15 March 2022 – Man, Woman, Other: Disrupting Gender Hierarchies in Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling has unique potential to disrupt gender hierarchies through interactive representation. Dr Margarita Vaysman will be joined by Svetlana Shteba (scriptwriter) and Sainte Maria (illustrator) to discuss their ongoing project, adapting the biography of the nineteenth-century genderqueer writer, N. Durova/A. Aleksandrov.

30 March 2022 – Fiction on the Spectrum

The diversity of human minds has been represented in countless ways. Nicola Simonetti is joined by writer, Reif Larsen, to discuss representation strategies of characters on the spectrum and how this precipitated a crisis in the protocols of traditional narrative representation.

6 April 2022 – Writing Noises

European artists in the 1920s are seeking the abolition of all barriers: art in all forms should inform life and art should have no other boundaries but life itself. In 1922, the Russian composer Avraamov reconfigured the everyday life of the workers in the city of Bakú (then the Soviet Union) as a musical performance, and from Madrid the quintessential Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963), celebrated it. Dr Fernandez will reinterpret Avraamov´s collage of sounds with the words of the writer. The active participation of the audience is required.

4 May 2022 – In the Margins: Elena Ferrante and Feminist Storytelling 

Join Dr. Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Italian, University of Durham) in conversation with Dr. Rebecca Walker and Carlotta Moro (Italian, University of St Andrews) about bestselling author Elena Ferrante. We will celebrate the recently published essay collection ‘In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing’ (2022) with a discussion of the themes that permeate Ferrante’s feminist storytelling. Our reflections will be interspersed with readings from Ann Goldstein’s English translation of the volume.

26 May 2022 – This is Not a War Story, Dir. Talia Lugacy, 2021

This is Not a War Story – Screening + Q&A with director Talia Lugacy and collaborators.

This is Not a War Story tracks a ragtag group of combat veterans in New York, whose anti-war art, poetry and papermaking keep them together, despite the spectre of their friend’s suicide and the ever-crystallizing fact that healing from war is something of an impossible mission.