Events
Conferences
Romantic Voyages - Voyaging Romantics: Call for Papers
Date: 29–30 September 2012
Time: 9.00 am
Wellington, New Zealand, 29-30 September 2012
A two-day International Conference, hosted by the School of English, Film, Theatre, & Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on all aspects of Romantic voyaging, the period, its context and its authors. Papers which address the larger issues of ‘voyaging’ will be welcome too. The conference will include an opportunity to admire some of the treasures of the Rare Book collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library. There will also be time to explore the bracing sea-front and beautiful streets of Wellington with its numerous restaurants and bars, and to ascend via the famous cable car to the Botanical Gardens.
Keynote Speakers
Dr Ruth Lightbourne (Alexander Turnbull Library)
Professor Vincent O’Sullivan, DCNZM (Emeritus Professor, Victoria University of Wellington)
Professor Nicholas Roe (St Andrews University, Scotland)
250 word proposals for papers of no more than 2750 words together with a brief c.v. should occupy no more than 2 sides of A4 in a Word document (they will be copied into a composite file). Please do not send as a pdf. E-mail to the Conference Organizer Heidi Thomson heidi.thomson@vuw.ac.nz by 1 April 2012. All other enquiries should also be e-mailed to this address.
The Charles Brown Bursary of NZ $550 will be available to enable one unfunded postgraduate scholar working in the field of Romantic Literature (currently enrolled at either MA or PhD level) to travel to and deliver a paper at this conference. Please bring this announcement to the attention of qualified applicants.
Registration details are to follow.
Delegates need to arrange their own accommodation. There are a large number of Hotels and B&Bs in Wellington. Hotels within walking distance of the conference venue include: Novotel, Rydges, Intercontinental, Ibis, Bolton, Kingsgate Hotel
The following website is useful for arranging accommodation: www.wellingtonnz.com/accommodation
Productions
Summerfolk
Date: Tuesday June 5th - Saturday June 9th, 7pm
Time: 7.00 pm
Venue: 77 Fairlie Terrace
Summerfolk
Produced by THEA 301 & 308, Directed by David O'Donnell & Rachel Lenart
"If you had a grudge against me you'd tell me, wouldn't you?"
The warm summer air turns to poison for a group of wealthy holiday-makers when their dirty laundry is hung out to dry. As the season thickens with wine and whispered secrets, the Basovs' idyllic retreat becomes a prison of stifling excess. And some want out.
A revolution can happen anywhere. Directed by David O'Donnell and Rachel Lenart, Victoria University's Theatre 301 & 308 takes Maxim Gorky’s razor-sharp satire and presses it against New Zealand’s bach culture, to lay bare the beating heart of our ultimate success symbol.
Bookings can be made by emailing theatre@vuw.ac.nz with "Summerfolk booking" as the subject and the amount of tickets you would like in the email content.
Ticket prices: $15 waged. $8 unwaged
Seminars
Seminar - Seeing Through the Eighties (Again): Politicising Nostalgia in Contemporary Popular Culture
Date: 31 May 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: Room 103, 81 Fairley Terrace
Dr Hannah Hamad
School of English and Media Studies, Massey University
Writing in 2001, Andrew Hoskins asserted that "never before has our relationship with the past – some judgment of it, celebration, commemoration or denial of it – been so much a part of public culture." This paper accordingly examines the proliferation of depictions of the 1980s in a spate of recent popular film and television (e.g. the BBC‘s 'Eighties Season' [2010]; time travel police drama Ashes to Ashes [2008-2010]; and Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady [2011]), arguing that this backwards-looking turn in mainstream moving image culture can be productively understood in relation to striking discursive parallels to be drawn between the present and the recent past of the represented period. Revisionist attempts to recuperate this much maligned decade in recent social, political and cultural history have sought to negotiate this discourse by eliciting nostalgic affect from audiences. I aim to interrogate what is at stake in this negotiation, and the political efficacy of articulating the present through the distorting prism of cultural nostalgia for the 1980s.
Hannah Hamad is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University. She is the author of several articles on Hollywood stardom, and postfeminist media culture, and the forthcoming monograph Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary Popular Cinema: Framing Fatherhood (Routledge, 2013).