The School of English annual postgraduate conference, entitled ‘Environments – Landscapes and the Mind’, took place on June 19 2015. In the spirit of academic collaboration advocated by the Consortium of the Humanities and Arts South-East England (CHASE), the organisers had joined forces with two other consortium members, the University of Essex and the University of London, Goldsmiths. The conference took place on the Goldsmiths’ campus in London and attracted postgraduates from all over the UK and also from continental Europe.
The conference was centred around scholarship that explored the relationship between environments (in all definitions of the word) and literature, with thirty-one research papers being delivered across ten panels. In the morning sessions, speakers explored human movement through environments by way of rail and roads and looked at gendered narratives about women moving from the domestic to the public sphere. Questions about how to rationalize the wild were also looked into alongside animal studies and mycology. Speakers offered a fantastic mixture of creative and critical engagement presenting not only their academic research but also reading samples of their novels and poems. Moreover, the University of Kent’s Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid delivered the keynote address, giving the first public reading of his forthcoming book Footnotes, a creative critical study of running, nature, and modern life. The afternoon sessions then took one from the grand landscapes of the Lake District to the cityscapes of Shanghai, Tokyo, and London raising questions about translation on the textual and spatial level. This was followed by presentations on coastlines, marshlands, and spaces of exile.
In the evening, after the final panels had come to their conclusion, delegates were invited for a glass of wine on Goldsmiths’ rooftop terrace and the chance to informally get to know one another to the backdrop of the London skyline. All in all, the day was a huge success, offering the chance for postgraduates from across the CHASE consortium to share their research and make connections both social and professional.
Organising committee: Peter Adkins, Naomi Donovan, Joanna Maskens, Katja May, Frances Reading, Harrison Sullivan