HUMANITIES, MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS RESEARCH 2014-15
For more information visit: www.plymouth.ac.uk
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Contents
Introduction
→ 04
Art History
→ 06
English and Creative Writing
Alternate Spaces of the Great War → 10 AHRC sponsored events → 11 Environmental Literary Studies → 11 Poetry and Poetics → 12 Museums of Memory: Narratives of Remembrance in the Arts and Humanities → 13
History
Japan 400 → 16 New Directions in Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, August 2014 → 17
Music
Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) → 18 Unlocking the mysteries of the mind with music → 18
Contents
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Performance. Experience. Presence (P.E.P)
Zombies & Performance → 21 Anatomy of Performance Training → 21
Our Research Students
ResM → 22 MPhil/PhD → 26
Forthcoming Research Seminars in HuMPA
Art History → 28 English and Creative Writing → 28 History → 29 ICCMR Doctoral Research Seminars → 29 Performance. Experience. Presence (P.E.P) → 31
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Topping Out Ceremony at The House, Plymouth University’s new, £7 million performing arts centre. Located in the city’s central quarter, adjacent to the iconic Roland Levinsky Building and the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. It provides an enviroment with exceptional facilities that will inspire and nurture emerging talent and creativity. From left to right: Professor Eduardo Miranda (ICCMR). Dr Elisabeth Tingle (head of school Humanities and Performing Arts). Professor Dafydd Moore (Executive Dean of Arts & Humanities), Dr Ruth Way (Associate Head of School for Music & Performing Arts), Ms Jane Cullen (External Relations).
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Introduction The Humanities, Music and Performing Arts Research Centre (HuMPA) is Plymouth University’s home for research in Art History, English and Creative Writing, History, Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts and Music. It promotes and encourages individual, collective and cross-disciplinary research excellence through a range of activities including conferences, performance events and collaborative research projects. In the recent REF2014 research assessment exercise, more than two thirds of this research was rated at 3*/4*, of internationally excellent and world-leading importance. The internationally renowned Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) is located in HuMPA. Led by Professor Eduardo Miranda and based in the University’s new performing arts centre, The House, ICCMR annually hosts an important international contemporary music festival. HuMPA hosts five research seminar series with internal and external speakers, to foster exchange and debate within and across disciplines. It supports the work of new scholars and contributes to faculty and university-wide early career researcher networks. Nearly fifty postgraduate
research students are registered in HuMPA, taking advantage of its excellent supervision and wide subject expertise. HuMPA provides a focus for a number of inter-disciplinary research groups and clusters. These include the Transatlantic Exchanges Forum, led by Dr Kathryn Gray, which was formed in 2009 and fosters US-UK collaborative scholarship in the Humanities. Each year additional crossdisciplinary clusters are identified in order to further research and innovation, and to initiate new activities and ideas across the boundaries of individual subjects. In 2014-15 these are: • Nineteenth-Century Studies (PUNCS) • Marine and Naval Studies • Art and Politics in the Twentieth Century. HuMPA encourages collaborative work across the university and with external partners. Its staff engage with other research institutes in Plymouth University, particularly the Cognition Institute and the Marine Institute. HuMPA also works with the university’s public arts organisation, Peninsula Arts, to share its research in a wide variety of creative and engaging ways with the public of Plymouth and the South-West region.
