On Friday 22nd May 2015, the Darwin Lift will be out of service from 09.00 until 12.00 whilst essential repairs are carried out.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. If there are any queries please contact the Estates Helpdesk on Extn 3209.
Tokaido Road: Chamber opera
A Journey after Hiroshige
Saturday 23 May, 7.30pm – Gulbenkian Theatre
Okeanos Ensemble
Nicola LeFanu composer
Nancy Gaffield librettist
Caroline Clegg director
Tokaido Road is a new multi-media chamber opera, with music by Nicola LeFanu, based on the award-winning cycle of poems by Nancy Gaffield (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of English). The University is delighted to be welcoming the opera to Canterbury as part of the University’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations and the Festival of English. The chamber opera premiered last year at the 2014 Cheltenham Festival and received a four-star review from The Times’ Hilary Finch, before enjoying a sell-out performance at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.
The fifty-minute work is set in the rich, hedonistic ‘Floating World’ of Japan’s Edo period. A composite of music, poetry, mime, dance and visual imagery, Tokaido Road draws inspiration from the ravishing mix of art forms enjoyed by the wealthy members of Edo society.
Okeanos Ensemble mixes traditional Japanese instruments, such as koto, sho and shamisen, with western ones.
More information about Tokaido Road can be found on the blog and tickets can be purchased through the Gulbenkian box office.
Starting on 31 July 2015, two members of the Estates Department will be cycling between five of Kent’s campuses and centres to raise money for charity.
Alan Hollister (Support Services Supervisor) and Gary Wilson (Carpenter) will be cycling 600 miles from Tonbridge to Medway, Paris and Brussels returning back to Canterbury on 5 August 2015.
They are raising money for the Pilgrims Hospice and the Cathedral Day Unit of Kent and Canterbury Hospital. You can support them through their Just Giving page – www.justgiving.com/OldCodgersOfKent.
For more information please contact Alan Hollister (01227 823388).
Work on Phase One of the high voltage cable replacement has been taking place for the last four weeks and will continue until Friday 11th September 2015. It has now been confirmed that there will be a site wide electrical shutdown on Saturday 20th June from 07.00 until 13.00 to carry out the changeover from the Boiler House supply equipment to the temporary supply equipment. (Please be aware that Saturday 20th June is the first day of the Student Summer Vacation).
This will isolate all electrical supplies to all buildings apart from the following:- Keynes, Keynes 2, Turing, Careers, Tanglewood, Oaks Study Hub, Olive Cottages, New Day Nursery, Woodlands, Rothford, Beverley Farmhouse, Highlands, Belmont and Hilltops.
During this shutdown there will temporary electrical generation for the following buildings:- Rutherford, Tyler A, B and C, Eliot, Becket Court, Darwin, Darwin Houses, Ingram, Stacey, Telephone Exchange, Campus Watch, UELT, Estates, Parkwood Admin Building and Woody’s Bar.
During this period there may be increased noise levels from the generators.
For information there will also be a further shutdown in September to change over from the temporary supplies to the refurbished boiler house. The date for this is yet to be agreed and should only last for approximately 1 hour.
If any further information is required please contact the Estates Helpdesk on Extn 3209.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Eighty top academics including Eerke Boiten from the School of Computing and Alan Mckenna from Kent Law School have signed an open letter to Google, arguing for more public scrutiny over its handling of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests. The letter was featured in the Guardian and stated that since The European Court of Justice ruled that Google is responsible for removing links to outdated, irrelevant or misrepresentative information on search results for individuals, it has received 250,000 requests to do so.
For full story with working links see http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/news.html?view=655
The final lecture for this academic year in the series of Visiting Artist Talks at the School of Music and Fine Art will take place next week on Thursday, 21st May, 17.30-18.30 with the artist Sonia Boyce, MBE in The Clocktower Building Lecture Theatre, The School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, Chatham Historic Dockyard, Kent ME4 4TE.
