糖心TV

Women's History Month

Catherine Hall, 鈥楤eing an historian – then and now鈥�

Wednesday 26 February, 5 PM PM, OC0.01 (Refreshments will be served from 4:30 PM onwards, all welcome).

Hosted by the Feminist History Group and the History Research Seminar

Chair Laura Schwartz

Reflecting upon her personal and political life as a feminist and postcolonial historian, Professor Hall will consider the politics of intellectual work, how ideas emerge from movements and communities, and what politically-engaged historians should be doing in the present conjuncture.

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London. She is known for her work on gender, class and empire in the 19th century, particularly her pioneering Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (new edn. Routledge, 2002) which she published with Leonore Davidoff in 1987 and Civilising Subjects; metropole and colony in the English imagination 1830-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2002), one of the first substantive feminist histories to take up questions of race as central to the formation of modern Britain, a work influenced by black feminism. Hall published Macaulay and Son: architects of imperial Britain (Yale University Press) in 2012 and is Chair of the .

Professor Hall was active in Birmingham women's liberation and attended the first national women's liberation conference at Ruskin in 1970. From 1981-1997 she was a member of the Feminist Review Collective. Her journalism and scholarship most recently includes 鈥�

Seminar presented by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra (Birkbek, University of London)

From shipwreck to shipwreck prevails today the image of a Mediterranean cemetery of the bodies and hopes of migrants and necropolis of the principles and values of Europe. Never since the Second World War has the management of the arrival of new refugees in the eu been so chaotic. Never again has the eu political landscape been so chaotic as immigration becomes the core issue on which populist parties rely to weaken governments. As migration defies democracy, many literary texts have launched a prospective reflection to challenge and reverse our understanding between 鈥渢erritories鈥� and 鈥渕ovements of people鈥�, still trapped by borders regulations imposed by centuries of national sovereignty. How literature can contribute to renew the political imagination, in particular in the direction of this reversal? This presentation focuses on the awakening of utopia in the 21^st century that emerges from the analysis of two collections of poetry (Ananda Devi and Patrick Chamoiseau) and one poetico-political essay (Marielle Mac茅), all written in response to the asylum crisis of the Mediterranean. Through new forms of political writing of hospitality, these poetic texts claim a right to mobility in which feeling and acting are closely linked, as if the ethics of consideration for the common world was an invitation to pure praxis.

Dr Carlotta Cossutta (IAS International Visiting Fellow) is a post-doctoral researcher in Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy, and a member of Politesse Research Centre (University of Verona) and GIFTS – The Italian network of gender, intersex, feminist, transfeminist and sexuality studies.