Timed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Prince Albert’s death, this one-day symposium seeks to investigate how grief was manifested and mourning facilitated in the Victorian period through literature, music, performance and the visual arts.

3 December 2011

Things Unspeakable: Theatre after 1945

An international, interdisciplinary conference on theatre and human rights

7-9 October 2011

Development and Empire, 1929-1962

1-2 July 2011

This two-day conference brings together scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America to share knowledge and ideas about British aid-assisted colonial development in the mid-twentieth-century.

Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive

23-26 June 2011

A major international conference with special guests JM Coetzee, John Banville, John Calder and John Minihan, and keynote speakers Linda Ben-Zi, Lois Overbeck and Jean-Michel Rabate.

Watching and Being Watched

18 June 2011

Watching and being watched are experiences that constantly shape modern experience. This one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference explored themes of observation and surveillance across the arts, humanities and social sciences from a range of literary, philosophical, artistic, sociological, theoretical and historical perspectives.

Victorian Women Artists Revisited

27 April 2011

Half day conference hosted by the British Art Research School in the History of Art Department at the University of York.

Myths and Fairy Tales in Film and Literature post-1900

25-26 March 2011

This international conference invited renewed reflection on fundamental, inherited tales as these have found self-reinventing expression in film and literature post-1900. It sought to interrogate the dramatic, poetic and visual character of culturally core stories (fairy/mythic/classical/religious/Shakespearean etc), the formal operations and cultural force of their variant tellings (and showings) across media and moment, and the ways in which their psychological, social, political and aesthetic functions have been interpreted and employed.

A Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism

3-5 March 2011

A 3 day event organised by the Centre for Women's Studies. The carnival was part-festival and part-conference. The event brought together people from many nations to learn from each other, celebrate activist creativity, and advance feminist work.

Living Beyond Theory: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postcolonial

11 February 2011

An interdisciplinary postgraduate symposium hosted by the Postcolonial Perspectives reading group at the University of York. The symposium was directed towards the problematising of the postcolonial paradigm through an attempt to pay heed to the lived experience of those people who live and have lived within geographic areas affected by colonisation as well as people who, despite not being the direct descendants of colonial situations, enact identities and political positions that take much from the postcolonial project.

Novelties: A Postgraduate Symposium on Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

27 November 2010

The nineteenth century is frequently characterised as a period of extraordinary change, but what is still surprising about its literature and culture?

The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship

25 March 2010

This one-day conference explored cinema's engagements with literary lives, real and fictional, and with literary processes. It examined how the processes of composition and creativity from one medium have been narrated and interrogated through the codes and conventions of another, asks what appeal (cultural and commercial) an attention to the literary has held for the film industry in different historical moments and considers how particular authors' lives and their imagined working practices have been treated in the cinema. Speakers included Andrew Higson, Deborah Cartmell, Pamela Church Gibson, Julian North, Geoff Wall, Ian Hunter, Erica Sheen, Judith Buchanan.

Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA

23 to 25 July 2009

A conference exploring the significance of Anglo-American cultural relations for the visual arts produced in Britain and the United States since 1776. Wanda Corn (Stanford), Jennifer Greenhill (Illinois), Michael Hatt (Warwick), David Lubin (Wake Forest), Alexander Nemerov (Yale), Jennifer Roberts (Harvard), Cécile Whiting (California, Irvine).

Cultures of the Global Symposium

20 June 2009

Speakers:

Professor Maxine Berg (History, University of Warwick)
Professor Michael Dillon (Politics & International Relations, University of Lancaster)
Dr. Angela Dimitrakaki (History of Art, University of Edinburgh)
Dr. Priyamvada Gopal (English, University of Cambridge)

Interdisciplinary One-Day Symposium on Narrative Research

3 June 2009

Speakers:

Professor Brian Richardson (University of Maryland),
'Narrative Beginnings in History, Fiction and Drama'.
Professor Peter Goldie (University of Manchester),
'Life, Fiction and Narrative'.
Dr Maria Tamboukou (Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London),
'Participation without Belonging: Narrative Research within and beyond the Genre'.
Professor Porter Abbott (University of California, Santa Barbara),
'Conversion in an Age of Darwinian Gradualism'.

Linguistic Turns in the Twentieth Century

20 May 2009

Speakers:

Professor Andrew Linn (English, University of Sheffield)
Professor Peter Hacker (Philosophy, University of Oxford)

Orientalism, 30 Years Later

1 November 2008

A one-day symposium commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism

Keynote speakers:

Peter Gran
Robert Irwin