Creative Writing Reading Series – David Herd

As part of the Autumn Term Creative Writing Reading Series

University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture

Proudly presents David Herd reading from his new poetry work Through

A new book of poetry by internationally acclaimed poet David Herd addresses the language that surrounds the reception of people seeking asylum in the UK. Considering the risks that such official hostility poses to human intimacy, Through sets out to register broken affections, to re-explore possibilities of solidarity and trust. Countering the enclosures of public discourse, the poems embrace instead ‘a language in transition’, one in which meaning is multiple, ‘echoing into place a genuine and subsisting relationship’. David Herd is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent and co-organiser of the Refugee Tales project.

“What are we going through? How do we get through this? How saturated are we, through and through, with feelings and political sensibilities in interior exile from our time and place? All these questions and more are evoked in David Herd’s subtle and resistantly intelligent work – lyrical and critical at once. Refugees and refusals, refuge and Law, conscience and critique, Agencies and agency, politics and poetics all combine in a pensive work of singular poethical force.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Thursday 20 October 2016

6.30pm at Reid Hall, Salle de Conférence

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006 (Métro: Vavin)

RSVP to paris@kent.ac.uk or to the Facebook Event

Creative Writing Reading Series – Simon Smith

As part of the Autumn Term Creative Writing Reading Series

University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture

Proudly presents the Paris launch of

Thursday 6 October 2016

6.30pm at Reid Hall, in the Maison Verte

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006 (métro: Vavin)

In a writing career that began in the early 1980s, Simon Smith has published a dozen pamphlets and collections of poetry, reviewed and written essays for Poetry Review, PN Review, fragmente, Stand and Blackbox Manifold among other periodicals, and translated the work of Catullus, Martial and Reverdy. This selection of his work covers the period 1989-2012, and is edited by the poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky. There are generous selections from Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge, alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content. On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: ‘It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School’s love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith’s British contemporaries’.

To see more Creative Writing Reading Series events in the Autumn Term, click here

To register for the event, either rsvp to our Facebook event or email us: paris@kent.ac.uk

Creative Writing Reading Series – Autumn 2016

University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture is excited to announce our Creative Writing Reading Series for the Autumn Term!

All readings are at 6.30pm at Reid Hall,

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006 (métro: Vavin)

Simon Smith Thursday 6 October Maison verte

Simon Smith in the Paris launch of his new work: ‘More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry: Selected Poems 1989 – 2012’, edited by poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky.

European Summer Schools success

The European Summer Schools at the University’s centres in Paris and Brussels have just taken place for the fourth time since they were first created in 2013 as part of our 50th anniversary celebrations.

Scholarships were awarded to Kent Undergraduate students and external applicants to spend a fortnight participating in academic sessions and cultural activities in these two major European capital cities.

Students in Brussels studied on the theme of ‘Europe and the World’ benefitting from dynamic sessions including those on International Migration, European Neighbourhood Policy and a discussion with a member of the British Embassy on the EU referendum result and the future of the EU.

Students also had the chance to visit the European Parliament to discuss the EU with a current MEP, as well as to take part in an all-day guided tour of the battlefields of WW1 in Ypres, Flanders. Here, students learned about the human cost and political impact of the First World War and discovered how it helped to shape today’s Europe.

Students in Paris studied on the theme of ‘Revolutions’ immersing themselves in French culture by exploring the city’s art, architecture, film, drama, writing and philosophy. Through a series of interconnected lectures and excursions guided by academic specialists, students visited a wide range of culturally and historically significant sites including the Pompidou centre, Versailles and Picasso Museum.

At the end of the Summer School, the students had developed close friendships with each other and had gained analytical and intercultural skills that they can take with them into their studies and out into the job market. The programme has also helped to promote Kent’s European Centres.

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the generosity of the programme’s sponsors, including Student Project Funds.

Sophie Punt, Academic Division

We are still accepting applications for September 2016

We will continue to accept applications for the academic year 2016-17 until the end of August 2016.

The Menteur Literary magazine – 6th edition launched in Paris

The 6th edition of the The Menteur literary magazine was launched during the Paris postgraduate festival and conference, which took place between 6th and 10th June 2016.

An online copy has also been published as a Flipbook.

The Menteur is an arts and literary magazine written, edited and produced by the University of Kent’s Humanities MA students in Paris.

Shakespeare in Paris: lectures to mark 400 years since the bard’s death

Tuesday, 3 May 2016

David Ellis

Professor Emeritus, University of Kent School of English

The Sad Tale of Shakespeare Biography

We know desperately little about Shakespeare’s life and what we do know has been in the public domain for a long time. In this lecture, David Ellis demonstrates some of the methods biographers use for overcoming these disadvantages and explores how academics try to make bricks without straw.
Please reserve your place here.

Wednesday, 11 May 2016

Professor Karen Newman

Owen Walker ’33 Professor of Humanities and
Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Brown University

Shakespeare Celebrated: Souvenirs du Théâtre Anglais à Paris

This lecture is about the visit of English Shakespearean actors to Paris in 1827 where they played, first at Odéon, than at Favart, for ten months, performing Shakespeare in English. The commemorative programme reflected French/English rivalries at the time.

Please reserve your place here.

18.30

Grande Salle, Reid Hall

4, rue de Chevreuse 75006 Paris

Free and open to the public

Paris students organise end-of-term dinner cruise

The University of Kent’s Paris Graduate Union organised a farewell dinner cruise on the River Seine on Friday 8 April 2016. A total of 27 students and guests were welcomed on board by student leaders and University of Kent, Paris director Peter Brown. Participants enjoyed full French fare as they took in some of the world’s most iconic views.

Yelena Moskovich Leads a Night Walk in Paris

Yelena Moskovich, whose recent debut novel The Natashas has been earning stellar reviews across Europe, visited Kent MA students as part of Paris: The Residency, a Kent module in Creative Writing. Led by Moskovich and instructor Adam Biles, the evening began at Shakespeare and Company for a reading and discussion of her book. It continued on the Place de Notre Dame, where students practised ’embodying’ pedestrians, discreetly imitating their gait and movements as the basis for developing fictional characters. On the Quai de la Tournelle, students focused on their sense of hearing, alternatively listening to and writing the Parisian soundscape.

Olivia Rosenthal, one of the Paris MA students in Creative Writing, commented: ‘We saw places by night that we might have missed by day. We were definitely out of our comfort zone some of the time. Yelena has a background in acting and that helped us to see character from a new angle. It was challenging and fulfilling to try and be somebody else.’

Yelena Moskovich (pictured) is the keynote speaker at the MA conference on Motion at Reid Hall, Kent’s base in Paris, on Monday 6 June — part of a week-long MA festival. Click here for further details.

The Guardian’s review of The Natashas is available here.

Launch of June MA Conference and Festival on Motion

Kent Paris students have launched a festival and MA conference on the topic of Motion. The conference will run at Reid Hall on Monday 6 June and other festival events will take place in the course of the following week. They include an exhibition of student art, conversation with a Paris artist, book launch at Shakespeare & Co., launch of the new issue of the Paris MA magazine, Le Menteur, and a trek across Paris finishing with a celebration in song and readings. Speakers and readers for the week include Vybarr Cregan-Reid, David Herd, Yelena Moscovich, Dragan Todovoric, Joanna Walsh and Lauren Elkin. The conference is designed to attract MA students working on their dissertations, whether from Paris institutions or from Kent’s other campuses. See the call for papers and for further details go to motioninparis.wordpress.com.

Paris News

The Blog of Kent University's Paris School of Arts and Culture