International fellowship programme for New York Public Library resources

15 fellowships of up to $60,000 are awarded each a year to outstanding scholars and writers – academics, independent scholars, journalists, and creative writers - by the Cullman Center’s Selection Committee.

The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers is an international fellowship program open to people whose work will benefit directly from access to the research collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street (formerly the Humanities and Social Sciences Library). Renowned for the extraordinary comprehensiveness of its collections, the Library is one of the world's preeminent resources for study in anthropology, art, geography, history, languages and literature, philosophy, politics, popular culture, psychology, religion, sociology, and sports.

Foreign nationals conversant in English are welcome to apply.

The Cullman Center looks for top-quality writing from academics as well as from creative writers and independent scholars. It aims to promote dynamic communication about literature and scholarship at the very highest level – within the Center, in public forums throughout the Library, and in the Fellows’ published work.

Exclusions
Candidates who need to work primarily in The New York Public Library's other research libraries – The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Science, Industry and Business Library – are not eligible for this fellowship, nor are people seeking funding for research leading directly to a degree.

Deadline
Completed applications and letters of recommendation for the Cullman Center fellowship must be received by Friday, September 25, 2009. Candidates will learn the results of the competition in early March.

For more information and application form, see:
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/scholars/fellowship.html

Collaborative Research Seminar - Framing Muslims: New Directions

A collaborative workshop has been organised by the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, Open University and the Framing Muslims Project, SOAS as follows:

25 June 2009, 2pm
Venue: MR01, Wilson A Block, Ground floor
Milton Keynes Campus, Open University

Speakers:
Madeline Clements (English, University of East London)‘Lunar streets and the Lonely Planet: locating Karachi in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography’

Maruta Herding (Sociology, Cambridge University)‘'Pop-Islam': The Emergence of an Islamic Youth Culture in Western Europe’

Peter Morey (English Literature, University of East London)
‘How (not) to Recognise a Muslim Stereotype: the Spooks Controversy’

Amina Yaqin (Postcolonial Studies and Urdu, SOAS)
‘What is a Muslim Diaspora? Locating Muslim transnational subjectivities in British media post 9/11’

ALL ARE WELCOME

If you would like to book a place please contact Heather Scott, Research Centre Secretary at h.scott@open.ac.uk

This seminar is one of a series. The specific questions which the seminar series and interactive website will address include the following:

• How is the production and reception of images of Muslims governed?
• How have the roles and conventions of such representations changed since 9/11?
• What are the strengths and limitations of existing theoretical paradigms when addressing questions of representation and power?
• How might we understand oppositional modes of Muslim representation, and how is the space for such forms negotiated?
• How has the legal status of certain Muslim practices and structures been called into question, and how has this questioning been mediated?
• How has the re-entrenchment of national belonging been used to question models of multiculturalism?

For more information see: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre or http://www.framingmuslims.org

Conference: Echoes of the Past: Women, History and Memory in Fiction and Film

Newcastle University, June 26-28 2009

Keynote Speakers:

• Kate Mosse (best-selling author of Labyrinth and Sepulchre)
• Deborah Cartmell (De Montfort University)
• Veronica Gregg (City University of New York)
• Diana Wallace (University of Glamorgan)

Plus 'Vanessa and Virginia Writing Workshop' with Professor Susan Sellers

A very limited number of places on the workshop are still available for those attending the conference. Early registration is recommended to avoid disappointment. Registration and payment deadline for non-speakers: 29th May 2009

This conference is supported through a generous contribution from the Catherine Cookson Foundation.

Details of the cfp, conference programme and how to register can be found on the conference website at: http://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/echoes

New Writing Prize for poetry, fiction and life writing

As part of their 25th anniversary celebrations, Wasafiri has launched a New Writing Prize for poetry, fiction and life writing. The competition closes for entries on 30 June, and the winner will be announced on 31 October at a day-long programme of events for Wasafiri at the Southbank Centre in London. Judges for the prize include Margaret Busby, Mimi Khalvati, Susheila Nasta and Blake Morrison. The winner of each category will receive £300, and their work will be published in the first issue of Wasafiri in 2010.