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Art History
In the last academic year Art History has produced 3 international-loan exhibitions with accompanying scholarly catalogues, published 4 articles and 5 book chapters, submitted 2 monograph manuscripts, applied for 4 grants, attended 3 conferences, and accepted over 20 invitations to provide lectures at universities, galleries and museums in the UK and abroad. In January 2014, Dr Péter Bokody joined the team. Specialising in the visual culture of Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Péter’s interests have enabled us to look back further into the history of art. His book Images within Images in Italian Painting: Reality and Reflexivity exivity, which won the International Centre of Medieval Art-Samuel H. Kress Award, will be published by Ashgate in 2015 Exhibitions have been a major focus for one half of the team. In October 2013
Gemma Blackshaw’s Leverhulme-funded research project – a social history of the modern Viennese portrait – culminated in the international loan exhibition Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London. Sponsored by Credit Suisse, this was the UK’s first exhibition devoted to portraiture produced in the city of Sigmund Freud. Taking an unexpected curatorial approach to the genre that emphasised the importance of class, immigration and assimilation, Facing the Modern attracted an enormous amount of attention in the national and international press. As Christie Davies commented in a review for The New Criterion: ‘In designing the exhibition, Gemma Blackshaw has consciously rejected what she calls “the Freudian script”. It is time we all did.’ And as Rachel Campbell-Johnston remarked for The Times: ‘Far from the glittering world of the
Art History
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900
Exhibition image Christinaity, Benedictine Archabbey, Pannonhalma, 2014. © Tamás Horváth
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popular cliché, this complicated, probing and philosophically fascinating show exposes a society that is darkly sinister.’ Facing the Modern did not set out to be a ‘block-buster’ show, but it welcomed the block-buster figure of just under 90,000 visitors nevertheless; 5400 paperback and 2250 hardback copies of the accompanying scholarly catalogue, edited by Gemma and co-produced with Yale University Press, were sold. At the close of the exhibition, Gemma was commissioned to work on a further two shows in London, Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude at the Courtauld Gallery and The Nakeds at Drawing Room, which opened in September and October 2014 respectively. In the spring of 2014, the first of Péter Bokody’s two exhibitions at the Benedictine Archabbey of Pannonhalma, Hungary, opened. Including loans from Austria, Croatia and Hungary, Icons and Relics: Veneration of Images between East and West focused on certain aspects of attitudes towards images and pictures in Greek and Latin Christianity, through the medium of the icon, the relic and the painted panel. Besides the theological implications of image-worship, it also
presented the historical link of how the veneration of images in Greek Christianity contributed to the emergence of the image understood as the free selfexpression of the artist in Latin Christianity. Icons and Relics was complemented by a second exhibition conceived and curated by Péter, which opened in the summer of 2014, Image and Christianity: Visual Media in the Middle Ages. These exhibitions were a first for the Archabbey of Pannonhalma; reviewers of the exhibition noted Péter’s skill in diplomatic negotiations as well as curatorial matters in their articles on this ‘untried exhibition space’. Comparisons between the gallery and museum cultures of East and West Europe were made, with Péter’s approach being singled out for its excellence. As Chloë Reddaway at Kings College London commented: ‘After the minimal labels of most big UK exhibitions, it is a pleasure to be given the opportunity to find out a bit more about the objects on display, and the labels suggest an attractive optimism about viewers’ interest and desire to learn.’ A major, scholarly catalogue, edited by Péter and published in both English and Hungarian, accompanied both exhibitions.
Art History
The other members of the Art History have been no less active. Jody Patterson became a founding member of SAVAnT (Scholars of American Visual Arts and Texts), a network of academics working on American art in the UK, which will be launched at the Annual Conference of British Association of American Studies in the spring of 2015. She also completed a peer-reviewed article ‘“Point of Promise and of Danger”: Postwar Aesthetic Debates in the US’ for the Special Issue of Kunst und Politik, as well as three commissioned book Politik chapters, on ‘Meyer Schapiro, Marxism, and Modernism in the US’ for the anthology Art History and the Cold War edited by Ben Thomas and Grant Pooke (forthcoming Ashgate, 2015); ‘Nature of Abstract Art’ for the volume The Social History of Art edited by Rossella Froissart, Neil McWilliam and Todd Porterfield (Institut National d’Histoire
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de l’Art, 2014) and ‘Art and Politics on the New York Waterfront in the 1930s’ in Re/New Marxist Art History (Art/Books UCL, 2013). Continuing her Leverhulme-funded work Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), and the reception of the Renaissance and Renaissance artists more broadly, Jenny Graham completed an article for a Festschrift devoted to Francis Haskell entitled ‘Amorous Passions: Vasari’s Legend of Fra Filippo Lippi in the Art and Poetry of the 19th Century’. She also attended a special interest day at the University of Ghent on the Getty-funded restoration of Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece and presented a paper at a conference on looted art and restitution in the 20th century at Cambridge University that resulted in a commission to write an essay for a forthcoming book project.
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English and Creative Writing
English and Creative Writing Project Profile: Angela K. Smith, ‘Alternate Spaces of the Great War’ In this centenary year of World War I, Angela K. Smith’s reputation in the field of War Writing has been recognised nationally in her contributions to Woman’s Hour Hour, Radio 4, and high profile events at the British Library and Southbank Centre, London. She is also the recipient of an AHRC Network grant, ‘Alternate Spaces of the Great War. A primary aim of the Alternate Spaces of the Great War project is to bring together established scholars and Early Career Researchers to set up a forum for debate and encourage the development of fresh inter-disciplinary ideas and innovative research in a wellestablished field. The Network has promoted a series of academic symposia and public events, organised through Peninsula Arts at Plymouth University, and will make its findings more widely available through a specially designed website, complemented by a special edition of the Journal of War and Culture Studies and an edited collection of essays (Routledge) combining its key findings. Together these outputs will promote the sustainability of the network over a
minimum of the next five years, to explore the legacy of the centenary of the war. The network addresses these ‘alternate spaces’ through three themes, ‘landscapes’, which considers sites of war beyond the Western Front, ‘journeys’, looking at individuals’ movements between different landscapes, and ‘voices’ where competing representations of war can be found. The themes are broad enough to encourage creative and critical research from a range of disciplines, yet sufficiently focussed to result in valuable and coherent research outputs to benefit scholars, students and the wider public. The network held three symposia during 2014, each one built around one of these themes. The network will organise a major international conference in July 2015 entitled ‘Alternate Spaces of War 1914 to the Present’ which will open up the debates begun in the First World War to scholars doing a range of work on warfare in the twentieth century and beyond.
