A Historiography of Psychoanalytic Film in Hollywood, 1920-1960

This seminar looks at some of the films influenced by the introduction of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice to the United States in the early 1900s. This was a period where psychoanalysis grew in popularity and support within mass culture before undergoing a crisis within academic and professional circles. Films that will be discussed in this seminar include Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Freud (John Huston, 1962). Elements such as the image of the analyst and the neurotic patient within these films form an exaggerated and sometimes melodramatic (mis)representation of psychoanalytic practice, however, such insistence on therapy as a narrative device has assisted in its popularisation and ongoing love/hate relationship psychoanalysis has with American cinema.

• Full details and series schedule here

A selection of four to five short papers on a variety of subjects

• Full details and schedule here

Mutant Media: Cinema, Video Art and New Media

John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits both locally and internationally. His art practice cuts across a variety of art forms - video, new media, installation, performance and radiophonic art - and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in-between” links between cinema, literature and the visual arts. He is a prolific contributor to local and overseas art, film and media journals and a frequent participant in conferences, forums and seminars. In 2000 he was awarded a New Media Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. His recent book Mutant Media (Artspace/Power Publications, Sydney) collects his essays from over a 20-year period.

In his presentation, John will discuss issues arising from Mutant Media, illustrated with clips.

• Full details and schedule here

One is “Alternative visions: philosophies of freedom in South Asian Diasporic Writing”. Students of postcolonial studies should find this area of particular interest, although as always Colloquy remains open to researchers from all areas of the humanities with a focus on critical inquiry and creative responses. This issue will be guest edited by Elin-Maria Evangelista, Isabella Ofner and Pooja Mittal.

The other considers current understandings of globalization and the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, including relations between the empirical and the theoretical in media cultures in action, what ideas we use to make sense of them, and whether or not disciplinarity is even still a workable idea. This theme will be taken up in a special postgraduate event to be held in conjunction with the Communications and Media Studies conference, to be held in August 2008, on International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media. Select postgraduate papers from the conference will be featured.

In line with colloquy’s mandate to make postgraduate publishing openly available, other unsolicited academic articles and review articles of a general nature, along with book reviews, translations, opinion essays and creative writing, will also be considered. We encourage postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and research fellows to submit scholarly articles in line with the style guide available at the Colloquy website.

Articles of an unrelated nature will be considered alongside the themed section (both refereed in a double-blind process), and creative writing or opinion pieces are also welcome for the unrefereed section of the electronic journal.

B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value

Monash University, Melbourne, April 15–17, 2009

Over the past decade, paracinema – a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies – has seen a counter-cultural valorisation of all forms of cinematic trash or ‘badfilm.’ In many internet and print sources devoted to the celebration of paracinema, the term B-movie has (in contrast to its earlier studio-era sense) come to mean almost anything: disreputable and unworthy movies, low-budget exploitation movies, straight to TV or video movies, and even big-budget studio movies. B for BAD cinema seeks to negotiate some of the (aesthetic and moral) values and judgments inscribed in a B-movie culture in which films are deemed to be good-because-bad or bad-because-good.

• Full details available here

21 August 2008

Julia Vassilieva presents: 4 (Ilya Khrzanovsky, 2004, Russia)

Since communism collapsed in the mid nineties, “4” directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky and based on the screenplay by Vladimir Sorokin has become the first film to be censored in Russia. While the film has won a number of prestigious awards in the West, “4” has also provoked harsh criticism : “Though director Ilya Khrzhanovsky denies that his synopsis-proof first feature is a product of the Russian necrorealist movement – self-consciously inflammatory underground art, film and video that symbolises (or feasts upon) the putrefying corpse of the Soviet state – the startling “4” is nonetheless a howling orgy of decrepitude and decay.” (J.Win, Time Out London Issue 1831: September 21-28 2005) In her introductory talk “On the Political Power of Pro-filmic” Julia Vassilieva (Film and TV Studies, Monash University) examines the most controversial aspects of Khrzhanovky’s confronting footage.

