ÌÇÐÄTV

All interested staff and students are welcome to join this informal lunchtime reading group, tackling Dante's Divine Comedy one canto per week.

We are reading the parallel-text edition by Robert M. Durling (copies and e-book available in the library).

The group meets at 1-2pm on Wednesdays during terms 1 and 2 (except reading week) in H2.46.

To be added to the mailing list or for further information, please email sarah.wood@warwick.ac.uk.

A global history seminar by Helen Curry, University of Cambridge

Various disciplines have sought in recent decades to develop accounts of the agricultural practices of indigenous peoples. These include ethnobotany, agroecology, and agricultural anthropology. Since the 1980s this research has often been linked to conservation work, for example in promoting a return to earlier farming methods or tools as means of maintaining biodiverse forests or preventing soil erosion. In this talk I explore the influence of research on indigenous agriculture on the conservation of global crop diversity. Drawing on the example of maize (corn) in the Americas, I show how social scientists developed new narratives about the past and present of indigenous and peasant farming, and used these to sustain arguments about the most desirable futures for farming, both within and beyond indigenous communities. Their accounts of both the past and the future of agriculture centered on particular crop varieties: the locally adapted varieties, or landraces, thought to have been traditionally cultivated but widely understood to be endangered as a result of agricultural intensification. As a result, the research of ethnobotanists and agroecologists contributed to new interest in and approaches to protecting those same varieties, in the process linking local acts of cultivation with global conservation concerns.

Dr Barbara Del Giovane (Florence): 'No City for Old Men. Varro and Rome in the Menippean Satires.'

Global seminar by Helen Curry, University of Cambridge

The Disney animation Moana’s release was accompanied by celebrations of animation software and the ingenuity of VFX practitioners. Frequently focussing on the feature’s quite fabulous looking water animation, these commentaries are a valuable starting point for challenging the extent to which simulations in cinema are, as is so often claimed, ’realistic.’ Given their scale and increasingly detailed textures, it is easy to get caught up in the visual appeal of simulations created with VFX software. Professor Wood’s purpose in exploring Moana is to step around the power of this visual appeal, and map a route through to the computational and cultural influences that inform and shape simulations.

The talk will be followed by a drinks reception in A0.26. All staff and students are welcome.

The next research seminar will take place on Wednesday 30^th October 5-7pm in room S2.81 (please see ÌÇÐÄTV Interactive map for this room), we are excited to welcome artist Ignacio Acosta (please see for more details about one of this current exposition in London) who will be sharing with us his projects.