With the school holidays just around the corner, Kent Sport has the perfect solution to keeping your children entertained this summer – SummerZone!

With up to two weeks of professional sports coaching, led by qualified and DBS checked coaches and supported by sports supervisors, SummerZone cures the summer boredom and gets your children active. If your child(ren) are aged five to 14 and would enjoy taking part in a variety of sporting activities on a daily basis, including football, kwik cricket, tag rugby, hockey and tennis, then book them on SummerZone 2019!

SummerZone will run from 9.00 to 15.00 daily from Monday 12 to Friday 16 August (week one), and Monday 19 to Friday 25 August (week two). Late pick-ups are available from 15.00 to 17.00 and will include staff-led fun games and creative activities.

You can book places for SummerZone now through the website. Booking is available for one week, two weeks or individual days. For full details visit www.kent.ac.uk/sports/summerzone. Booking closes on Friday 26 July.

The University of Kent Players are proud to present Gail Young’s ‘Bothered & Bewildered’ this September.

The play will be performed at 7.30 on the 5-7 September at the Gulbenkian Theatre, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NB.

Tickets are now on sale via the Gulbenkian website, in person at the Gulbenkian ticket office, or over the phone 01227 769075.

Bothered & Bewildered is a comic drama that follows Irene and her two daughters Louise and Beth as they begin a long journey in which the girls lose their mum in spirit but not in body. As her family struggle to come to terms with her Alzheimer’s, Irene’s past passion for romantic fiction blurs with reality. She discusses with her unseen and witty companion Barbara Cartland (Irene’s favourite and now deceased world famous romantic novelist) how best to write her ‘memory book’, disclosing to Barbara long kept family secrets that she would never reveal to anyone else.

Several members of School of Arts academic staff will be presenting at the British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2019.

Professor Murray Smith, Professor of Film, Dr Dieter Declercq, Assistant Lecturer in Film and Media, Dr Mark Windsor and Claire Anscomb, Assistant Lecturers in History of Art, and Aurélie Debaene, PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Art, will present papers at the conference which will take place at St Anne’s College, Oxford, from Friday 6 September 2019 to Sunday 8 September 2019.

The aim of the British Society of Aesthetics is to promote study, research and discussion of the fine arts and related types of experience from a philosophical, psychological, sociological, historical, critical and educational standpoint. As well as holding an annual conference, the BSA’s activities include publication of The British Journal of Aesthetics, Debates in Aesthetics, a newsletter, regional conferences, lecture series, grants to support research in aesthetics, and an essay prize.

Professor Murray Smith will be giving a paper as part of a symposium entitled ‘Filming Time: Film, Philosophy, and the Cinema of Richard Linklater’. Murray’s paper, titled ‘Moving Pictures, Seriality and the Long Durée’, will look at Linklater’s exploration of extended duration – narratives encompassing and films shot over many years – in his Beyond trilogy and in Boyhood. In particular he will be exploring Linklater’s use of natural ageing – shooting performers as they visibly age – as a way registering the passing of time.

Dr Dieter Declercq will give a paper entitled ‘Satire and the Sick World. Coping, not Curing’. Dieter’s talk will reassess the idea of satire as therapy. He challenges the heroic conception of satire as a cure for the ills of the world and instead argues that satire is an aesthetic tool to cope with a sick world beyond full recovery.

Dr Mark Windsor will present a paper entitled ‘Hume’s Standard of Taste: Erasing the Circle’ Mark aims to defend David Hume against two charges that have been brought against his essay, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. The first is one of circularity – that Hume defines good art in terms of good critics, and he defines good critics in terms of their ability to judge good art. The second is one of infinite regress – that good critics can only be identified as a matter of subjective sentiment.

Claire Anscomb will present a paper titled ‘Photography and the Contact Phenomenon’. Dispute surrounds the realist basis of Kendall Walton’s “transparency” claim, however the claim that viewers may experience a sense of contact with the object of a photograph, remains largely unchallenged. To account then, for this sense of contact, Claire examines the photographic medium and the beliefs of viewers, and proposes a hybrid explanation, based on realist and psychological factors, including the sub-doxastic state of alief.

And finally, Aurélie Debaene will present a paper titled ‘#IWokeUpLikeThis: Demystifying Photogenic Images’. Aurélie will open a discussion of the photogenic by exploring what we mean by ‘photogenic’, how photogenic images are achieved, and some of the implications of their mystification. Identifying a cross-pollination between make-believe and the real as the root of such mystification paves the way for a more informed aesthetic appreciation of these images and the processes behind them.

Registration for the conference is now open, and tickets can be booked here.

The Estates Department will be holding its annual Celebration Day on Friday 12 July for Estates staff.