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Other AHRC sponsored events: Our expertise in the fields of eighteenth-century literature and book history has been recognised nationally with an AHRC-funded CDA project examining the importance of local and national archives and collections. As part of the AHRC CDA, ‘Reading Plymouth’s Cottonian Bequest: Manuscripts, Books and Practices of Collection 1740-1863’ awarded in 2013, we are hosting a conference with the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in April 2015, ‘Collecting Texts & Manuscripts, 1660-1860.’
Environmental Literary Studies Our interest in this field ranges from creative fiction and creative nonfiction, to contemporary eco-critical research, and also considers the histories of science and natural history narratives. In relation to these interests, we are collaborating with the Devon Wildlife Trust, the Institute for Sustainability Solutions Research, the Marine Institute, and the Marine Biological Association. Key contributors are Miriam Darlington, Mandy Bloomfield, David Sergeant, Kathryn N. Gray, Angela Szczepaniak
‘Short FICTION’, edited by Anthony Caleshu
‘Otter Country’ by Miriam Darlington
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Poetry and Poetics Anthony Caleshu’s work bridges two levels of research -- often bringing traditional academic scholarship to his creative writing, and ‘creativity’ to his criticism of contemporary poetry. His third book of poems is forthcoming from Shearsman Press in 2015, and includes work which has appeared in a number of significant journals on both sides of the Atlantic: Boston Review (as winner of the Boston Review Poetry Prize), Narrative Magazine, Web-Conjunctions, Poetry Review (London), and The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt). The book’s exploration of ‘friendship’ takes a classical philosophical model and opens it out into a contemporary space -- one which is concerned with gender relations as well as the environment. A second project is Caleshu’s editing of the forthcoming Wesleyan University Press book of essays about the American poet Peter Gizzi -- a book which includes essays by Caleshu himself as well as some of the most lauded poets and critics now writing: Marjorie Perloff, Charles Altieri, Ben Lerner, Dan Beach-Quick, Ruth Jennison etc. The book is the first on Gizzi (who, in his early 50s, is the youngest poet to have had his papers archived by Yale) and explores Gizzi’s work as extending 19th and 20th century traditions in ways that advance the lyric in the 21st century.
In 2015, Anthony will launch a new initiative which supports the publication of first books of poetry by the best new British writers. This new publication will continue in the tradition of the annual ‘visual literary journal’, short FICTION, which Anthony has been FICTION editing for the past 8 years. Other areas of research in this area include: Mandy Bloomfield’s work in American, British and Caribbean poetry, which has led to the development of a public-facing project called ‘Poem Pod’, a website containing podcast discussions focusing on the poetry of contemporary British and world writers; Peter Hinds’ new project on the role of the Poet Laureate in early modern Britain, and Dafydd Moore’s ongoing research into eighteenth-century literary culture and national self-definition; David Sergeant’s critical and creative work in poetry, which includes the organisation of a 2014 symposium on Poetry and Happenstance at the University of Cambridge, poems published in leading magazines at home and abroad, and a collaboration with the composer Martin Suckling which was performed last year at the Royal Opera House.
English and Creative Writing
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English and Creative Writing Research Event: ‘Museums of Memory: Narratives of Remembrance in the Arts and Humanities’ A one-day, interdisciplinary postgraduate conference held at Plymouth University in June 2014. Organised by a postgraduate student committee and supported by the DTC, this conference examined the construction, recollection and representation of memory and sought to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion within the Arts and Humanities. The conference organisers were pleased to welcome two distinguished keynote speakers. Professor Tim Perfect (Plymouth University) opened proceedings with a discussion on the boundaries of memory. Dr Anita
Rupprecht’s (University of Brighton) closing keynote paper examined the politics of memory and archival activity in relation to the British transatlantic slave trade. The papers presented considered a wide array of topics, ranging from an exploration of the performativity of autobiographical memory to the function of prison graffiti as commemorative marks. A recurrent theme throughout the conference focused on the influence memory has on and within creative practice. The conference also featured an exhibition by local artists John England and Anna Newland-Hooper.
