Bernardino Branca, a PhD student in the History and Philosophy of Art in the School of Arts, has published a major new intellectual biography of the philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind entitled Edgar Wind, filosofo delle immagini. La biografia intelletuale di un discepolo di Aby Warburg (Milan and Udine: Mimesis Edizioni, 2019).

Edgar Wind (1900-1971) was a German art historian who specialised on the survival of the ancient art of the Renaissance, and was and close collaborator of art historian Aby Warburg. In 1933, after the rise of Nazism in Germany, moved to London and became involved in the Warburg Institute and finally became Oxford University’s first Professor of Art History.

Based on extensive archival research, the volume is the first book-length study of Wind’s extraordinary life and significant contribution to scholarship, and makes an important contribution to our historical understanding of the Warburg tradition of art history.

Bernardino’s own PhD project is on ‘Edgar Wind, The Warburg Circle and the Renaissance’, under the supervision of Dr Ben Thomas and Dr Grant Pooke.

For further details, please see the publisher’s page (in Italian) here.

We are delighted to announce that SARD, a medical technology company based at the Innovation Centre, has chosen to support our fundraising for the Kent and Medway Medical School by choosing us as their Charity of the Year.  They have pledged to raise £5,000 through a programme of charity events such as bake sales, quizzes, challenge events and much more and we are very much looking forward to working with them.

SARD is a family run business which supplies workforce management software to the healthcare sector.  They are passionate about applying the best technologies to improve the way the healthcare workforce is managed and make life easier for those within it.

About their support for KMMS, they said:

“As a company founded alongside and working with doctors every day, we want to do everything we can to help strengthen the UK’s medical workforce. Kent and Medway Medical School will provide a new point of entry for future doctors and its focus on widening participation means that a career in medicine may become a possibility for many who would not have previously considered it. With one of our offices based at the University of Kent’s Innovation Centre, we are thrilled to have this development right on our doorstep and are excited about what this means for our children and children’s children, whether they be the doctors of the future, or those being cared for by them. We urge everybody to support this cause as every single person will need medical care at points in their life. The Kent and Medway Medical School will train future doctors who may end up saving the lives of you or your loved ones.”

They are kickstarting their fundraising efforts with a bake sale on Thursday 18th April from 10am in the Innovation Centre café area.

Kent alumna Amber Winston, who completed a BA (Hons) in Visual and Performed Arts at Kent in 2015 and an MA in History and Philosophy of Art in 2016, is currently Project and Marketing Executive for The Coffee Art Project, an art competition inviting artists to interpret the theme of coffee. As part her role, she selected Dr Grant Pooke, Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History, to be on the competition’s panel of judges.

The Coffee Art Project was featured at the London Coffee Festival, where 46 artist submissions were selected and displayed in a gallery. The Project is a non-profit initiative aimed at encouraging artists by providing them with an open platform to showcase their works.

Artists at all levels can enter one piece of artwork that connects to ‘coffee’ and/or ‘coffee shop’ experience. There is no restriction on media used; providing that they have a link to coffee. The project supports Project Waterfall, a charity committed to bringing clean water to communities which grow coffee. Project Waterfall has raised more than over £1 million and delivered clean water to over 37,000 people across 7 countries in partnership with WaterAid, Charity: Water and Water for People.

How did Amber come to be involved in The Coffee Project? ‘After graduation, I went on to a sales job for 20 months as a Business Development Executive, and took on another few roles throughout the business to gain some corporate experience’, she explains. ‘After this I took a big leap, took a big cut in pay, got myself a job in London as a marketing intern for a start-up company to experience in a more creative and autonomous role. After this ended I applied for a social media role at the Allegra Foundation, then – after seeing my work experience and past roles, plus my degrees – they asked me to take on the Coffee Art Project’.

