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.

Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film and Head of the School of Arts, and Dr Lies Lanckman, Lecturer in Film at the University of Hertfordshire, have edited a new collection entitled Star Attractions: Twentieth-Century Movie Magazines and Global Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2019).

During Hollywood’s ‘classic era’, from the 1920s to 1950s, roughly twenty major fan magazines were offered each month at American newsstands and abroad. These publications famously fed fan obsessions with celebrities such as Norma Shearer, Mae West, Doris Day and Elvis Presley. Film studies scholars often regard these magazines with suspicion, perhaps due to their reputation for purveying scandal and gossip, their frequent mingling of gushing tone, and blatant falsehood.

Looking at these magazines with fresh eyes and treating them as primary sources, the contributors of this collection provide unique insights into contemporary assumptions about the relationship between fan and star, performer and viewer. In doing so, they reveal the magazines to be a huge and largely untapped resource on a wealth of subjects, including gender roles, appearance and behaviour, and national identity.

The volume includes a number of chapters contributed by alumni and students from the PhD in Film at Kent, including Ann-Marie Fleming, Oana-Maria Mazilu, Sarah Polley and co-editor Lies Lanckman, who completed her PhD in Film at the University of Kent in 2017.

For more details, please see the publisher’s page here:
www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609386733/star-attractions

Dr Lucy O’Meara, Senior Lecturer in French in the Department of Modern Languages and Acting Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities, has won the Society for French Studies 2019 Prize Research Fellowship.

The Fellowship is open to early and mid-career academics in all areas of French Studies, and provides funding for a period of research leave in the 2019-20 academic year.

Lucy’s project is entitled: ‘Interrogating the Encyclopaedia in European Fiction and Autobiography 1870-2020’. She describes it as “a comparative literary project examining the attitudes of French, German and British authors towards the encyclopaedic organisation of knowledge in European novels and autobiography from the 1870s to the present. I’ll be analysing mainstream and experimental fiction and a range of types of memoir. The prize entitles me to research leave from January to June 2020 and I’m really looking forward to taking up the fellowship.”

At the Paris School of Arts and Culture, Lucy teaches on our FR820: Paris: Reality and Representation module.