News & Events

Home or Away? Globalization and Literary Studies (Thursday 15th October, 2009)

A virtual seminar entitled ‘Globalization and Literary Studies: Home or Away?’ took place at the University of Leeds and the University of Sydney on Thursday 15th October as part of the Worldwide Universities Network’s (WUN) ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Studies’ Virtual Seminar Series. The seminar proved a successful experiment in international collaborative research, with participants from a total of four universities in the U.K. and Australia. Professor Huggan, one of the co-chairs of the event, commented that “the WUN seminars which link academics across the globe to discuss these issues are an exercise in postcolonial transnationalism in themselves”.

Two Phd students presented papers at the seminar: Ben Miller, from the University of New South Wales, gave a paper entitled ‘The Edinburgh ‘Corobbora’: (Post)colonial Nationalism in David Burn's The Bushrangers (1829)’ examining how “the ambivalent nationalism at the heart of The Bushrangers mirrors recent debates about Australian national identity”. The second paper was given by University of Leeds PhD student, Lizzy Finn, who is currently conducting her research at The University of Sydney as a visiting scholar through the WUN’s Research Mobility Programme. Finn’s paper, ‘Representations of Domestic Violence in Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs (1997)’ discussed local and global solutions to violence in Indigenous Australian communities.

A more detailed overview of this seminar will be published in the University of Sydney’s postgraduate journal, Philament, and both Miller and Finn’s papers are being considered for publication in the next issue of the WUN postgraduate eJournal, Ex Plus Ultra, which will be hosted by the University of Leeds in 2010. Finn, who also helped organize the event, hopes to further develop the links she has helped to build upon between Leeds and Sydney into a conference next year, and invites any interested staff and postgraduates interested in getting involved in this project to contact her for more information (Lizzy Finn - eng3e3f@leeds.ac.uk)

The Postcolonial Human, a postgraduate conference held by the ICPS, University of Leeds

From 24-25th September 2009 the ICPS held 'The Postcolonial Human', an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars from the UK, China, France, Canada, Germany, Austria, Denmark and Mexico supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Faculty of Arts Graduate School and the Leeds Centre for Canadian Studies.

Following on from the success of last year's postgraduate conference, the event was well attended, with 60 registrants over the two days. Presenters talked on a variety of topics, from representations of the human in literature and film, to problems arising from its sometimes unacknowledged specificity in narrative histories, to the ramifications of its legal definitions.

A distinction between the 'natural' and the 'culturally recognised' developed as a prominent line of inquiry, among others, during discussions. Papers discussing migration questioned whether the 'human' was a category of exclusion and disempowerment, while others suggested that the human body itself must be privileged as a site that rejects its own circumscription as 'civilised'.

Two especially engaging sessions on training and professional development were delivered at the conference by Dr. John McLeod and Dr. Ananya Kabir, both affiliated with the Institute and both in the English department at Leeds. Dr. McLeod's talk, 'Getting Started in Academia', characterised the importance of a proactive yet thesis-centred approach to a scholar's early career, while Dr. Kabir provided a more specific focus in 'Getting Published'. This part of the conference was well received by attendees, who generally found the career talks very useful as well as providing a pleasant break in the proceedings.

Finally, our keynote speakers, Professors Alan Lester and Peter Hallward, each challenged the possibility of intersecting postcolonialism with humanism on a conceptual level from their own disciplinary standpoints (Professor Lester as an Historical Geographer; Professor Hallward as a Philosopher). A special issue of Ex Plus Ultra, an international journal edited by postgraduates at the Institute, is being assembled.

'After Empire? Rethinking the post in the postcolonial.'

A Conference at the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
Friday 26 - Saturday 27 September, 2008
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds

For historians, watersheds are an inescapable tool. To think in terms of continuity and change, scholars cannot help but look for ruptures and breaks, turning points and defining moments. But a timeframe demands a beginning and an end. The validity of origins or beginnings has now been challenged. But what of 'end'?

This conference will provide a space in which to critically rethink the notion of an 'end' of empire. Just how meaningful is it to divide the twentieth century into colonial and postcolonial chapters? And more importantly, how meaningful might it be to think without them? This is not simply to repeat the neo-colonial refrain. Rather, the intention of this conference is to critically appraise what colonialism was, how it was undone, the form in which it may have continued to exist and ways by which it may be challenged once more.