Wasafiri, the literary magazine at the forefront of contemporary international writing, celebrates its 25th birthday in 2009. To mark the occasion, a variety of celebratory events is planned throughout the year.

Since the magazine was first published in 1984 it has continued to champion new writing, celebrating Britain’s diverse cultural heritage together with inspirational writing from around the world. ‘Wasafiri’, the Kiswahili word for ‘travellers’, echoes the magazine’s ethos of writing as a form of cultural travel and its aim to extend the established boundaries of literary culture.

Founded in 1984 by the writer, critic and academic, Susheila Nasta, the magazine has provided a platform for hundreds of writers. Many were struggling to be heard at the outset of their writing careers, and many have since gone on to become world-renowned, award winners.

For further information about the New Writing Prize and forthcoming events, visit the website – www.wasafiri.org

Wasafiri is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Open University and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

The Books that Made Me

Boyd Tonkin chairs literary panel at The British Library, in association with Wasafiri magazine and Arts Council England.

Monday 18 May: 6.30-8.00pm

Conference Centre, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, W1

£6 / £4 concessions

2009 marks the 25th anniversary of Wasafiri magazine, the literary magazine at the forefront of contemporary international writing. To celebrate, the magazine is hosting a literary debate at The British Library, to discuss how literature impacts on some of the leading writers of today.

The panel, chaired by The Independent’s Literary Editor Boyd Tonkin, includes distinguished authors Helen Cross, Diana Evans, Aamer Hussein, Caryl Phillips and Marina Warner. Reflecting on the books that have inspired them, the panel will discuss why some books impact so forcefully on our reading and writing lives, as well as looking at the ways in which we encounter them and in which they return to us.

Wasafiri magazine was founded in 1984 by the writer, critic and academic, Susheila Nasta. Celebrating Britain’s diverse cultural heritage together with inspirational writing from around the world, the magazine champions new writing and has provided a platform for hundreds of writers. The magazine championed early works by Vikram Seth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and has featured interviews, reviews and new writing by Hari Kunzru, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Anita Desai, Linda Grant, Maggie Gee, Michael Horowitz and Catherine O'Flynn. Prestigious contributors to the magazine include V S Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe.

Tickets for ‘The Books that Made Me’ are now on sale at http://boxoffice.bl.uk, by telephone on 01937 546546 (Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm) or in person at The British Library Information Desk.

For more information on this event and for a full list of anniversary activity throughout 2009, go to www.wasafiri.org.

Wasafiri is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Open University and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Profiles of chair and speakers:

• The Chair, Boyd Tonkin, studied English and French literature at Cambridge University. He taught literature in higher and adult education before becoming an award-winning magazine journalist, a feature writer and features editor of the weekly magazine for social services professionals, Community Care. Already a freelance writer and interviewer for The Observer, he became social policy editor of the New Statesman, and then Literary Editor, before moving to The Independent as Literary Editor. In addition to working as organiser and judge on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and (in 2007) the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. He has reported on literary and artistic issues from more than 20 countries on four continents, and his cultural essays have been published widely; most recently, in the British Council anthology New Writing 15 (Granta).
• Helen Cross is the author of The Secrets She Keeps and My Summer of Love, which won a Betty Trask Prize and was made into an award-winning film. Helen's second novel, The Secrets She Keeps is now available in paperback, and her third novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee is published by Bloomsbury in May 2009. She lives in Birmingham.
• Diana Evans was a dancer before she became a writer and critic. Her first novel, 26a, received a Betty Trask award, a nomination for the Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award. It was also the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She lives in London.
• Aamer Hussein is the author of the short story collections, This Other Salt, Turquoise and Insomnia. His first novel, Another Gulmohar Tree, will be published by Telegram on 7 May 2009.
• Caryl Phillips has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006. His next book, In the Falling Snow, will be published in June 2009.
• Marina Warner has an international reputation as a critic, historian and a novelist. Her recent non-fiction works include The Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman and Fantastic Metamorphoses, while her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Indigo and The Leto Bundle, and most recently a short-story collection, Murderers I Have Known.

