Theory Research Seminar: Past Seminars
Autumn Semester 2008/09
NATALIA SKRADOL
`A Carnival of Exception: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giorgio Agamben and Mikhail Bakhtin´
Tuesday 4 November 2008
Seminar Room, Douglas Knoop Centre, Humanities Research Institute, 34 Gell Street
Natalia Skradol is Research Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeitgeschichtliche Forschung, Potsdam, Germany. She has published in the areas of film studies, psychoanalysis and totalitarian rhetoric. Her current research project is "Totalitarian emotions" - representations of the emotional world of the 'New Man' in popular scientific and propagandistic texts from the time of the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, post-revolutionary Russia and the period of 'high Stalinism.'
PETER JONES
`Sign Mediation in Vygotsky's Cultural-historical Psychology´
Tuesday 2 December 2008
Seminar Room, Douglas Knoop Centre, Humanities Research Institute, 34 Gell Street
Peter Jones is Principal Lecturer in Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. His interests include general linguistic theory and philosophy of language, the Vygotskian cultural-historical conception of language, and the role of language and communication in social activity. His recent publications present a critique of mainstream linguistic views (including 'discourse analysis'), drawing on the 'integrationist' approach to language and communication developed by Roy Harris and others. He is currently writing a book on language theory in the Vygotskian tradition.
Spring Semester 2007/08
HANS GÜNTHER
«Остранение: Брехт и Шкловский»
('Defamiliarisation: Brecht and Shklovskii'; in Russian)
Tuesday 15 April 2008
Hans Günther is emeritus professor of the University of ielefeld (Germany). His research focuses on Russian avant-garde and Soviet culture, and his publications include Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur (1984), The Culture of the Stalin Period (ed., 1990), Der sowjetische Übermensch (1993), Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (ed. with E. Dobrenko, 2000), and Sovetskaia vlast´ i media (ed. with S. Hänsgen, 2006). His principal current interest is the work of Andrei Platonov, on whom he has published extensively.
BRIAN KENNEDY
'War, Carnival Violence, and National Identity: Timothy Findley Makes the Case for Canada'
Tuesday 6 May 2008
Brian Kennedy teaches contemporary British and post-colonial literature and writing classes at Pasadena City College in California. He is the author of Growing Up Hockey (2007), a work of creative non-fiction, and co-editor, with Mona Field, of The People and Promise of California (2008); he has also published articles on writers including Henry James and Virginia Woolf. He has been active in Bakhtin studies for a decade and is currently putting together a volume of essays which use Bakhtin to read the work of Finnish poet and novelist Bo Carpelan.
Autumn Semester 2007/08
MIKA LÄHTEENMÄKI
'Evgenii Polivanov: Between Two Paradigms'
Thursday 11 October 2007
Mika Lähteenmäki is Acting Professor of Russian at the University of Joensuu, Finland. A frequent visitor to the Bakhtin Centre, he has published widely on the work of the Bakhtin Circle, with particular reference to questions of language and linguistics.
Spring Semester 2006/07
ILYA KALININ
'Fiction, Non-Fiction, Meta-Fiction: The Case of Russian Formalism'
Tuesday 30 January 2007
Ilya Kalinin is an assistant professor at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in St Petersburg. His research focuses on the history of the humanities in early Soviet Russia (particularly on the political and philosophical dimensions of Russian Formalism). He is editor-in-chief of the journal of NZ: Debaty o politike i kul'ture (NZ: Debates on Politics and Culture), and has published in a wide range of journals including Russian Literature, Wiener Slavistischer Almanach and Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.
MAGDALENA SMOCZYŃSKA
'Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Child Language Study'
Tuesday 6 February 2007
Magdalena Smoczyńska is Docent (Reader) in Linguistics and Head of the Child Language Laboratory at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland and was, from October 2006 to February 2007, Leverhulme Visiting Professor based in the HRI, and attached to the Department of Human Communication Sciences and School of English, at the University of Sheffield.
GAVIN GRINDON
'Bread and Circuses or Bread and Roses?: Carnival as Safety Valve or Revolution'
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Gavin Grindon is a final-year PhD student in the English department at the University of Manchester. His thesis examines the theory of revolution as festival as it has developed in Surrealist-Marxist thought from the College of Sociology in the 1930s to Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s. His recent publications include 'Carnival Against Capital: A Comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey', Anarchist Studies, 12:2 (2004) and 'The Breath of the Possible', in Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation // Collective Theorization, ed. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber (AK Press, 2006).
