In Search of the Missing England

On this coming Saturday Northumbria university will host this one-day event which will undoubtedly interest Spaces in Theory attendees as well as anyone with an interest in emigration, ethnicity or family history. The event will provide both a platform for debate about English emigration and enable discussion on locating and using source materials. To register, please contact events@englishdiaspora.co.uk.

For more information on the excellent 'Locating the Hidden Diaspora Project', visit the project's website here.

Readings for Tuesday 28th February

As mentioned below our next meeting will take place on this coming Tuesday, led by Laurie Mckee. We'll be talking about Robin Hood and theories of hospitality (especially Derridean), and our texts are:

• Anon., "A Gest of Robin Hood" (c.1450) [circulated to mailing list]
• Mark W. Westmoreland, "Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality", Kritike 2, 1 (2008): 1-10.  [available at: www.kritike.org/journal/issue_3/westmoreland_june2008.pdf]

As usual, all are warmly and hospitably welcomed to join and discounted wine will flow. If you're not on the mailing list and would like to join in, just email us at spacestheory@hotmail.co.uk.

'Pictures from Hopper' launch

Neil Campbell will introduce his new collection of short stories Pictures from Hopper at 6pm in Gallery North, Northumbria University on Tuesday, December 13th. Neil's stories are inspired by the works of Edward Hopper and engage with issues of place and location. For more on this collection visit: http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/9781844718306.htm

Newcastle Winter Book Festival

The Newcastle Winter Book Festival starts this Thursday 24th November and runs until Sunday 27th, featuring readings and workshops from a range of local writers, artists and historians. Events take place at a range of venues including Northumbria, Seven Stories, the Lit & Phil, Newcastle City Library, Blackwells Bookshop, and the Star and Shadow Cinema.

Place-based highlights include talks by Alistair Moffatt, 'Who do we think we are? The Scots: A Genetic Journey', and Ann Cleeves, who will talk about her story collection, Shetland Quartet. In addition, Ann will jointly run 'Crime in a Foreign Country' with Shirley McKay and Northumbria's own Jacky Collins.

Northumbria University Library will be hosting performance and installations from students and staff at the university, in An Encounter with Antigone (dir. by Jane Arnfield and Matt Cummins) and Chattering Monkey (by Alex Elliott). It would be great to see many of you there.

Interdisciplinary Conference at Northumbria

Readers may be interested in the following conference hosted by Northumbria's 'States of Mind' research group:

Situating and Interpreting States of Mind 1700-2000

An Interdisciplinary Conference

14-16 June 2012

Northumbria University

Keynote Speakers

Professor Joel P. Eigen (Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania)

Professor Melinda A. Rabb (Professor of English, Brown University, Rhode Island)

Dr. Judith A. Tucker (Lecturer in the School of Design, Leeds University)

This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference seeks to situate and interpret states of mind from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first questioning how the space, place and historical context in which mental states are experienced shaped the narratives produced by individuals. Interweaving perspectives from across such disciplines as literature, history, philosophy, art history, creative writing, psychology and sociology, the conference will explore accounts of states of mind including mental illness, dreams, sleep-walking, imaginative states and self-awareness. The conference seeks to assess how these varying states of consciousness are expressed and how such narratives are influenced by historical change, continuity or the reconfiguration of these forms of expression.

We would like to invite abstracts for papers from across disciplines on the theme of the conference, particularly related, but not limited, to the following key strands:

Experience and Representation of Mental Illness

- the gap between individual experience and interpretations by medical and legal practitioners

- the relationship between mental distress, agency, literature and cognition

- representations of mental derangement and criminal responsibility

Liminal States of Mind

- representations of liminal states of consciousness

- the relationship between experiences and representations of dreams and sleepwalking

- categorisation of imaginative states in cognitive science and philosophy

- concepts of interiority, selfhood and imaginative processing of real or fictional worlds

Self-awareness and Place

- relationship between self and place, particularly regarding the past, decay and dilapidation

- artistic expressions of situating self-awareness

- creative representations of landscape as a geographic metaphor

Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted no later than 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers: anita.oconnell@northumbria.ac.uk or leigh.wetherall-dickson@northumbria.ac.uk.  Please see www.northumbria.ac.uk/statesofmind for details.