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History
In the last academic year, History has produced one monograph, two edited collections, and more than ten articles and book chapters, including in History Workshop Journal, Women’s History Review and Journal of Ecclesiastical History. Staff have given more than History twenty research papers at national and international conferences, and hosted an international conference on ‘Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe’. We have also won three national grants, including a major three-year Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, a one-year Leverhulme Trust Fellowship and a British Academy-Leverhulme grant. Professor Daniel Maudlin was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the period 2014 to 2017 to research and write a monograph entitled, Different Places, Same Spaces: the inn and the traveller in the British Atlantic World World. The project is an investigation of eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century inns (1700-1850) along principal routes of the historic British Atlantic world in order to establish broad trends in construction and design as routes cross regions and cultures, offering an opportunity for new insights into the architecture and society of the British Atlantic world. It
represents the first time that a transnational route-based study of British Atlantic architecture has been undertaken and also the first time an architectural history study has focussed on the inn or the traveller. Elizabeth Tingle was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship 2013-14, to work on a project ‘Indulgences after Luther: the fall and rise of pardons in CounterReformation France’. The aims of the project were to explore the theory, nature, uses and evolution of indulgences after Luther, c.1520 to c.1700 in a case study of France. This was to provide a case study by which to address larger questions of Church organisation and practice in the Catholic and Counter Reformations. A monograph on the subject is currently in preparation for Pickering & Chatto. James Gregory’s new book, The Poetry and the Politics. Radical Reform in Victorian England examines ‘that very singular and dangerous character’, James Elmslie Duncan, described thus in the pages of the London Morning Post in June 1851. It reflects Gregory’s ongoing fascination with nineteenth-century British ‘movements’ – political, social, moral reform causes – through a study of this Chartist poet who
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gained notoriety in the late 1840s for his antics in support of progressive causes.The book was completed during a sabbatical funded by the School in 2013-2014. Sandra Barkhof (with A.K. Smith in English) edited a volume of essays entitled War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014). This book brings together a collection of inter-disciplinary works by scholars who are currently producing some of the most innovative and influential work on the subject of displacement in war, in order to share their knowledge and interpretations of historical and literary sources. The collection unites historians and literary scholars in addressing the issues of war and displacement from multiple angles. Contributors draw on a wealth of primary source materials and resources including archives from across the world, military records, medical records, films, memoirs, diaries and letters, both published and private, and fictional interpretations of experience. In addition, James Daybell has been involved in ‘knowledge mobilisation’ work, sharing his research expertise on secret codes, ciphers, invisible ink and Elizabethan politics for a major new three-part documentary BBC2 series on the Armada, fronted by Dan Snow, and for a five-part documentary on Spymasters.
‘The Poetry and the Politics. Radical Reform in Victorian England’, by James Gregory
‘War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century’, edited by Sardra Banrkhof and Angela Smith
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History Research Event 1: Jonathan Mackintosh, Japan400. The International Maritime Synergies Symposium (29 September 2014) was sponsored by The Daiwa AngloJapanese Foundation, and held in partnership with the School of Marine Science and Engineering The Symposium was opened by Captain Keizo Kitagawa, Defense Attache to the Embassy of Japan in the UK, and featured three international panels. The first panel explored the early twentieth-century Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Chaired by Professor Emeritus Ian Nish whose research on relations between Japan and the UK was seminal in developing this history, the panel (Harry Bennett, PU and Antony Best, LSE) debated the
Vice Admiral Yoji Koda speaking at the IMSS
extent to which concerns of maritime realpolitik must be balanced by real affinity in understanding the Alliance. Panel 2, chaired by Professor Martin Attrill, Director of the Marine Institute, shifted attention to competing values in the management of marine resources. In the contrast of British (Steve Fletcher, Plymouth University) and Japanese (Kazumi Wakita, Tokai University) studies, trans-national concerns were identified to define ‘blue economy’ interventionist policy, not simply in material ways, but crucially military, social, and cultural ways. Maritime security co-operation was the focus of Panel 3, chaired by Shadow
History
The Audience at the International Maritime Synergies Symposium
Defense Secretary Alison Seabeck MP, and commentated on by Simon Chelton (RUSI). The papers delivered by Alessio Patalano (War Studies, KCL), Peter Roberts (RUSI), and Vice-Admiral Yoji Koda (former Commander of the Japanese Marine SelfDefense Forces) generated passionate discussion that considered the limitations imposed by geo-political practicalities and the interpersonal bonds which open opportunities for co-operation. The Symposium was one of the core events of Japan400 Plymouth, a five-day international festival initiated out of the History Unit celebrating the establishment of Anglo-Japanese relations four centuries ago, and Plymouth’s place in this story.
