IDEAS IN PROGRESS

SPRING

11 February – Geoffrey Nowell Smith – Digital Cinema: What’s the Difference?

Within the next decade, film may be a thing of the past? But will new technology automatically bring with it a new aesthetics or wll the movies continue to look the same and be the same in spite of the change from celluloid to digital formats? Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is Professor of Cinema Cultures at the University of Luton; he is the Editor of The Oxford History of World Cinema (1996) and is currently writing a book about European art cinema of the 1960s.

18 February – Haim Bresheech – USA vs EU: The Media Wars

Professor Haim Bresheech is an Israeli academic and peace activist who teaches at Sapir College in Israel and the University of East London. He is co-editor of The Gulf War and the New World Order, and co-author of Introduction to the Holocaust.

4 March – Claire Pajaczkowska – The Sublime and Sublimation

Claire Pajaczkowska is a senior lecturer in FIlm Studies at Middlesex University, and the author of the recent Perversion (Ideas in Psychoanalysis) and an essay on Location Envy in David Blamey’s (ed) Here, There, Elsewhere. She is currently researching the sublime on a Leverhulm Fellowship (2002-2004).

18 March – Ian Conrich – The Friday the 13th Films and the Cultural Function of a Modern Grand Guignol

Ian Conrich is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey Roehampton and an editor of Journal of Popular British Cinema. He is co-editor of the forthcoming, The Techniques of Terror: the films of John Carpenters, and Horror Zones: the cultural experience of contemporary horror cinema.

1 April – Paul Smith – ‘Love and Sex and the Whole Damn (American) Thing

Paul Smith is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex and Professor of Cultural Studies and George Mason University. He is author of Millenial Dreams, Clint Eastwood, Discerning the Subject, and Pound Revisited and editor/co-editor of Boys, Madonnarama, and Men in Feminism.

AUTUMN

23 September – Sudeep Dasgupta – Between the Retina and the Body: Regimes of Visuality and the Truths of Modernity

Sudeep Dasgupta teaches in the Department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam.He is editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture and Critique and has published on globalisation, national identity, sexuality and Hindu nationalism.

7 October – Jon Bird – Nancy Spero in the 1970s

Professor of Fine Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University, Jon Bird’s publications include articles on Leon Golub, Terry Atkinson, Nancy Spero, Michael Sandle, Alfredo Jaar, Rachel Whiteread, and the visual culture of 9/11. He was a compiler and contributor to Nancy Spero (Phaidon, 1996) and is the editor of Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith (forthcoming, Reaktion)

21 October – Barbara Penner – Lands of Love

With their heart-shaped whirlpool baths, 12ft beds, and wall-towall shag carpets, honeymoon resorts from the 1950s to the 1970s are now by-words for kitsch and are dismissed as such by design historians. This talk will give these spaces another look: high profile and immensely popular, they both reflected and produced the shift from a companionable ideal of marriage to a hedonistic one, holding out to young couples the promise of doing ‘it’ right. Barbara Penner is a Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She has published articles in a variety of books and journals, and co-edited Gender Space Architecture (Routledge, 1999).

4 November – Parveen Adams – Psychoanalysis and the Image: Where Next?

Director of the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Studies Programme at Brunel University, Parveen Adams is a pioneer of the development of Lacanian thinking in visual culture. Her most recent edited volume in which she has written articles on Crash and Joel-Peter Witkin is Art: Sublimation or Sympton (The Other Press, 2003)

10 November – Renate Bräuninger – Problems of Analysing Musical Multimedia

A wide range of vocabulary has been employed to describe the relationship between music and the moving image. This paper will examine the film musicological writings of a number of scholars, problematising notions of interdependence and synthesis through the analysis of video excerpts. Renate Bräuninger is a research assistant and PhD candidate in Performance Art at Middlesex University. She has published and lectured on dance and the relationship between music and the moving image.