Location: Royal Dockyard Church, Chatham Dockyard

Date and time: Wed 27 Feb, 19.30

The Chineke! Foundation was established in 2015 to provide career opportunities to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians in the UK and Europe. The Chineke! Ensemble will be performing in Chatham this February, with tickets free for all students and staff (£10 for public).

Strauss (arranged Franz Hasenoehrl) Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders! (8 mins)

Florence Price String Quartet in G (1929) European premiere (13 mins)

Beethoven Septet in E flat Op 20 (42 mins)

Chineke!’s motto is: ‘Championing change and celebrating diversity in classical music’. The Chineke! Ensemble is comprised of exceptional musicians from across the continent brought together multiple times per year.

The event has been organised by University of Kent Arts&Culture, and tickets can be booked online.

Dr Lavinia Brydon, Lecturer in Film and Media in the School of Arts, has won a place on a British Academy and Academy of Science South Africa collaborative workshop. Taking place in Gauteng on Thursday 21 – Saturday 23 February, the workshop will explore the theme ‘Urban Lives’.

More than half of the world’s population currently lives in cities, and this is projected to increase to almost five billion by 2030, with the majority of the urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia.

The challenges and opportunities of living in an urban environment need responded to in a number of ways, drawing together academic, aesthetic, artistic, literary and policy perspectives and thought.

This workshop aims to bring together early career researchers based in the UK and South Africa who are able to contribute multiple disciplinary and cross-regional insights from the humanities and the social sciences to our understanding of urban life.

Lavinia’s research interests extend from the representation of place on screen to location filming, screen media tourism, DIY arts practices (including pop-up cinemas) and the construction of leisure spaces. She is looking forward to growing these interests within the ‘urban lives’ theme and with researchers who can offer different disciplinary perspectives and take her beyond the British context that she usually works within.

To read the full details about the workshop, please see the British Academy page.

Dr Frances Guerin, Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, has just been interviewed for the podcast series This Is Not A Pipe Podcast.

This Is Not A Pipe Podcast explores critical theory, cultural studies and philosophy. It takes its name from the title of the painting by René Magritte.

In the episode, Frances discusses her book The Truth is Always Grey: A History of Modernist Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

In particular, Frances considers the question of what grey is: ‘It’s such an interesting question. The way that it is spelt even – is it grey or gray – how do we even write grey, and what is it? There’s this big question mark that sits over the colour grey’, she explains, ‘I think a lot of that is because we don’t pay much attention to grey.’

‘There’s this assumption that grey is all about reflecting depression; and the metaphor I always give is  the London sky, which is depressing and its gloomy, and we think of grey as describing the approach of death. And when painters and critics talk about grey, they talk about it as not a colour – they’ll say it’s colourless, or a non-colour, or somehow the same as black and white.’ And yet, in the episode, Frances goes on to explain why this is not the case and argues for the richness and vibrancy of the colour.

To find out why, you can listen to the episode on the This Is Not A Pipe Podcast page.

Dr David Walsh, Lecturer in the Department of Classical & Archaeological studies, has just published a new article in the ‘Journal of Late Antiquity’, in which he argues that the remains of one of the supposedly oldest churches in Britain was actually a temple to Mithras.

In recent decades, archaeologists in regions such as Germany, Italy, and France have developed an increasingly robust approach to the identification of early churches and thus dismissed a number of formerly misidentified examples in the process. In Britain, however, various supposed ‘churches’ discovered in the twentieth century continue to be referred to as such despite a lack of strong evidence to substantiate this. One such example is a structure found at Butt Road, Colchester. In this article, the issues surrounding the interpretation of this building as a church are revisited and enhanced, while it is illustrated why other interpretations, such as a ‘pagan funerary banqueting hall’, are also unlikely.

David has also just released a new episode of his podcast available now to stream via iTunes and Spotify.

David’s guest this week is SECL graduate Becky Newson, who graduated in 2009 with a BA in Classical & Archaeological Studies and Drama. Becky joins David to discuss her six years working as a tour guide in Rome, how she ended up in this role, how she preps for tours, and her advice for anyone visiting Rome. She also chats about getting used to the Roman way of life (and adjusting when she visits home), #Rome on Instagram, and how the extras on the DVD of The Mummy led her to study Ancient History at Kent!

