PUBLIC EVENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
Lectures and Seminars
ARTS AND HUMANITIES
The departments of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities support some 350 academic/non-academic staff and 4,000 students, forming a close-knit Arts and Humanities group around the Humanities Research Institute, in the city centre and right at the heart of the University campus.
An exciting programme of knowledge exchange and civic engagement activities across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, aiming to deliver a programme of collaborative projects and events that are of mutual benefit to the University and external partners. www.sheffield.ac.uk/artsenterprise
Department of Archaeology
HEAVENLY BODIES
By Professor Paul Koudounaris, California State University
Tuesday 17 September, 1.00pm, Departmental Lecture Theatre, Northgate House, West Street
Paul is an art historian and professional photographer and will be speaking on his latest research into Christian relic creation, cults and ossuaries.
Paul’s last book, 'The Empire of Death' https://www.facebook.com/empireofdeath, http://empiredelamort.com/ was a photographic encyclopaedic examination of Christian ossuaries worldwide. His current book, 'Heavenly Bodies,' is an in-depth examination of a collection of skeletons discovered in Rome in 1578, who were believed to be early Christian martyrs. These sacred relics were laboriously reconstructed and decorated, before being distributed around European churches, where they were revered as saints and served as a reminder of the afterlife for Catholics and Christians.The treatment of these skeletons is an example of how the curation and reverence of human bones, initiated during the early medieval period, developed and progressed over time. Paul's research details the intensely spiritual relationship between the living and the dead throughout medieval and post-medieval Europe, exemplified by human bones and their treatment. It also explicitly demonstrates the effects of the European Reformations on these beliefs and practises.
Rhyme & Reason bookstore will also be selling Paul’s book in the Dept. on Tuesday for the great discounted price of £15.
Booking must be made in advance by emailing prp11jnc@sheffield.ac.uk
PHILOSOPHY AT THE SHOWROOM
Philosophy at the Showroom probes the philosophical questions raised by some of cinema’s most intriguing films, while also connecting them to books with related philosophical themes. Our obligations to others, heroism, death, and the functioning of the mind are just some of the themes these screenings and the book series will explore.
THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD CENTRE FOR NORDIC STUDIES
Sheffield has had a long cultural and trading relationship with Scandinavia, reflected in local street and place names as well as in our shared respect for the highest quality craftsmanship. The University approved the establishment of the Centre for Nordic Studies on 23 May 2012.
A group of University of Sheffield colleagues have worked from existing expertise and experience to create a Centre for Nordic Studies in Sheffield, to work in partnership with Scandinavian and UK organisations to promote the understanding, use and enjoyment of Nordic languages and culture, to encourage research and to support more effective engagement between researchers, teachers and students in the UK and Scandinavia
MEDIEVAL AND ANCIENT RESEARCH SEMINARS
MARS is a seminar series that brings together the wealth of research conducted on the ancient and medieval worlds within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. This year’s programme covers subjects from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval England, from Atlantis and Roman Africa to Arab conquests and the medieval church.
The 2013 Galdós Lecture
Death and the City in the work of Benito Pérez Galdós & Narcis Oller by Professor Elisa Martí-López (Northwestern University, USA)
Tuesday 19 November 2013 at 5pm
Douglass Knoop Conference Centre, Humanities Research Institute (HRI) University of Sheffield
Burial practices and sites changed radically in all of Europe during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Beside the justified concerns about the insalubrity and saturation of old burial sites, the decision to close down the old churchyards and build new cemeteries outside the city walls points to the bourgeoisie's radical new attitude - and sensibility - toward both death and the city. The lecture will discuss, first, the creation of new burial grounds outside the city as one of the new practices of exclusion and confinement of all non-productive individuals that characterized enlightened thought, and as marking a new relation between the living and the dead based on a 'new regime of the hidden body' (T W Laqueur). After this contextualisation, the lecture will explore the place death and its new urban spaces occupy in the late nineteenth-century novelistic imagination, their strategic position within the plot, and their effect on the act of narrating. In particular, the lecture will discuss Narcis Oller's La febre d'or (1890-1891), a novel on the stock market crash of 1880-1881, and Benito Pérez Galdós La de Bringas (1884), a novel on the last months of Queen Isabel II's Monarchy in 1868. I will analyse the narrative role of modern cemeteries in Oller's literary re-creation of Barcelona and its relation to the popular pictorial and photographic genre of panoramic views, and Galdós's reliance on memento mori (specifically, on objects made with human hair) to re-create the pre-revolutionary Madrid. I will contend that it is death, its new urban spaces and practices, and its complex relation to 'seeing', that both make the city visible and articulate modernity's illusions and delusions.
Admission is free and without a ticket but please contact Rhian Davies to reserve a place and for general enquiries E: rhian.davies@sheffield.ac.uk