Campus Security and the University switchboard will be operating as normal; however, there will be some service disruptions as follows:

• The Estates Customer Services Centre and the main Estates reception will be closed from 11.30 on Friday 12 until 08.00 on Monday 15 July. If you need to report a building or service emergency, please contact Campus Security on extension 3300 and the relevant trade will be called out.
• Any visitors or contractors should report directly to Campus Security.
• Design and Print Centre will be closed from 11.30.
• The Transport Team (based in the Security and Transport building) will be closed from 11.30. Information regarding transport and parking is available on the Transport website or, in an emergency situation, please contact Campus Security on extension 3300.
• Postal Services will not be delivering or collecting mail after 11.30. Delivery and collection times will be brought forward for departments that normally have their delivery/collection after this time.
• The Post Room will be closed from 11.30 until 15.00 and the postal counter service for personal mail will not be available until Monday. We will do our best to process all outgoing items collected before 11.30. Urgent items of business mail may be hand-delivered to the Post Room between 15.00 and 16.00, where they will be processed in order of priority

We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any concerns, please contact Estates Customer Services on extension 16666 or email Estates Customer Services.

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 Donna Timmiss, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.

In this episode, Donna and Chris talk about special needs education; the care system; tap dancing; Dollar and Bucks Fizz; going to the cinema for 50p; being hit at the cinema during ‘Rocky IV’; fan fiction; Dirty Dancing; Babylon 5; the role of spirituality in Terry Pratchett; the Durham Miners’ Gala; Jeremy Corbyn; being bullied at school; lifelong friendships; reunions; and why the North East is quite a matriarchal environment.

Future guests include alumna Sarah Blackman, who participated in our Open Day on 6 July, Professor Gerard Loughlin from the University of Durham and our own Professor Jeremy Carrette.

The Centre for the Study of Higher Education warmly congratulates the following colleagues who applied for Senior Fellowship of the HEA through the Route to Recognition for Experienced Staff (RRES) and successfully gained national recognition for their leadership, excellence, expertise and commitment to professionalism in teaching and learning.

Sahar Al-Sudani, School of Computing – Senior Fellow

Maria Balta, Kent Business School – Senior Fellow

David Hornsby, School of European Culture and Languages – Senior Fellow

Sue Tarrant, Kent Business School – Senior Fellow

Jackie Walduck, School of Music and Fine Art – Senior Fellow

Sean Williams, School of Music and Fine Art – Senior Fellow

For further information on the Route to Recognition for Experienced Staff please click here or email recognition@kent.ac.uk.

Professor Elizabeth Mansfield, of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science, will present the inaugural Noether Public Lecture at the University’s Canterbury campus on Monday 15 July.

In her lecture, entitled On the Nature of Mathematical Joy, Professor Mansfield will describe and illustrate the seven levels of mathematical joy, beginning with the discovery of patterns, illustrated from her own mathematical travels.

The lecture will take place in the Sibson Lecture Theatre 3 at 18.00 and is free and open to all, although prior booking is required. For more information and bookings see our Eventbrite page.

The CHASE Comparative Literature Summer School 2019, which took place from 24 – 26 June, was organised by the Centre for Modern European Literature with the generous support of the Consortium for the Humanities and Arts South-East England (CHASE). This year’s framework was the paradigm of the Global South circulating around the recurring questions ‘Is comparative literature for the globalized age?’ and ‘Whose world exists in world literature?’

The international range of the participants – with projects covering African, Asian, European, and Latin American topics – allowed for insightful discussions addressing the range of research questions, and a panel discussion on the pragmatics of comparative literature addressed questions of employability in world literature studies. This offered participants the opportunity to think about various routes to pursue after PhD completion.

Participant Penny Carthwright described the Summer School as ‘…impressively multilingual. Contributors spanned the more staple Europhone languages of English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese (the latter in European and Latin American contexts), but also Turkish, Mandarin, Bengali, Hindi, Afghani and Persian.’ She also commented that ‘the range and diversity of student projects was remarkable, spanning from old age and the absurd in avant-garde European radio to “Dalit” resistance poetry’.

Participant Lida Amiri commented: ‘The final day of the summer school offered students the platform to present their research embedded in knowledge acquired over the course of the three days. Constructive feedback from academic staff and peers was very insightful, and proved a fittingly stimulating note on which to conclude an invigorating week.’

Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalan, Head of the Department of Comparative Literature, said: ‘The CHASE-funded 2019 summer school offered intensive training in the principles and practices of comparative and world literature. Following the success of the inaugural CHASE summer school in June 2018, this second iteration built on the first event while taking its intellectual focus in a new direction by prioritising a global South theoretical orientation. Attended by students from all corners of the world, the summer school featured a packed programme of exciting events, including seminars, keynote lectures, round-table discussions, and, on its final day, student presentations. The event undeniably showed that Comparative Literature as a discipline is in great health and I felt extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to train and inspire the next generation of comparatists.’