Author: Thomas Bridgewater

  The Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture was delighted to welcome Het Phillips to speak on true crime and its influence on the fiction of horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson. Phillips traced through Jackson’s fiction a fascination with true crime, which brought her repeatedly back to the thematic influences of several real-life cases. … Continue reading “Het Phillips, ‘The Possibility Of Evil: Shirley Jackson, True Crime and the Horror of the Everyday’ (13/02/2019)”

The evocative and urgent voice of Jesmyn Ward is a significant force in our contemporary movement towards amplifying the existence of black women in the United States. Through a wide reading of her literary works, Arin Keeble continued this project in a compelling and important talk on allegory and its applications, reading into the kinships … Continue reading “Siblings, Kinship and Allegory in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction and Nonfiction (04/03/2019)”

For our latest reading group in the Contemporary Studies Network, we read from Helen Hester’s 2018 book Xenofeminism. The section we examined – her introduction, ‘What is Xenofeminism?’ – is an attempt to conceptualise a new branch of feminism that is emerging from a world of increasing technological complexity. Adapting the digital Xenofeminist manifesto by … Continue reading “CSN Reading Group: Xenofeminism (06/02/2019)”

A full lecture room welcomed Sara Ahmed to the University of Birmingham for her talk, Mind the Gap: Complaint as Diversity Work, which would prove to be a hugely engaging and thought-provoking evening. Ahmed’s brilliant talk on complaint was just part of a bigger ongoing project she has been undertaking about university institutions and the … Continue reading “Sara Ahmed – Mind the Gap: Complaint as Diversity Work (30/01/2019)”

At 6pm, our evening of poetry reading at the Birmingham & Midland Institute began. The theme of the event – ‘Nature and Our Environments’ –  hinted initially at the increasingly pressing ecological crises emerging in the contemporary age, yet proved to be a highly flexible point of departure for thinking about not only the physical … Continue reading “Poetry Reading: Nature and Our Environments (27/11/2018)”

Visiting speaker, Professor Joseph Slaughter, described his lecture as a critique of the new historiography of human rights. He began this critique with an analysis of Milan Kundera’s story ‘The gesture of protest against a violation of human rights’, from his 1991 Immortality, in which the principle character, Brigitte, attempts to buy an expensive bottle … Continue reading “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World (21/11/2018)”

This semester’s Queer and Now reading group, led by Angus Brown, centred around Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders (2018). This new book by Omise’eke Tinsley explores the ways in which black Atlantic sexuality is mediated through the imagery, symbolism and cultural traditions of Caribbean spirituality, with emphasis on the polysemous, multi-formal Ezili, a senior … Continue reading “Queer and Now: Ezili’s Mirrors (15/11/2018)”

At around 5pm, we gathered together in the Barber Institute of Fine Art for an evening of poetry reading, written and performed by students of the university during a workshop run by celebrated artist Dzifa Benson. The workshop ran earlier that October with the aim of drawing out and interrogating the histories of people of … Continue reading “Unveiling Hidden Stories: Black History Month & The Creative Archive (29/10/2018)”

.                           . During this reading group on Islamophobia, we focused on three pieces: ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ by Martin Amis (2002), ‘The Protestant Aesthetic and Islamophobia’ by Jo Carruthers (2011), and ‘Free Speech, Blasphemy and Secular Criticism’ by Talal Assad (2013). Peter Morey began the reading … Continue reading “CSN Reading Group: Islamophobia (10/10/2018)”