Theatre censorship in Spain

Dr Michael Thompson

The Faculty of Education and Society Research Institute is holding its next School of Culture Research Seminar on Wednesday 1st May 4-5pm at St. Peter’s Campus in David Goldman Room 312A.

All staff and students are welcome as Dr Michael Thompson from Durham University presents his research on theatre censorship in Spain. Work on censorship in modern Spain (both his own and that of other scholars) focuses primarily on the period of the Franco dictatorship (1939-75). This is a rich field and in some ways a very accessible one: Franco’s censorship apparatus was methodical and centralized, and almost all the information needed for an in-depth investigation is contained in the Spanish state archive in Alcalá de Henares. The administrative documents and thousands of censors’ reports provide concrete evidence of what was censored, by whom, and according to what criteria. However, Dr Michael Thompson’s research has sought to compare this model of censorship with those in operation before the establishment of the dictatorship. Theatre censorship during the Second Republic (1931-36) was decentralized and much less reliant on prior vetting of texts, and became radically fragmented by the social, political and economic upheaval triggered in the Republican zone by the civil war (1936-39). Evidence of the operation of censorship in these periods is therefore scarcer, and particularly elusive with reference to the confused war years. Dr Michael Thompson’s talk will present examples of the different kinds of evidence available from the three periods and reflect on what they show about different models of cultural control.

The petticoat fallacy: male historians and female agency in women's narrative histories

The Faculty of Education and Society Research Institute is holding the next School of Culture Research Seminar on Wednesday 20^th March 4-5:30 pm at St. Peter’s Campus in Reg Vardy Building, Room 112.

Archaeologist and historian Max Adams will be discussing his research exploring how women have used alternative strategies to develop agency in artistic, social and political life and exploited opportunities created by widowhood and through patronage to gain access to resources and power.

Tickets are free for this event.

For full details of the event and to register for the seminar please click here.

Culture research seminar

Dr Rachel Ramsey

The university's new research impact officer, Dr Rachel Ramsey, will feature in the School of Culture's upcoming research seminar. She will be presenting the key findings from her doctoral research, which aimed to make methodological and theoretical contributions to the knowledge and study of the senses of polysemous words. Rachel offers her analysis of four polysemous words – over, under, above and below – as a case study for the use of sentence-sorting tasks, data from which were analysed statistically and graphically to test two predictions of an exemplar-theoretic account of word sense representation. More details can be found here.

Wednesday, January 30, 2019: 16:00 - 17:30

St. Peter's Campus, Reg Vardy Room 306

School of Culture research seminar

Dr Sarah Hellawell (Lecturer in Modern British History,
University of Sunderland)

The first School of Culture Research seminar of the academic year will take place on 14th November 2018. Dr. Sarah Hellawell's paper is entitled ‘A strong international spirit’: the Women’s Co-operative Guild and Interwar Internationalism’. Established in 1883, the English Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) was a mass membership association of working-class housewives and mothers. During the First World War, the Guild was an outspoken critic of militarism and maintained an absolutist pacifist response during the interwar years. Internationalist ideals and activities relating to peace, co-operation and the citizenship of women influenced the WCG during the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, the impact of internationalism upon the Guild has previously been overlooked by historians. This paper examines the dynamic between the international, national and local dimensions of the WCG. 

The seminar will start at 4 pm in Reg Vardy 111 and is open to all.

School of Culture Research Seminar

Professor Angela Smith will be giving a talk in the School of Culture research seminar series. Her focus is Channel 4’s Naked Attraction. This is a show that opens with the assertion that ‘Online dating has been a complete nightmare […] with the status symbols we wear getting in the way of finding our perfect mate.’  With full nudity, lingering close-ups and graphic descriptions, many viewers took to Twitter to express dismay that the show had made it to mainstream television, and led to the Guardian referring to it as symptomatic of the dystopian media landscape of 2016. Angela's paper will explore how the shock of graphic nudity is ameliorated by the linguistic strategies of positive politeness that all participants seem to collude with. Such amelioration would appear to be a defence against accusations of voyeuristic and pornographic content on mainstream television.

Wednesday 21 March 2018

Reg Vardy 104A, 4pm-5pm

Light refreshments and Q&A after the talk