Reading Experience Database 1450-1945

Version 3 of the Reading Experience Database (RED) is planned for release in summer 2009.

RED was launched in 1996 at the UK Open University. Its mission is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of readers of all nationalities in Britain and those of British subjects abroad from 1450 to 1945.

RED currently contains approximately 17,000 records, the majority of which have been verified, edited and released for searching. More entries are contributed and released every day and thus return visits to the database should yield new results each time.

Anyone can contribute information to the database and help to make this resource usefully and fully searchable by providing details of whatever evidence you have of a relevant Reading Experience.

RED is also looking for volunteers to work their way systematically through such materials in order to record evidence of reading.If you are interested in becoming a volunteer see: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/volunteers.html

What is a ‘reading experience’?
‘Reading’ can mean many things, from reading a book aloud or silently, to the critical ‘reading’ of a text (including dramatic and cinematic texts) in an academic sense, or (metaphorically) ‘reading’ a face, a social situation, or the symbolic value of a text. But in the interests of clarity and manageability the RED has had to exclude certain of these ‘reading experiences’ as outside their remit. For the purposes of the database, a ‘reading experience’ means a recorded engagement with a written or printed text - beyond the mere fact of possession. A database containing as much information as possible about what British people read, where and when they read it and what they thought of it will form an invaluable resource for researchers of book history, cultural studies, sociology and family history, to name but a few.

For more information see: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/

Seminar: ‘The Role of South Asian Sailors in the 1919 Port Riots’

Tuesday 5 May 17.30 - 19.00
Venue: NG15, North Block, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E

All are welcome; booking is not required.

Jacqueline Jenkinson is Lecturer in History at Stirling University. Her two main research interests are the social history of medicine, on which she has written several books – the most recent being Scotland’s Health: 1919–1948 (Peter Lang, 2002) – and the history of minority ethnic populations in Britain. She has published several articles on the 1919 port riots; the most recent, on the riot in Glasgow, appeared in the journal Twentieth Century British History in January 2008. Her book on the riots, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Post-Colonial Britain, is published by Liverpool University Press in March 2009.

This seminar series has developed from the AHRC-funded project 'Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950'. Complicating the common perception that a homogeneous British culture only began to diversify after the Second World War, the project examines how an early South Asian diasporic population impacted on Britain's literary, cultural and political life.

'Making Britain' is led by Professor Susheila Nasta (Open University), in collaboration with Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) and Dr Ruvani Ranasinha (King's College London), and Research Assistants Dr Sumita Mukherjee (Oxford), Dr Rehana Ahmed (Open) and Dr Florian Stadtler (Open).

Please visit the project website for more details and information about other forthcoming workshops and events: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/south-asians-making-britain

This series of seminars coordinated by Dr Sumita Mukherjee and Dr Rehana Ahmed will be addressing various forms of resistance by South Asians in Britain during this period. It forms part of the regular series organized by the Open University Postcolonial Research Group in association with the Institute of English Studies.

Papers invited on Swinburne for conference in July 2009 - closing date for proposals 28 Feb 2009

The Institute of English Studies, Senate House (London) is holding a conference on Friday 10th and Saturday 11th July, 2009 on the works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909, poet, dramatist, novelist and critic).

The organizers – Stefano Evangelista (Trinity, Oxford), Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, London), and Patricia Pulham (Portsmouth) – welcome papers on all aspects of Swinburne’s life and works (poetry, essays, dramas and novels), but are keen to receive proposals relating to writing produced after 1866.