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History Research Event 2: New Directions in Early Modern Women’s LetterWriting August 2014. Professor James Daybell organised a two-day international conference at the History Faculty at the University of Oxford in conjunction with Oxford’s ‘Cultures of Knowledge Project’ as part of his British Academy-Leverhulme funded project ‘Women’s Early Modern Letters Online’. The conference attracted speakers from leading universities in the UK (including Oxford, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Sheffield as well as a range of scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia and The Netherlands). Keynote lectures were delivered by Professor Daybell and Professor Barbara Harris, from UNC-Chapel Hill, USA.
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Music Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR)
Unlocking the mysteries of the mind with music
ICCMR includes members of staff and post-graduate students looking into the development of new technologies for music. However, this is a means to more ambitious ends, which are twofold: on the one hand, our research is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the impact of technology on creativity. On the other hand, our research is also aimed at looking into ways in which music mediated by technology may contribute to human development and wellbeing, in particular with respect to health and disability.
Can music be the tool that unlocks devastating of neurological conditions? ICCMR is working to identify a range of innovative techniques to analyse the brain’s response to music.
Amongst the pioneering projects currently being undertaken at ICCMR is a brain-computer music interface (BCMI), through which a user wears a head cap to link a computer screen with their visual cortex, enabling them to control musical performances using just their vision. Exciting exploratory work is also underway into biocomputers, using organic material as part of an electrical circuit which can influence and respond to music. Research is also continuing into audience perceptions of music and movement, and the ways these can be adapted to influence existing and future compositions.
The composition Corpus Callosum for a chamber orchestra, by Prof Eduardo R. Miranda, is one of the latest artistic outcomes of this research. The composer teamed up with colleagues at ICCMR’s collaborating institutions such as New York University, NOTAM (Norwegian Centre for Technology in Music and the Arts) in Oslo, and IRCAM/Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, to recreate the dialogue between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The score was composed from an fMRI scan of Prof Miranda’s brain listening to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The piece is accompanied by a video by Norwegian video artist Ellen Røed with pictorial renderings of the composer’s brain scanning data.
In addition to contributing to scientific and medical research, the understanding that ICCMR has been amassing from this work has informed a number of cutting edge compositions and performances, in which brain scans have been converted to music and sensory equipment has allowed audiences to take control over elements of what they are watching.
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Research Profile: Bethany Lowe
Research Profile: Katherine Williams
Bethany Lowe’s research focuses on music theory and analysis: how music works and how we interact with its patterns. Dr Lowe has been looking into consciousness and music, using perspectives from mind science to illuminate music and vice versa, with a particular interest in Buddhist philosophy of mind. Currently, she is conducting a study on the construction of overtone singing as a practice of conscious perception.
Katherine Williams’ research and practical activity focus on three major themes: 1) musical genres that can be informed by features and discourses from other genres 2) the interplay between improvisation and composition and 3) the relationship between, and aesthetic appreciation of, live and recorded jazz. Currently, Katherine is co-editing a book entitled TheSingerSongwriter Handbook for Bloomsbury Academic, which is intended as a practical guide for aspiring singer-songwriters.
Photo: Lloyd Russell
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Performance. Experience. Presence (P.E.P) Dr Maggie Irving, PhD thesis performance in Plymouth city centre
The P.E.P Research Group at Plymouth University encompasses researchers of theatre, dance, popular performance, live art, cross-artform and digital performance practices. It focuses on embodiment, representation, culture and identity through the making and analysis of performance: our own and that of other people. P.E.P is particularly interested in interdisciplinary areas that stretch understandings and expectations of performance and discrete genres. Specific areas of expertise include the body in performance; performance sites, spaces and environments; and performer training. The research group is based in The House, the University’s new awardwinning new performing arts centre.
Three exciting monographs were published by P.E.P researchers in 2014: Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism by Dr Prarthana Purkayastha (Palgrave Macmillan); On Walking... and Stalking Sebald by Dr Phil Smith (Triarchy Press); and Anatomy of Performance Training by Dr John Matthews (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama). 2014 additionally saw the creation of a EU-funded dance-film entitled Heaven is a Place, made collaboratively by P.E.P researchers Ruth Way, Roberta Mock & Kayla Parker in partnership with the LGBT advocacy group, Pride in Plymouth.