Following on from last year’s successful January sale, Kent Hospitality are holding another sale on some of their best-selling dishes across the Medway and Canterbury campuses. Each deal is priced at only £5, and the offer ends on 31/1/2019.

There’s some huge savings on Big Stack burger meals from Hut 8 (Turing College), two healthy smoothies for £5 in K-Bar (Keynes College), loaded fries from Cargo Bar & Grill (Liberty Quays), or a delicious wok bar meal from Rutherford Dining Hall (Rutherford College).

More details on each offer can be found on Kent Hospitality’s Catering blog.

Event date and time: Wednesday 16 January, 16.00-17.30

Event title: Multi-lingual Communication, Minorities and Identity

Event location: Grimond Lecture Theatre 2

Inspirational speaker Professor Itesh Sachdev examines the complex relationship between language, communication and group identity in multi-lingual communication, using data from indigenous and migrant minorities and majorities around the world.

Further details: email Alison Webb – acw42@kent.ac.uk

The centenary of women’s formal entry into the legal profession in the UK and Ireland is celebrated in a unique new scholarly anthology co-edited by Kent Law School Professor Erika Rackley and Professor Rosemary Auchmuty (University of Reading).

Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the history of women and law in the UK and Ireland (Hart Publishing) is an anthology of 92 key legal landmarks written by over 80 feminist legal and history scholars, all of whom are participants in the Women’s Legal Landmarks Project led by Professor Rackley and Professor Auchmuty. Between them, the book’s contributors address almost 2000 years of history of women and feminists’ engagement with law and law reform. Topics covered include the right to vote, sex discrimination, surrogacy and assisted reproduction, rape, domestic violence, FGM, equal pay, abortion, and the life stories of a number of women who were the first to undertake key legal roles and positions.

Professor Rackley said: ‘Women’s formal entry into the legal profession was – of course – a key legal landmark for women. But it was not the first. Nor was it the last. Women’s legal history in the UK and Ireland is full of landmarks, turning points in law’s response to women’s lives and experiences.

‘Feminists have long had recourse to law as a key means of achieving equality. From “Votes for Women” to #repealthe8th, from the East End of London to Greenham Common, women, feminists and women-led organisations have been there campaigning and making the arguments for change.’

The book will be launched at Matrix Chambers in London at the end of January. This will be followed by a series of ‘Conversations’ hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies throughout 2019.

‘I’m a Scientist’ and ‘I’m an Engineer’ events are running 4-15 March 2019 alongside British Science Week. Anyone from Postgraduate Research to Professor level at Kent is eligible to apply to take part.

These online events allow researchers to answer questions from school pupils all over the country with the chance to win £500 to fund more STEM engagement. It’s a great opportunity to be challenged over research and its meaning.

It’s a simple application process based around a one sentence description of the research, with a deadline for applications of 28 January 2019.

The events take place 4–15 March for British Science Week 2019:

Apply for I’m a Scientist

Apply for I’m an Engineer

(and apply for both if your role fits!)

The events are split into ‘zones’ including: drug development, psychology, nuclear physics, water science, organs, space engineering, energy engineering and some general science zones.

If you are successful in applying, please contact Maddy Bell, Research Impact & Public Engagement Manager at m.r.bell@kent.ac.uk. Please email peresearch@kent.ac.uk to join a mailing list for Kent Public Engagement with Research news.

In the latest episode of the Nostalgia podcast series, Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, speaks to Olly Double from the School of Arts.

In this week’s episode, Olly and Chris talk about ghosts and Scooby Doo; having a Dr. Who book signed by Tom Baker; the difference between public and private profiles and personae; being an anti-hierarchical person in a hierarchical profession; watching The Boomtown Rats on ‘Top of the Pops’; queuing up in the rain to see Planet of the Apes; how The Omen made Olly rethink what he’d grown up believing in the Church of England; and we share our experiences of going to see Jim Davidson on stage.

Future guests will include the Vice-Chancellor and President, Karen Cox, and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) April McMahon. For all the other interviews in this series, please see here.