IDEAS IN PROGRESS

SPRING

9 February – Jo Bryce – Gender and Gaming: Representation, Reproduction and Resistance

Dr Bryce is a Senior Lecturer in Pschology a the University of Central Lancashire. She has extensive research experience on the psychological and social aspects of Information Communications Technologies, including mobile devices, the internet, and computer gaming technologies. She is currently the Project Manager for the International Property Theft & Organised Crime Project (IPTOC)

23 February – V.F.Perkins – Evaluation in Film Criticism- the Case of Badness

V.F.Perkins is the author of Film As Film (Penguin, 1972), and the volume on Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons in the BFI Flm Classics series, as well as of many articles in Movie and Cine-Action. He founded the film studies programmes at the Universities of Reading and Warwick. His main research interests are in film aesthetics and criticism.

9 March – Lisa Downing – Nocturnal Visions: Imagining the NIghtmare in French 19th Century Literacy, Scientific and Visual Culture

Dr Downing teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on perverse sexuality in literature, sexology and psychoanalysis. Her works include Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Legends, 2003). Perversion (co-edited with Dany Nobus: Karnac Books, 2005), and the latest book on director Patrice Leconto, in relation to theories of sexuality and ethics in the cinema (Manchester UP, 2004).

6 April – Paul Willemen – Comparative Cinema Studies: A Possible Discipline?

Prof Willomen is starting a Comparative Cinema Studies programme at the University of Ulster in conjunction with the Centre for the Study of Cultural and Society in Bangalore. His many publications include The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (with Ashish Rajadhyaksha), Questions of Third Cinema (with J. Pines), Theorising the National in Cinema (with V.Vitali) and Looks and Frictions. Recent works include essays in Meaghan Morris (ed.) The Hong Kong Connection: Action Cinema in a Transnational Perspective, Hong Kong UP (forthcoming); Convergence 10 (3); and Pamela Church-Gibson (ed.), More Dirty Looks, BFI.

20 April – Yvonne Tasker – Gender, Violence and the Disciplined Body: Alias and Kill Bill

Yvonne Tasker is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is author or editor of various books including Working Girls (1998). The Silence of the Lambs (2002) and most recently Action and Adventure Cinema (2004). She is currently working on a study of military women in cinema and television since WWII.

AUTUMN

12th October – Dr Ines Weizman – The urbanism of the political spectacle: East German Cities before and after the Wall

Dr. Ines Weizman is an architect and critic based in London. She studied architecture at Weimar, Cambridge and at the Architectural Association in London from which she has received her PhD. In recent years she has written about architecture and urbanism after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, concentrating on the architectural transformation of former East German cities. She published articles on the political and ideological spectacles enacted by Soviet-era architecture, on the urban historiography of former East German cities, as well as on the phenomena of shrinking cities. At present she is the director of a London Metropolitan University MA program and teaches an MA course in politics at Goldsmiths College London.

26th October – Professor Adrian Rifkin – Between Maimonides and a queer place, or in search of the perfect anachronism

Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture in the Art, Philosophy and Visual Culture Academic Group at Middlesex University and author of Street Noises – Parisian Pleasure 1900 – 1940 (1993) and Ingres then, and now (2000), will consider the death of the index in cultural procedure.

9 November – Dr Jorella Andrews – Showing Off

Dr Jorella Andrews is Lecturer in Visual Culture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College and is on the editorial board of the journal Third Text. Her current work explores how phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Pontean phenomenology, enables questions of visuality and the ethical to be reappraoched outside of the various anti-ocular positions that have become dominant in recent decades. She will address some of the main themes of this research in her talk.

23 November – Peter Cusack

Peter Cusack – (guitar, bouzouki, live electronics) – is a sound artist/recordist and musician with a special interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Current activities range from song writing, through improvised music, to research on how sound contributes to our sense of place and recording projects which document areas of special sonic interest – most recentlyLake Baikal, Siberia, and the Azerbaijan oil fields. Very interested in how sounds migrate globally through movements of people and via new technology. In 1998 he initiated the ‘Your Favourite London Sound’ project, which aims to find out what Londoners find positive in their city’s soundscape. Currently involved in ‘Sound & the City’ the British Council sound art project for Beijing, 2005.

7 December – Richard Hylton

Since the early 1990s, Richard Hylton has been involved in producing a variety of national and international exhibitions working in both municipal galleries and independent contexts. From exhibitions such as Landscape Trauma in the age of Scopophilia (2001) and Imagined Communities (1996), he has also edited artists monographs including the late Donald Rodney (2003) and Janette Parris (2002). As co-founder with Virginia Nimarkoh of Hand/Eye Projects, he has co-produced, The Holy Bible: Old Testament (2002), by the American artist David Hammons. Alongside various aspects of critical writing on art he is also a founder-member (with David Mackintosh and Martin Vincent) of the band Die Kunst. He is currently the Curator at Unit 2 Gallery based at London Metropolitan University. He is also writing The Nature of the Beast, a study of cultural diversity and the visual arts sector to be published in 2006 by University of Bath and London Metropolitan University.