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Zombies & Performance! Following on from a collaborative public lecture and successful symposium in 2013, three members of P.E.P have co-edited a special issue on the theme of ZOMBIES & PERFORMANCE for the peer reviewed journal, Studies in Theatre & Performance (Vol 34 Issue 3, 2014). It opens with an editorial introduction by Dr Lee Miller, in which he provides an historical taxonomy of the living dead and suggests that zombies provide a model for an utopian community. An article by Prof Roberta Mock reflects on how the living dead acted as iconographic metaphor and performance scenario in Detroit’s hardcore punk scene in the early 1980s. Dr Victor Ramirez Ladron de Guevara examines the performance of (post)modernity and national identity in Mexico through the analysis of four different irruptions of the zombie canon in a range of media. In his article, Dr Phil Smith discusses a series of performative walks which he made in Devon terrains that are suggestive of the fictional landscapes of living dead cinema and literature. Taken as a whole, the journal explores how zombies enable us to interrogate pace and space, presence and absence, and the imagination of new subjectivities, all of which are at the heart of contemporary performance paradigms.
Illustration: Andy Parks
Research Profile – John Matthews, Anatomy of Performance Training. In January 2015 John concluded a 15 month AHRC Research Fellowship on a project ‘Anatomy of Performance Training’ which has produced a monograph, a week of lectures at Britain’s oldest anatomy theatre, a professional workshop for theatre-makers at Theatre Royal and a talk, broadcast on public radio. The project also produced 5 new films by his Research Assistant, Siobhan McKeown, viewable on the Actors and Performers website, where John has has been invited to join the ‘Expert Advice’ panel. The book, Anatomy of Performance Training, published by Methuen Drama Training (Bloomsbury) has been nominated for the ATHE Outstanding Book Award.
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Our Research Students
The School of Humanities and Performing Arts has a varied and thriving community of postgraduate research students, researching on a wide range of projects. The school is able to draw upon a range of internationally recognised staff who are leaders in their respective fields to offer expert supervision. With a rich research environment, students within the school work in a supportive and rigorous context through which they can develop knowledge and skills in research methods, explore appropriate discursive strategies and find ways to communicate their findings to a range of academic and professional communities. Since October 2014, academics within the school have begun the supervision of nineteen new postgraduate research students. Of these students, six are supported by bursaries (HuMPA or 3D3 studentships). If you are interested in beginning a research degree within the school of Humanities and Performing Arts, please contact Arts Research at Plymouth University (arts.research@plymouth.ac.uk).
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Currents student ResM (all part-time)
Student
DoS
Dissertation Topic
Helen Billinghurst
Phil Smith
Translating Walking into a Painting Practice (practice-as-research)
Jonathan Busby
Victor Ramirez Ladron de Guevara
Performing Presence (practice-as-research)
Philippa Catnatch
Annika Bautz
Female Sexual Experience in Gothic Literature of the Late Eighteenth Century
Gemma Chatwin
Roberta Mock
Performing an Alter-ego in Globalized Space (practice-as-research)
Claire China
Ruth Way
Dance, Text & Voice (practice-as-research)
Leah Dungay
Roberta Mock
Protest & Feminist Spectacle
Ellen Hunn
Ruth Way
Improvisation & Well-being (practice-as-research)
Mark Millard
Elaine Murphy
The English settlement of St Christopher’s 1623
Luis Ponte
Kathryn Napier Gray
Fantasy Fiction and the Literary Canon: From Explanation to Escapism
Glyn Potter
James Gregory
