submitting a paper to any postgraduate …..
The Public Lives of Things
Seventh Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars
Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, Saturday 25 April 2009
The Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware invites submissions for papers to be given at the Seventh Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars.
Supported in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for public engagement in the humanities, this year’s symposium encourages graduate students and other emerging scholars to submit papers that align their object-based research with some aspect of its potential role in society at large. Within that context, we seek diversity in topics, chronology, and disciplinary approaches. Travel grants will be available for all presenters. Disciplines represented at past symposia include American studies, anthropology, archaeology, consumer studies, English, history, museum studies and the histories of art, architecture, design and technology. Read the rest of this entry »
Living in the Past: Histories, Heritage and the Interior
The Sixth Modern Interiors Research Centre Conference, Kingston University
Thursday 14th and Friday 15th May 2009
The annual conference of the Modern Interiors Research Centre has established itself as a leading forum for international interdisciplinary debate on the history and theory of the modern interior.
In 2009 the Modern Interiors Research Centre Conference will bring together architectural and design historians and practitioners, curators and policy makers, to examine and debate the theme of the interior as a marker of history.
Deeply embedded in historical processes, interiors are mutable spaces, shaped and re-shaped over time. The conference will seek to reveal and debate the numerous ways in which interiors register and mark the passing of time and will question the ways in which time and the effect of social, cultural, political and economic factors shape our understanding and assessment of the interior. Read the rest of this entry »
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