Remember, Remember: Eventful November

Apologies for the terrible rhyme. In addition to Laurie's Robin Hood and Derrida session on Friday 18 November (readings to follow shortly), there are loads of space-related events going on this month that you might be interested in. Our very own English Literature department is hosting some great talks in the Seminar Series this month: 

• Dr David Stewart (Northumbria University), 'Reading Like a Cockney: Magazines and Romanticism', Wednesday 9 November
• Dr Ian Davidson (Northumbria University), 'The Production of Suburban Space and 1950's Fiction', Wednesday 23 November

 Over the road at Newcastle University, NCLA are hosting the following: 

• Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, 'Edgelands: Journeys into England's Last Wilderness', Thursday 17 November (£6/£4)  
• Jack Mapanje, reading and panel discussion, 24 November (£6/£4) [This reading is hosted in association with English PEN and will be accompanied by an exhibition: Beyond Bars: 50 years of the PEN Writers in Prison Committee, Percy Building foyer, 18 November to 2 December 2011]

And further afield, the Tate Modern 'Topology' project runs from 5th November 2011-May 2012, bringing together artists, writers and intellectuals to discuss topological theory. The following events are taking place this month:

• Spaces of Transformation: Borders with Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra and Bernard Burgoyne, Saturday 5 November 
• Secrets of Space seminars, Saturday 12 November 
• Embodying Transformation, Saturday 19 November-Sunday 20 November

Keep checking back for updates on the next meeting, and thanks to readers for recommending events, we're always grateful. We look forward to seeing you on 18th.

New Reading Group for the New Academic Year

Following the success of last year's reading group 'Objects in Theory' we welcome readers to 'Spaces in Theory'. The new theme for 2011/12 reflects Northumbria's interest in issues of space, illustrated by the taught MA course Literature and Place and the AHRC-funded research project Locating the Hidden Diaspora.

In these sessions we engage with familiar and lesser known theorists alongside a range of literary and nonliterary primary sources. Last year, for example, we read Don DeLillo through Heidegger and Walter Benjamin through Jean Baudrillard, and this year we'd like to cover a similar breadth of periods and disciplines. We hope, above all, to bring people together from across the arts and social sciences in a friendly and informal setting.

Helen Williams will lead October's session, introducing Xavier de Maistre's Journey Round my Room and accompanying theory text, Jenny Mezciems's '"'Tis Not to Divert the Reader": Moral and Literary Determinants in Some Early Travel Narratives'. The November meeting, led by Laurie McKee, will consider some Robin Hood texts with reference to Derrida's Of Hospitality. Extracts will be circulated in advance. The sessions are not confined to the advertised texts; we merely use them as starting points for discussion.

Please get in touch if you have any ideas for December's session. You would simply give a very brief introduction to your chosen theory text (perhaps from the list below) and primary text, image or clip.

Possible themes include but are not limited to: adventure, the vagrant and the picaro; migration, exile and exile narratives; utopia; domesticity and country house poetry; travel and travel writing; borders and liminality; transnationalism and postcolonialism; the exotic; cartography; nationhood and regionalism; the theatre and the stage; nature and the pastoral; exhibiting and exhibition space; botany and landscaping; mobility and stasis; homelessness.

Readers are welcome to attend just one or all sessions. Refreshments (alcoholic and nonalcoholic) will be provided, followed by the customary trip to the Carriage. Do check this page for updates.

Possible Theory Texts

Extracts of theory should be 2000 words or less.

Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) pp. 84-258. Available here: http://books.google.com/books?id=JKZztxqdIpgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=chronotope&f=false.

Barney, Darin David, The Network Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), esp. ‘Network Society’, pp.1-33. Available in Northumbria library: 303.4833/BAR.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), esp. chap. 3 ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, pp. 52-26. Available in Northumbria library: 301/BOU.

Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1995), esp. ‘Pastoral Ideology’, pp. 31-52.

Davidson, Ian, Radical Spaces of Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), available in Northumbria library: 821.914/DAV.

Felski, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman, Comparison, special ed. of New Literary History, 40 (2009), available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/toc/nlh.40.3.html.

Foucault , Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, esp. section entitled ‘Heterotopias’.

Frank, Joseph, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts’, The Sewanee Review, 53 (1945), pp. 221-240.

Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), esp. ‘Social Space’, pp. 73-79. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=SIXcnIoa4MwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false.

McDowell, Linda, Gender Identity and Place (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Available in Northumbria library: 301.412/MACD.

National Trust Historic Houses and Collections Annual (National Trust, 2011) http://www.spectator.co.uk/supplements/National-Trust-Historic-Houses-Collections-2011/#/0/.

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (1854). Available online: http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html.