Plymouth at War: Imagining and remembering Plymouth at War 1935-1945
Lucinda Ross
Jody Patterson
Gold Griot: Jean-Michel Basquiat Telling (His) Story in Art
Joanna Ruddock
Péter Bokody
Dutch Artists in England: The Cultural Transfer in Seventeenth-Century ‘Low’ Art
Emma Weatherhead
Angela Smith
From a Cage to a Haven: Redefining the Feminine Middlebrow
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Currents student MPhil/PhD
Student
DoS
Dissertation Topic
Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann
Jody Patterson
Public Image: A Social Art History of London’s Murals 1951-2008 (HuMPA studentship)
Charlotte Rockey
Daniel Grey
Exploring the Inner Light: identity, belief and counterculture in England 1960-2000
Eleanor Walsh
Anthony Caleshu
Gareth Jones
Harry Bennett
A History of Nuclear Engineering in the Royal Navy, 1946-1970
James Kearns
Min Wild
Woolf and Phenomenology: A Way to “Separate Moments of Being”
Jamie Edgecombe
Anthony Caleshu
Ekphrastic Fiction: A novel and exploration into the inter-relationship between the visual arts and literature
Rachel Mace
Bonnie Latimer
‘New Species’ of Identity: The Reception of Selfhood in Henry Fielding’s Works
Susan Leedham
Dafydd Moore
Reading Plymouth’s Cottonian Bequest: Manuscripts, Books and Practices of Collection 1740-1863 (AHRC funded collaborative doctoral project)
Tracey Guiry
Angela Smith
Spanoak Wood: nurturing nature in children’s literature
Armani Shepherd
Lee Miller
Sacred Geometry: Exploring the socio-cultural resonance of the 528hz phenomenon
Aurélien Antoine
Eduardo Miranda
An investigation into computer-aided orchestration (AHRC funded 3D3 Studentship)
Our Reseatch Students
Student
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DoS
Dissertation Topic
David Strang
Lee Miller
Territories of Noise: spaces of resonance, dissonance, interference and contagion between light and sound (practice as research
Edward Braund
Eduardo Miranda
Music with Unconventional Computing: Engineering Devices from Plasmodium of Physarum Polycephalum
Federico Visi
Eduardo Miranda
Gestures and embodied meaning in performances with traditional musical instruments
Jared Drayton
Eduardo Miranda
Acquiring Vowel Vocal Tract Parameter Data For Articulatory Synthesisers Using Genetic Algorithms
Michael Mcloughlin
Eduardo Miranda
Developing a Data-Driven Multi-Agent Model for Studying Humpback Whale Song
Natalie Raven
Roberta Mock
Body/cloth and performance (practice-as-research) (HuMPA studentship)
Nuria Bonet Filella
Eduardo Miranda
Towards new approaches to data sonification
Pierre-Emmanuel Largeron
Eduardo Miranda
Developing techniques for musical performance with live electronics
Steven Paige
Roberta Mock
Performance Re-enactment and Digital Archives (practice-as-research) (AHRC Funded 3D3 studentship)
Adhraa Al Shammari
Angela Smith
The Influence of 20th Century English War Poetry on the Development of Modern Iraqi War Poetry
Amy Robson
James Gregory
The Dog as Mutable Motif in Victorian Visual Culture
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Currents student MPhil/PhD
Student
DoS
Dissertation Topic
Christopher Davies
Daniel Maudlin
John Hoyland: The Making and Sustaining of a Career – 1960-82
Douglas Watson
James Gregory
The Road to Learning: Re-evaluating the Mechanics’ Institutes Movement
Watson
Harry Bennett
Tommy Atkins, War Office Reform and the Social and Cultural Presence of the Victorian Army in Britain 1868 – 1899 (HuMPA studentship)
Jennifer Andrews-Fraser
Daniel Maudlin
ANTONY HOUSE - The Material Culture of a Cornish Country House
Jonathan Wooding
Anthony Caleshu
Natural Strange Beatitudes: Geoffrey Hill’s The Orchards of Syon, Poetic Oxymoron and Post-Secular Poetics and an Atheist’s Prayer-Book
Khairul Ismail
Daniel Maudlin
Pudu Jail’s Graffiti: Beyond the Prison Cells
Nikki Frater
Daniel Maudlin
Rex Whistler (1905-1944): Patronage and Artistic Identity
Peter Gillies
Anthony Caleshu
A book of poetry, and a critical dissertation ‘Ekphrastic possibilities in the poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Cole Swensen.