We are looking for papers from across the arts and social sciences that deal with the question of an end to empire. Topics might include:

• Decolonisation
• Memory and Nostalgia
• Migration and Diaspora
• Racism and Antiracism
• Protest and Resistance
• Nationalism and Transnationalism
• Globalisation and Hybridity

Papers from postgraduate researchers are especially welcome. Please send 250 word proposals for 20-minute papers to Ed Kirkby (E.N.Kirby@leeds.ac.uk) by July 1 2008.

Download conference poster (54kb pdf)

Postgraduate Intensive in Sydney, July 23-25 2008

The Intensive aims to explore the relationship between the recent trend to transnational history and the conceptualisation of the international as a space and form of interpellation that is both constructed out of, and alternative to, nations. What is the difference between transnational and international history? What is the relationship of transnational history to other concepts in current historiography, including cosmopolitanism, the global, as well as the international?

International Conference on Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism

June 20-21, 2008, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Diaspora and cosmopolitanism are mutually decentered, but along the contrasting metaphorical trajectories of the spore and the cosmos. The tension between these epistemological frames arguably opens a space for reconsideration of the new millennial politics of postcolonial identities... In the 21st century, how do the models of diaspora and the cosmopolitical allow us to reflect on the undoing of former social and political geographies, and the formation of new ones? How do these models merge or overlap, and how do they contradict or undermine each other?

Go to event website: http://africa.wisc.edu/postcolonial/ for further details.

Building links between Leeds and Sydney

Status and Power in the British Imperial World

On 30 May 2007, the Universities of Leeds and Sydney held the first of a series of video seminars, organised jointly by the University of Sydney’s ‘Nation Empire Globe’ research cluster and the University of Leeds’ Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

The seminar was themed ‘Status and Power in the British Imperial World’ and heard papers from Dr. Kirsten McKenzie, senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney, and from Professor Frederick Cooper, professor in history at New York University and visiting scholar at the University of Sydney. The seminar was chaired by Professor Andrew Thompson, from Leeds, and Professor Robert Aldrich, from Sydney.

This was the first time that Leeds and Sydney have used video-conferencing facilities to link their respective institutions. It is expected that a series of video seminars between the two universities will be staged during 2007/08. The intention of the series will be primarily to allow postgraduate research students to present their work to an international audience.

Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory

The massacre of Algerian demonstrators by the Paris police on the night of 17 October 1961 is one of the most contested events in contemporary French history. A new book by Jim House (University of Leeds) and Neil MacMaster (University of East Anglia) provides a multi-layered investigation of the repression through a critical examination of newly opened archives, oral sources, the press and contemporary political movements and debates. The book uses previously unavailable sources to uncover the truth about one of the most controversial episodes in contemporary French history. More information about this book can we found on the Oxford University Press website at

http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199247257

Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization

Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization, a special issue of the journal Contemporary Literature edited by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, brings together studies of world literature, book history, narrative theory, and the contemporary novel. Contributors suggest that contemporary novels by immigrant writers need to be read across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation. Analyzing work by David Peace, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Iva Pekarkova, Yan Geling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anchee Min, and Monica Ali, these essays take up a range of critical topics, including the transnational book and the migrant writer, the comparative reception history of postcolonial fiction, transnational criticism and Asian-American literature in the U. S., mobility and feminism in translation, linguistic mediation and immigrating fictions, migration and the politics of narrative form. Immigrant Fictions will be available in the Winter 2006 issue of Contemporary Literature and published as a book by the University of Wisconsin Press in March 2007.

Colonial and Postcolonial Migrations’ Conference

Weetwood Hall, Leeds, UK, 8-9th June 2006

The Worldwide Universities Network ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Migrations’ conference, hosted by the Leeds Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, was held at Weetwood Hall, Leeds, UK, on 8-9th June 2006.

The major international conference was attended by leading academics and postgraduate students from a number WUN universities in America, Europe and Britain: The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; The University of Wisconsin-Madison; The University of Utrecht; the University of Bristol; and the University of Leeds.

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