Events
Past Events
Wednesday 26th November, 2014
6:30pm, Arts Two Lecture Theatre
The 2014 History of Emotions Lecture: Professor Michael Roper, ‘Children, Veterans and Domesticity in Britain after the Great War’
On Wednesday 26th November Professor Michael Roper from the University of Essex will be delivering our 2014 Annual Lecture on the topic of ‘Children, Veterans and Domesticity in Britain after the Great War.’
The lecture will begin at 6.30pm in the Arts Two lecture theatre on Queen Mary’s Mile End campus and will be followed by a drinks reception. Details and booking available via Eventbrite.
Saturday 22nd November, 2014
11am, Arts 2
Conference: ‘Histories and Theories of the Unconscious’
A day conference on the unconscious mind from its early-modern philosophical origins to its diverse articulations in literature, art and social policy, and its controversial history within the psychoanalytic tradition.
Wednesday 19th November, 2014
6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts 1 Building
19th / 26th November, Emotional States: Film, Melodrama, Gender
Two film screenings and a symposium, which will consider the heightened world of film melodrama as a site for the gendered representation of intense emotional experience. The Seventh Veil uses psychiatry, a popular theme of 1940s cinema, to explore female consciousness, trauma and romantic love, while the male-centred Bigger Than Life constructs a baroque, disordered vision of suburban America and family life in the 1950s. A panel of film scholars will consider questions of affect, aesthetics, genre and gender.
Wednesday 19th November: The Seventh Veil (1945), introduced by Peter Evans
Wednesday 26th November: Bigger Than Life (1956), introduced by Andrew Asibong
Panel discussion: Andrew Asibong (Birkbeck), Peter Evans (QMUL), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), followed by discussion. Chair: Adrian Garvey (QMUL).
See here for more information and to register.
Friday 20th June, 2014
9am, Robin Brook Centre
Music, Emotions and Well-Being Conference
This symposium addresses both the role and potential of music in well-being, but it also raises the bar for medical humanities by investigating how its research areas can impact on research questions and strategies beyond the humanities. Delegates will present their views from the fields of neurology, cognitive psychology, music therapy, history and musicology.
Thursday 5th June, 2014
6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts One
Film Screening: La Signora di Tutti (Max Ophüls, 1934)
Introduced by Adrian Garvey
Film melodramas, sometimes denigrated as ‘weepies’, are indelibly associated with emotion, both representing and evoking heightened states of love and loss. Active in Europe and Hollywood, German-born Max Ophüls (1902-57), who made such films as Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948) and Madame de… (1953), is among the most acclaimed directors of the genre. La Signora di Tutti was produced in Italy where Ophüls worked briefly as a refugee from Nazism. Narrated in flashback, the film relates the tempestuous romantic life of a film star, Gaby Doriot. Less widely seen than his later work, it demonstrates the director’s characteristic synthesis of motion and emotion, as the expressive fluidity of the mobile camera intensifies the action and our responses to it.
See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]
Thursday 15th May, 2014
6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts One
Film Screening: Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, 2010)
Introduced by Dr Andrea Brady
Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary by Patricio Guzmán (The Battle of Chile, The Pinochet Case). In the arid landscapes of the Atacama Desert, Guzman encounters cutting-edge technologies for probing the origins of the universe, archaeologists recovering the remains of the 19th century, and women seeking out their dead, prisoners ‘disappeared’ after the military coup of 1973. The film contrasts these different investigations into place, memory, and the past, tragedy and rationality, science and kinship.
See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]
Monday 10th March, 2014
6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts One
Film Screening: ‘Poppy Shakespeare’ (Benjamin Ross, 2008)
Introduced by Dr Elena Carrera
Poppy Shakespeare is Benjamin Ross’s award-winning Channel 4 film adaptation of Clare Allan’s novel about a psychiatric day hospital in North London. Its protagonist, N, is given the job of showing the ropes to the reluctantly admitted, self-declared ‘sane’ Poppy, who has to learn to play ‘mad’ to be able to afford a lawyer who might get her out. In showing the mirroring relationship between these two ill-fated women as they cross shifting boundaries between sanity and insanity, the film mobilizes the viewer’s sense of alienation, and poses crucial questions about the role of empathy in mental healthcare.
Tickets now available from eventbrite.
See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]
Thursday 20th February, 2014
6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts One
Film Screening: ‘Shame’ (Steve McQueen, 2011)
Introduced by Dr Katherine Angel
Shame is written and directed by Steve McQueen, Turner Prize-winning video artist and director of Hunger and 12 Years A Slave. Widely glossed (including by McQueen himself) as a film about sex addiction, Shame is a fine-grained portrait of sexual compulsion and suffering. Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an office worker in New York in his mid-thirties whose routine is peppered with somewhat joyless pornography use, masturbation, the chasing of casual encounters, and visits from sex workers. Brandon’s sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to visit, which creates tensions in which Brandon’s suffering peaks. Shame is a film that reveals contemporary anxieties about pornography and addiction, while reflecting deftly on questions of humiliation, aggression, gender, and power.
See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]
Wednesday 15th January, 2014
1pm, Arts 2
Lunchtime seminars 2014
Here are details of the lunchtime seminars arranged for 2014
Thursday 5th December, 2013
1pm, Arts 2
Circuits of Feeling in The Age of Empathy, with Dr Carolyn Pedwell
With the rise of the ‘science of empathy’ in the wake of the discovery of mirror neurons, we have seen a veritable return to biology, ethology, neuroscience, genetics and various evolutionary theories to explain not only empathic circuits of feeling within the human body, but also the emotional politics of contemporary societies internationally.