Raheem Albu-Mohammed
Dafydd Moore
Making the Past: The Concepts of Literary History and Literary Tradition in the Works of Thomas Gray
Siobhan Sexton
Gemma Blackshaw
‘The Proust of Painting’: Jacques-Émile Blanche, the Neurasthenic Portrait and Nervous Elite of Paris 1900
Our Reseatch Students
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Student
DoS
Dissertation Topic
Tom Vowler
Anthony Caleshu
That Dark Remembered Day, a novel, and critical essay on editorial aesthetics in contemporary fiction
Alan Butler
Roberta Mock
Performing LGBT Pride in Plymouth 1950 – 2010 AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctorate
Danielle Abulhawa
Lee Miller
Play and Gender in Public Urban Space (practice-as-research)
Joel Eaton
Eduardo Miranda
Towards a framework for mapping brainwave signals to music for performance and composition
Mark Flisher
Lee Miller
Masculinity & Body Art (practice-as-research)
Tiffany Strawson
V Ramirez Ladron De Guevara
Intercultural approaches to gender and mask in Balinese Topeng (practice-as-research) (HuMPA studentship)
28
Forthcoming Research Seminars in HuMPA: April 17th 2-5pm – HuMPA Research Showcase. Art History Date and Time
Venue
Title / Speaker
RLB 208
Siobhan Sexton (Plymouth University), ‘Milk and champagne: the fashionable neurasthenic body of fin-de-siècle Paris’
18 Mar 4-5.30pm
RLB 208
Dr Matt Lodder (University of Essex), ‘The first tattoo artist: tattooing and mass print culture at the turn of the 20th century’
13 May 4-5.30pm
Rolle 116
Dr Jenny Graham (Plymouth University), ‘Gender, sex and the body in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artist’
20 May 4-5.30pm
Rolle 116
Dr Peter Bokody (Plymouth Unversity), ‘Body and absence: the phenomenology of art in the 20th century’
4 Feb 2015 4-5.30pm
English and Creative Writing Date and Time
Venue
Title / Speaker
18 Feb 2015 4-6pm
BGB403
Papers from ECW colleagues Diane Piccitto and Lucy Durneen
BGB403
Rachael McLennan (University of East Anglia) via our Transatlantic Exchanges Forum, will be speaking on representations of the Holocaust in American fiction
BGB410
A poetry reading: poems from Sandra Tappenden, now a student here and a poet published by Salt, alongside at one least one other local poet.
18 Mar 4-6pm
6 May 4-6pm
29
History Date and Time
Venue
Title / Speaker
21 Jan 2015 4-5.30
Rolle 210
Dr Simon Topping, Plymouth University, ‘Give the man a fair trial, and then hang the son-of-a-bitch’
Rolle 210
Dr Claire Fitzpatrick (Plymouth University) ‘An opportunity for the exercise of the national fancy’: The 1912 Home Rule Bill and the Post Office in Ireland.
25 Mar 4-5.30pm
Rolle 210
Professor Elaine Chalus (Bath Spa University), ‘Intimacy, Love and Loneliness: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars, the Fremantle Papers, c.1801-14’
5 May 4-5.30pm
Rolle 605a
Dr James Gregory (Plymouth University), ‘Mercy in British Culture, c.1760 - 1914’
11 Feb 4-5.30
ICCMR Doctoral Research Seminars Date and Time
Venue
Title / Speaker
29 Jan 2015 2-3.30pm
Meeting Rm, the House
Joel Eaton, Mapping Brainwave Information to Musical Control Systems
12 Feb 2-3.30pm
Seminar Space, Link 3
Edward Braund, Bio-computer Music
12 Mar 2-3.30pm
Seminar Space, Link 3
Nuria Bonet Filella, Sonification of Dark Matter
26 Mar 2-3.30pm
Seminar Space, Link 3
Jared Drayton, Articulatory Vocal Synthesis with Genetic Algorithms
30
Forthcoming Research Seminars in HuMPA:
Festival co-organised by ICCMR with Pen Arts: BioMusic – Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2015 27 Feb – 01 March http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event.htm Conference organised by ICCMR: 11th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR) - Music, Mind, and Embodiment 16-19 June http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/cmmr2015/ Workshops organised by ICCMR: 1st International Workshop on Brain-Computer Music Interfacing – Satellite Workshop of CMMR 2015 15 June http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/bcmi2015/ Motion and Music Workshop – Satellite Workshop of CMMR 2015 15 June http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/mocap2015/
31
Film still from Heaven is a Place, a practice-as-research dancefilm by Roberta Mock, Ruth Way and Kayla Parker (2014)
Performance. Experience. Presence (P.E.P). Date and Time
Venue
Title / Speaker
29 Jan 2015 6pm-7.30pm
Jill Craigie Cinema, RLB
Heaven is a Place (film screening and short papers), Roberta Mock, Kayla Parker & Ruth Way
RLB 208
Eila Goldhahn (“We are here now: experience and presence in moving and witnessing”) + Adam Benjamin (“Finding it when you get there”)
RLB 208
Phil Smith: “A review of recent developments and future opportunities in the practices, philosophies and products of contemporary performative walking”
5 Mar 2015 4.45-6.15pm
RLB 208
Victor Ramirez Ladron de Guevara (“And when he woke up, the dinosaur was still there: The Presence of Mexican Theatre Forms in Contemporary Britain”) + Helen Billinghurst (“Walking & Painting”)
12 Mar 2015 4.45-6.15pm
Rolle 102
Anya Lewin: “Fez: The Royal Scent”
26 Mar 2015 4.45-6.15pm
RLB 208
Lee Miller and Bob Whalley: “Between thirteen and fifteen steps”
5 Feb 2015 4.45-6.15pm
12 Feb 2015 4.45-6.15pm