Possible subject areas include: Swinburne and Classicism, Swinburne and Medievalism, Swinburne and the Arts (painting, music, sculpture), Swinburne and Aestheticism/Decadence, Swinburne and Modernism
Swinburne and France/Italy, Swinburne and Politics, Swinburne and his Influences, Swinburne and his Contemporaries, Swinburne and his Successors
Swinburne, Gender, and Sexuality, Swinburne and the Body/Senses, Swinburne, Style, Form, and/or Metre, Swinburne and Controversy, Swinburne’s Reception

Please email proposals (500 words maximum) for twenty-minute papers to all three organizers at the following addresses, stating your academic institution and status (if applicable) - c.h.maxwell@qmul.ac.uk, Patricia.Pulham@port.ac.uk, stefano-maria.evangelista@trinity.ox.ac.uk

Closing Date for proposals: 28 February 2009

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), poet, dramatist, novelist and critic, was late Victorian England’s unofficial Poet Laureate, admired by his contemporaries for his technical brilliance, his facility with classical and medieval forms, and his courage in expressing his sensual, erotic imagination. This international centenary conference aims to reclaim Swinburne’s position as the pre-eminent late nineteenth-century poet, to draw attention to the breadth and diversity of his oeuvre, to re-evaluate his considerable achievements, and to assess his impact on those who came after. In addition to the three distinguished plenary speakers – Jerome McGann, Terry Meyers, and Yopie Prins – the conference aims to attract both those with specialist interests in Swinburne and those keen to extend their knowledge of one of the most exciting literary figures of the Victorian age. It aims to stimulate further academic scholarship on Swinburne, with the specific intention of producing an edited collection of the best papers resulting from the conference. The conference is also timed to allow delegates to attend the joint BAVS/NAVSA conference 13-15 July 2009, Churchill College, Cambridge.

Professor's publication receives 'outstanding academic title' award

The Novels of Daniel Defoe has been awarded an ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ by Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association.

Bob Owens, Professor of English Literature at the Open University, has been joint General Editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe, an edition in 44 volumes that has been appearing at the rate of 4 or 5 volumes every year, since 2000. The first part of the final set, The Novels, appeared in late 2007, and included Prof Owens' editions of Robinson Crusoe and the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

The award of ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ is given to about ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice over the year. The 2008 list, published in the January 2009 issue (vol. 46, no. 5) includes 679 titles from 54 disciplines. There were 38 titles in the section on English and American Language and Literature, in which the Defoe edition was included.

The criteria for the award are:

• Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
• Importance relative to other literature in the field
• Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
• Originality or uniqueness of treatment
• Value to undergraduate students
• Importance in building undergraduate library collections.

The journal Choice is perhaps not very well known in the UK, but it has a circulation of over 35,000 copies to academic librarians as well as academics in the USA, and is very important in getting academic works into college and university libraries.

Professor Owens says, "For the edition to have been given this accolade in its final stages is very pleasing indeed, not only for me but for my dear friend and colleague and joint General Editor, Nick Furbank, Emeritus Professor of The Open University. Now in his 88th year of age, but as intellectually indefatigable as ever, Nick completed a magnificent edition of Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress in the final set which has just appeared. It has been quite a job seeing 4 or 5 volumes through the press every year for ten years, though it has been enjoyable too."

Edited from email 12/12/2008.

Open University academic wins prize for essay on Marlowe

Dr David Mateer is the joint winner of the 2008 Calvin and Rose G Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe. He has received half of the £9,000 prize money for his essay 'New Sightings of Christopher Marlowe in London', which is an account of the legal consequences of Marlowe's transgressive behaviour in the capital after he left Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It also fills in some details relating to his early career that were hitherto unknown.

The Calvin and Rose G Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe is offered annually. This is awarded to the person who submits to The King's School, Canterbury, prior to the first day of September in any year, an essay that, in the opinion of The King's School, most convincingly, authoritatively and informatively examines and discusses in depth the life and works of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, with particular regard to the possibility that Christopher Marlowe wrote some or all of those plays and poems, or made some inspirational creative or compositional contributions towards the authorship of them.