Why did Amber choose Grant? ‘I had to select judges who would be able to fairly judge artwork based off four categories; Creativity, Impact, Connection to Coffee, and Spirit of Humanity. The reason I asked Grant to be on the panel was because he taught me since I started at Kent – I admire his vast depth of knowledge and how he made me try harder at each piece of written work on his subjects even though I struggled with dyslexia. I remembered he taught a class on globalisation (which is part of coffee culture) and thought that he would judge each piece with the same amount of composure he has for all his previous students’ work’.

To see all Coffee Art Project entries, please click here.

A group of Masters students from the School of Computing attended Athena Hack, an all-women hackathon, in London from 13-14 April 2019.

The hackathon was organised by ShowCode as an initiative to champion female technologists and focus their skills to help solve one of the biggest environmental issues around. Prizes were awarded for the best performing university team and the best performing company team with a top prize of £5000 cash.

The challenge was to use their skills to create an idea that would help solve the plastic crisis that is currently plaguing the world in support of Plastic Oceans UK. The team, called ‘bumblebees’, was made up of five Masters students; Asha Barathoki, Sybil Mayard, Mai Pham, Zhaneta Georgieva and Clarissa Ang.

The team developed an app, called ‘Plastix’, based on the augmented reality, machine learning and image recognition features which have become popular among smart phone users. It aims to use real-time object identification, personal record and data aggregation to address the lack of awareness and lack of data, as well as making it convenient for the user.

Plastix has three basic functions:

• -identifying an object in real time and whether it is recyclable
• reporting and booking rubbish hotspots
• allowing the user to receive rewards for recycling / cleaning the hotspot.

Asha Barathoki said ‘We had an amazing experience at the hackathon where we got to network and develop our skills via workshops. Unfortunately we didn’t win but the whole process was very inspiring for female students like us in the tech industry.’

Calling all early career research staff at Kent!  You told us that “Research staff fall through the cracks”.  Help us stop this from happening in the future.  Have your say in the Careers in Research Online Survey (CROS) from 1 May 2019.

CROS runs nationally every two years for early career research staff. CROS is your chance to tell Kent about your views and experiences. Key benefits of CROS are:

• The information you provide will be used to inform policy and practice around employment, management and researcher development: this should benefit not only you, but also have long-lasting impact for future researchers.
• A clearer picture of Kent’s progress towards implementing the principles of the Concordat to support Researchers; and on how we are meeting our Athena Swan goals, to continue to improve our gender equality support for early career research staff.
• A good response rate and national benchmarking will provide leverage for future changes at Kent.

CROS is anonymous. It is managed by Vitae and hosted on Online Surveys, a secure web environment.

Is the survey targeted at you? Vitae’s definition of early career research staff is:

“Researchers are […] individuals whose primary responsibility is to conduct research and who are employed for this purpose. It is recognised that this broad category of staffing covers a wide range of staff with different disciplinary backgrounds, levels of training, experience and responsibility, types of contract (fixed or open-ended, full- or part-time), and different career expectations and intentions.  However, […] there are likely to be early career staff who may be sustaining their research activity through a series of teaching or other professional contracts.” (2015)

If you have any queries about the survey, contact Dr Jo Collins (Postgraduate Development Advisor), j.p.collins@kent.ac.uk.

CROS closes on 31 May.2019.

Kent Hospitality summer housekeeping are recruiting team members for Canterbury campus accommodation. Candidates should be available to work between 10 June and 15 September 2019.

Successful candidates will need to be flexible regarding working days and hours. Some weekend working is required; you must be available to work on Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 June 2019.

Rates are:

• £8.82 p/hr 16 – 24 years old
• £9.41 p/hr 25 years and over (Living Wage)

Successful applicants will be required to:

• Attend an interview on Monday 20 or Tuesday 21 May 2019.
• Attend a three hour Health and Safety induction on Monday 3 or Tuesday 4 June. For the health, safety and welfare of staff and conference guests, all successful applicants will be required to attend a health and safety induction. Applicants must be able to demonstrate the required level of understanding in all areas covered in the training. Any staff not achieving the required standard will not be permitted to work.
• Start work in the week commencing 10 June 2019 (minimum of two shifts for training).

