Monthly Archives: January 2020

Professor Vybarr Cregan-Reid to take the stage at TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells

The sixth TedxRoyalTunbridgeWells will be held at the Assembly Hall Theatre, where Kent’s Professor Cregan-Reid will be one of 12 thought-provoking speakers presenting to over 1,000 audience members.

With a talk entitled ‘How modern life is written all over your face’, Professor Cregan-Reid will discuss how individuals’ daily actions affect different body parts – from posture, to eyesight, as well as face and skull shape. He will specifically reference how modern life is driving shortsightedness, as well as being responsible for the fact that most humans’ teeth no longer fit in their head (requiring costly and painful dental work). Furthermore, he will explore how these changes have developed within our species over time, some even very recently.

Professor Cregan-Reid said: ‘I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this event and am really looking forward to talking to the TEDx audience about the history of their habits and how they affect their whole body, not just their physical and mental health. These talks are a great way to share ideas and get people to think differently and TED have a tremendous reach – they are the most public of public lectures. TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells will be an inspiring and uplifting event, and the wider speaker programme is full of interesting talks that I am looking forward to watching on the day.’

Vybarr Cregan-Reid is author of Primate Change: How the world we made is remaking us (2018) and Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human (2016). At the University of Kent’s Paris School, Professor Cregan-Reid teaches on the EN867 The Verbal and The Visual: Dialogues Between Literature, Film and Art module.

At Reid Hall, Paris mayoral candidates discuss the place of the bike in contemporary Paris

With both rounds of Paris’ mayoral elections taking place in March 2020, five candidates including incumbent Anne Hidalgo, visited Reid Hall yesterday to discuss the place of bicycles and cycling in the French capital.

Paris was a world pioneer in developing its successful bike-share system, known as Vélib, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Representing an important part of the Parisian psyche, each candidate presented his or her plan to make cycling easier and more accessible to Parisians. Forming part of a global trend, Parisians increasingly rely on bicycles to go to work, class, and move freely about the city. To that end, Paris continues to develop bicycle-only lanes across its paved surfaces.

As with all events held at our Paris Centre, University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture students had the opportunity to attend the event and ask questions.

 

The European Qur’an: Islamic scripture in European Culture

On 27 February 2020, in association with Professor Jan Loop, the University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture will host a seminar entitled “The Qur’an and the Reformation”. This seminar will be hosted in connection with an on-going research project, EuQu, which looks at at Islamic scripture through the lens of European Culture and Religion.

EuQu is an ambitious six year research project (2019-2025) studying the ways in which the Islamic Holy Book is embedded in the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Our research studies how the Qur’an has been translated, interpreted, adapted and used by Christians, European Jews, freethinkers, atheists and European Muslims in order to understand how the Holy Book has influenced both culture and religion in Europe.

EuQu is an ERC Synergy project formed by a consortium led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); the University of Naples L’Orientale (UNO); the University of Kent (UoK) and the University of Nantes (UN).

Other members of the consortium are the University of Amsterdam (UvA); Autonomous University of Barcelona; and the Humanities Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Additional partners include the New York University Abu Dhabi; the Ruhr-University Bochum; The University of Chieti; Columbia University; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the University of Erfurt; the King’s College London; the University of Notre Dame and the University of Sussex.

The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

The full programme of the conference in Paris can be found here.