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School of English and Drama

Research Seminar

 

QMCECS offers a programme of early evening seminars with speakers from a range of disciplines. We have six seminars a year, and recent speakers have included Sophie Gee (Princeton), Chloe Wigston-Smith (York), Karen Harvey (Birmingham), and Suvir Kaul (Penn). For a list of speakers in the last five years see the seminar archive.

Spring 2024 Programme  

*Seminars will be available both digitally and in-person: sign up links are available here and on the mailing list a fortnight before each event* 

All seminars Wednesday 17:15–19:00 unless otherwise stated.

Location: QMUL Mile End Campus, Graduate Centre GC222

31 January: Emma Griffin (QMUL), 'European exploration, empires, and the making of the modern world'

28 February: Judith Hawley (RHUL), 'From the Gin Craze to Gin Palaces'.

20 March: Dan Sperrin (Cambridge), 'Swift and the Secret World'.

This seminar is going to be about the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and his contact with the 'secret world': intelligencers, spies, strategic information gathering, and intelligence intrigue. As a political writer and satirist, Swift is most often associated with the parliamentary party system - especially with the 'rage of party' which erupted during the last ministry of Queen Anne towards the end of the second Grand Alliance war. I'm going to be talking about a very different Swift: a Swift who was not primarily invested in the party system (unless he was trying to satirise it), but who was much more concerned with service elites consulting on foreign affairs, international law, and the management of constitutional crises. I hope that, over the course of the paper, I can persuade everyone that this is far from being a matter of historical nicety and pedantic differentiation – that there is actually serious literary payoff to recontextualising Swift in this way, not least because Swift was himself a notoriously secretive and deceptive writer who built a mature poetics of allusion shaped by modern capabilities in ciphering, code-breaking, and rhetorical double-plotting. 

In-person at QMUL Mile End Campus Graduate Centre GC222
and Online via zoom, register at https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlcemoqTgqHNNuLVkuBj1KCyZsjOizV4Rw

22 May: Suvir Kaul and Will Bowers (QMUL), 'Fifty Fathoms Deep — Reading the Eighteenth-Century Shipwreck'. This will be a in-person 'reading group' style event, with texts circulated in advance. 

 

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