VLADIMIR V. FESHCHENKO
'Formalism with and without Aesthetics: Glimpses into the History and Theory of Linguistic Aesthetics'
Tuesday 22 May 2007
Vladimir V. Feshchenko is Research Fellow in theoretical linguistics at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
Autumn Semester 2006/07
SANJA BAHUN-RADUNOVIĆ
`The Subject and its Vicissitudes: Psychoanalysis in Early Soviet Russia´
Tuesday 26 September
Sanja Bahun-Radunović received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in May 2006. Her dissertation, entitled `Modernism and melancholia: history as mourning-work´, uses the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to illuminate the formal inflections in the genre of the novel as `refractives´ of wider social and intellectual changes. She has published articles and book chapters on a variety of topics, ranging from the history of psychoanalysis and its intellectual dynamics through modernist literature and arts to the theory of the novel.
RUTH DERKSEN
'"Write in Russian and very little or I will not get it": Transgressing Genre Boundaries in Stalin´s Prison Camps'
Tuesday 10 October 2006
Ruth Derksen is an instructor and administrator in the Centre for Professional Skills Development at the University of British Columbia, and a Remote Location PhD student associated with the Bakhtin Centre. The subject of her thesis, which is near to completion, is the epistolary form in light of genre theory and discourse analysis, with particular reference to the work of Bakhtin. As well as working on several articles and a book, she is producing a documentary which investigates letters sent to Canada by prisoners in Stalin´s Gulag between 1930 and 1939.
PETER JONES
'Voloshinov´s Linguistics in Integrationist Perspective'
Tuesday 28 November 2006
Peter Jones is Principal Lecturer in Communication Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. His interests include general linguistic theory and philosophy of language, the Vygotskian cultural-historical conception of language, and the role of language and communication in social activity. His recent publications present a critique of mainstream linguistic views (including `discourse analysis´), drawing on the `integrationist´ approach to language and communication developed by Roy Harris and others. His latest paper, `Why There is No Such Thing as "Critical Discourse Analysis"´, is forthcoming in Language and Communication.
Spring Semester 2005/06
ALEXANDRE MITCHELL
`A Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Carnival at the Kabirion Sanctuary (5th–4th centuries BC) in Central Greece´
Tuesday 21 February 2006
Alexandre Mitchell lectures in classical archaeology and Latin at the University of Reading, and is a research fellow at the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, entitled `Comic pictures in Greek vase-painting. Humour in the Polis and the Dionysian world, in the sixth and fifth centuries BC´ is the first systematic iconographical study of humour in Greek art. A book based on the thesis, and offering an archaeological and historical investigation of the social meaning of humour on Greek pots of the 6th to the 4th centuries BC, is to be published by University College London Press in 2007.
PAUL THOMPSON
`Spoken Monologue as a Medium of Learning´
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Paul Thompson was a secondary-school English teacher for many years before undertaking doctoral research into the ways in which children learn through small-group talk; his ensuing study was grounded theoretically in the ideas of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. He now works as a teacher educator and researcher in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham. Over the past two years, he has coordinated a teacher research programme involving ten linked action research projects to develop speaking and listening in schools in the Barnsley Education Action Zone. His most recent articles on classroom oracy have appeared in Changing English and English in Education. A paper on the assessment of classroom talk is due to be published in the Cambridge Journal of Education later this year.
CHIK COLLINS
`The Speech Genre of "Partnership" in Urban Scotland: Neo-Liberalism, Urban Degeneration and Local Communities´
Tuesday 9 May 2006
Chik Collins works in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Paisley. He is the author of Language, Ideology and Social Consciousness: Developing a Sociohistorical Appproach (1999), which seeks to develop a synthesis between the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky and A.N. Leont´ev on the one hand, and Bakhtin and Voloshinov on the other, in the context of `thick´ historical engagements in his own locality—central Scotland. He is the author of articles in journals such as The Journal of Pragmatics, Urban Studies and Historical Materialism. In recent work he has challenged `Critical Discourse Analysis´ from a `cultural-historical´ perspective—working with Peter Jones (Sheffield Hallam University)—and provided a critical assessment of the history of `partnership´ initiatives in Scotland for local community organisations.