Sonia Boyce, MBE, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. She is Professor at Middlesex University and Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London.
Working across a range of media including photography, installation, text and improvised collaborations. Boyce came to prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980s. Her work explores the experiences of being a black woman living in a white society, and how religion, politics and sexual politics form that experience.
‘In the broadest sense, my research interests lie in art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this burgeoning field. Since the 1990s my own art practice has relied on working with other people in collaborative and participatory situations, often demanding of those collaborators spontaneity and unrehearsed performative actions…I recoup the remains of these performative gestures “ the leftovers, the documentation“ to make the art works..’
Sonia Boyce was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, 2007, for services to art.
Students and staff from EDA look forward to exhibiting at Kent and Medway STEMFest 2015 in order to raise awareness of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
Kent and Medway STEMFest 2015 takes place on Thursday 4 June at the University of Greenwich, Chatham Campus. The event enables teachers of STEM and careers advisors to learn more about the organisations and individuals that support the development of these subjects in Kent and Medway schools.
For more details, see http://www.mebp.org/
Skepsi will be holding its 8th annual conference later in the month, under the theme ‘Disgust’. The event will be held over two days, 29 and 30 May 2015.
Skepsi is a peer-reviewed online journal produced within the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL). It is run by our PhD/MA candidates, with the support of established and early career academics, and commits to publishing the work of postgraduate students and emerging scholars.
Disgust has received growing critical attention among researchers in fields as varied as literature, philosophy of art, biology, psychology or gender studies. It is universally experienced even if the object of disgust can vary greatly according to the cultures. With the neurosciences increasingly gaining attention from the humanities for their project of explaining cognitive states and processes with reference to the material brain, it is opportune to reflect upon those experiences that strike the pit of the stomach before the head. Key research questions that will concern us are: Why is disgust so appealing? What is the relationship between physical and moral disgust? Can disgust be explained with the help of the theory of evolution? How is the rhetoric of disgust mobilised in far-right ideologies?.
Registration for the event costs £10, which includes a wine reception. For details of how to register, and the full conference programme, please see the page here: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/
Dr. Sophia Labadi has just finalized for UNESCO a draft policy on World Heritage and Sustainable Development, to be presented to and discussed by the World Heritage Committee at its 39th Session in Bonn, Germany, in 2015. This policy took two years to draft; it saw the involvement of experts from all over the world.
The overall goal of such a policy would be to assist States Parties, practitioners, institutions, communities and networks, through appropriate guidance, to harness the potential of World Heritage properties, and heritage in general, to contribute to sustainable development, and ensure that their conservation and management strategies are appropriately aligned with broader sustainable development objectives.
The process leading to the development of a sustainable development policy reflects a general trend to make the World Heritage Convention more relevant to challenges of the 21st century, and to align itself with other multilateral environmental agreements. It is also part of the broader efforts by UNESCO to integrate culture into the UN’s Post 2015 sustainable development agenda, which is to be agreed in September this year.
Dr Paul March-Russell from the Department of Comparative Literature has just published a new book, Modernism and Science-Fiction (Palgrave, 2015).
The book asks to what extent can the future-oriented narratives of science fiction, emerging alongside modernism during the last years of the 19th century, be described as ‘modernist’? To what extent did modernism, responding to the scientific and technological breakthroughs of Darwin, Edison and Einstein, draw upon a grammar of ideas and images that we would call ‘science fiction’? It pursues these questions through a wide-ranging series of examples, drawn from literature, film and the visual arts in Britain, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Americas, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) to J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973). The book challenges how high and low culture has been mapped in the 20th century.
Paul’s title joins several others in the Modernism and series to be written by staff from the School of European Culture and Language. These include Modernism and Nihilism (2011) by Professor Shane Weller, Modernism and Perversion (2011) by Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, and Modernism and Style (2011) by Professor Ben Hutchinson.
For more details on the book, please see the publisher’s webpage.