Dr David Mateer is Lecturer in the Department of Music at the Open University, Milton Keynes, and has published widely in the field of English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most recently in the form of editions of William Byrd’s Songs of sundrie natures (Byrd Edition 13) and two volumes of pre-Reformation liturgical settings from the Gyffard partbooks (Early English Church Music 48 and 51). From an interest in legal records as musicological documents, he has developed a theatre-historical side to his research, with recent articles appearing in Review of English Studies (on relations between Richard Perkins, Francis Langley and Edward Alleyn) and English Literary Renaissance (on the early history of the Theatre in Shoreditch).

Abstract - 'New Sightings of Christopher Marlowe in London'
Two lawsuits – one certainly relating to Christopher Marlowe, the other probably relating to him – have been discovered among the records of the court of King’s Bench at The National Archives in Kew, London. In the first, one Edward Elvyn, a friend from his student days at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, sued ‘Christopher Marley’ in debt for the unpaid sum of £10 lent to him in London in April 1588. In the second, James Wheatley, a hackney-man from the parish of Allhallows London Wall, brought suit against ‘Christopher Marlo’ in conversion for the non-delivery of a horse and tackle that the latter had hired from him in August 1587. These documents help to fill a yawning gap in Marlowe’s biography by locating him in the theatrical community living around Bishopsgate, in London’s north-east suburbs, immediately after leaving Cambridge on completion of his studies there. His difficulties with the hackney-man are tentatively linked with the horse-courser episode in Doctor Faustus, which, it is suggested, may have implications for the dating of the play. The transgressive nature of Marlowe’s behaviour, as revealed by the new documents, appears to confirm at an early date his reputation as the ‘bad boy’ of Elizabethan theatre.

Abstract copied from http://www.earlytheatre.ca/et11_2.pdf. The full essay appears in the journal ‘Early Theatre’ Vol 11.2 (2008).

Yale Centre for British Art - Visiting Scholarships (up to 4 months)

The Yale Center for British Art offers residential awards ranging from one to four months to scholars undertaking postdoctoral or equivalent research related to British art. These awards allow scholars of literature, history, the history of art, and related fields to study the Center’s holdings of paintings, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts. The Center also offers several pre-doctoral residential awards ranging from one to two months for graduate students writing doctoral dissertations in the field of British art.

Visiting Scholar awards include the cost of travel to and from New Haven and also provide accommodations and a living allowance. Recipients are required to be in residence in New Haven and must be free of all other significant professional responsibilities during their stay.

Applications to become a visiting scholar between July 2009 and June 2010 must reach the YCBA by January 16, 2009. It is too late to apply for this deadline, but if this is something that is applicable and of interest it is worth looking at this again around September/October 2009 for an application in January 2010.

For more information see: http://ycba.yale.edu/education/edu_fellowships.html

Open University International Contemporary Writing magazine wins Arts Council funding

Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, housed at the OU and edited by Susheila Nasta of the English Department has won an additional grant from the Arts Council of England to support our 25th anniversary year in 2009. Susheila and the Wasafiri team based in Camden (Region 1) will be co-ordinating and organising a series of high profile events in London next year. The grant to support these events is for £36,000. Events will include a live event at the British Library with invited writers talking about the 'Books That Made Me', participation in the London Book Fair (India focus) in partnership with the British Council, the launch of a New Writing Prize (judged by Blake Morrison, Susheila Nasta, Mimi Khalvati, Margaret Busby) and a day of anniversary events at the Festival Hall, South Bank in October 09 including a number of highly distinguished writers.

We will also be publishing a bumper special issue.

This is very good news indeed especially in the current economic climate. The grant supplements our annual award as an Arts Council revenue client.

For more information about Wasafiri see www.wasafiri.org

Edited from email (08/12/08) from Dr Susheila Nasta, Professor of Modern Literature, Editor, Wasafiri.