If you think this summer vacancy is for you, please complete the online questionnaire

Closing date for applications: 30 April 2019 (or earlier if we receive a large number of applications).

The Kent Hospitality HR department will then email you by Tuesday 7 May to let you know whether or not your application has been successful. You will then be invited to an interview at which you will need to provide documentation to confirm your eligibility to work in the UK.

Please do not contact the Kent Hospitality HR department to check the status of your application, as they will be unable to answer individual enquiries.

Alumna Christina Irwin, who graduated with a BA (Hons) in History and Philosophy of Art in 2016, has recently gained a position on the Graffiti Project, part of a Canterbury Journey project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and based at Canterbury Cathedral, which is currently seeking new volunteers.

The Canterbury Journey aims to engage new, hard to reach and diverse audiences through a volunteer programme that develops and interprets Cathedral collections. The Graffiti Project is an initiative that engages volunteers in recording marks found in the eastern crypt, etchings of lost voices from the medieval world.

‘This is such a valuable project,’ explains Christina, ‘I am acquiring new skills at one of the world’s most significant  heritage sites, learning about historic collection practices and interpretation while meeting new people and sharing a passion with Cathedral professionals, volunteers and the public. It is exciting being part of this project which will become part of the Cathedral archive collections. I feel privileged to be part of this story.’

The graffiti tells us of religious devotion, fear of damnation, of love and of humour. Unlike contemporary graffiti or street art mostly seen as anti-social vandalism, medieval graffiti incised or scratched through vibrantly painted surfaces stood out clearly and would have been easily noticed suggesting that these images were totally accepted, these marks have meaning and function. There are prayers, devotional and votive, memorials, ritual apotropaic marks, compass drawn geometric designs, and five-pointed stars or pentangles, the symbol representing mathematical perfection in Ancient Greece, in abundance. There is relatively little published material about this subject and the imagery of the medieval parishioner is steeped in folklore and superstition, challenging the search for meaning.

The many voluntary opportunities can be found here.

Dr Maurizio Cinquegrani, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, will be presenting a paper at the International Congress on Visual Culture: Latin America from the Image, the Historical Narrative and Visual Culture, to be held in San Juan at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico on Monday 15 April 2019.

Maurizio’s paper is entitled ‘Ratline Escapees and the Cinematic Landscapes of Post-War Latin America’. From Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File (1972) to George Steiner’s philosophical novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981), where Adolf Hitler is found alive in the Amazon jungle over thirty years after the end of the war, and to the Führer’s brief appearance in ‘Bart vs Australia’ in The Simpsons (S06E16), where he is seen struggling with his car phone in the Buenos Aires of the 1990s, the afterlife of the Third Reich has continuously been narrated or reinvented on film, literature and other media.

Based on a chapter from a monograph that Maurizio is currently writing, his paper focuses on the ways in which the presence of Nazi war criminals in Latin America, following their escape across the so-called ratlines after the war, has been portrayed on film since 1946. It explores a diverse range of case studies including classical Hollywood cinema and Latin American films, spanning across different genres including dramas, espionage, and science fiction. Two main tensions are going to be identified throughout his study: on the one hand there is vague Latin-American topography used in films exploiting post-war events to fabricate a generic cinematic space with no ties to historical accuracy; on the other, a group of films focusing on the escape and capture of Adolf Eichmann see the unfolding of a more coherent cinematic landscape.

These films will be made to dialogue with documentaries and archival footage on Jewish migration to Latin America before and after the war. Case studies include Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor, 1946), Operation Eichmann (dir. R.G. Springsteen, 1961), They Saved Hitler’s Brain (dir. David Bradley, 1969), Boys from Brazil (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978), Algunos Que Vivieron [Some Who Lived] (dir. Luis Puenzo, 2002) and Wakolda (Lucia Puenzo, 2013). Additionally, the paper is based on Maurizio’s study of archival footage held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

To find out more about the congress, please see the page here