• Room H/HB40, Building H, Caulfield Campus, 4:00pm
• Full schedule of screenings here

An Alternative Ophelia: Embodying Madness on the late-Victorian Stage

In 1897, audiences warmly welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage. His sane, intelligent prince was received as a pleasing departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell’s own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so welcome. Critics described her playing as “curiously weak” and “unconvincing and unimpressive.” Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblem of prettiness and pathos and instead offered a vacant, depressive, “beaten” Ophelia. This paper examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress’s own experience of mental illness and the notorious “rest cure” treatment regime. I read the reception of this performance in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness as well as responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity. In seeking to re-cast Campbell’s achievements in this role, the paper ultimately calls for a broader perspective in determining the constitutive elements of a performance event, and affirms the importance of careful consideration of the performer’s identity (personal identity, professional identity, celebrity identity) when analyzing the reception of past performances.

• Full details and schedule here

18 August 2008

The global reach of Spain’s regional diasporas, and their modern reframing as supranational identities

The geographical reach of the Spanish diaspora is surveyed, using as data the names and locations of more than 1,000 emigrant centres registered with Spain’s governments. The names of the centres, created as grass-roots initiatives since the 1840s by groups of Spanish emigrants, reflect the prime identification of the emigrants with their ethnic home region in Spain rather than with their Spanish nationality. The historical evidence for the destinations of the emigrants from different regions of Spain is consistent with the locations of the surviving centres, populated by their descendants.

Since 1985 several regional governments of Spain – those of Andalusia, the Asturias, the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Euskadi (the Basque Community), Galicia, La Rioja and Navarra – have implemented policies to build enduring links with their diasporas. Several have put em-phasis on ‘extra-territorial’ ethnic identity such as asturianía, catalanitat, isleñidad, euskal-tasuna and galeguidade via legislation, proclaiming annual days for international celebration, organizing international conferences for their global ‘collectivities’. All have subsidised cultural programs in their emigrant centres abroad, and many have subsidised reverse emigration.

• Full details and series schedule here

Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation

Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception.

• Full details and schedule here

14-15 August 2008

Registration now open

This interdisciplinary conference will explore how ideas of the sacred inform our concepts of what the family should look like, how we relate to each other as family, and how these family structures are recognised, or fail to be recognised, in law and structures of governance. It seeks answers to questions about the appropriate role of the state in the governance of family. Themes include:

• Representations of the family, marriage and gender roles in religious traditions
• Recognition of religious law
• Recognition of alternative family structures
• Social justice and the rights of women and children
• Health, reproduction and the family

Full details and registration at this link.

Swing that Thing

Danielle Wilde will discuss her current doctoral research into how technology might be paired with the body to poeticise experience (and what this might mean).

Primary aims of this research include understanding how one might incite people to move and extend themselves physically; the value of a direct consideration of the body’s tendencies and affordances when creating interactive body-centric elements and systems; the value of visceral experience and full-body, or ‘beyond limb- and digit-triggered’ interaction; the idiosyncratic nature of relationships to the body and technology; and provoking, inciting or inspiring reflection about these relationships through the creation of wearable works of art, design and performance.

Related projects include highly visible, extended and extending interfaces through to “invisible”, embedded and distributed systems, which allow the wearer to actuate and control changes in sound, colour, light, shape and form. The research builds upon more than ten years of experience pairing interactive technology with the body, with a particular emphasis on performance and performativity. Outcomes include wearable artefacts, performances, performance interventions and the development of interfaces for use by the general public.

• Seminar jointly organised with ECPS Communications and Media Studies
• Full details and schedule here

The Third Wave of Disaster: Science Fiction Cinema and the New Era of Anxiety

Photo: Restroom Signage by Marcin Wichary

The science fiction disaster film has had sporadic success over the last 60 years, the peaks of which can be seen in three distinct waves – those of the 1950s, the 1990s and the 21st century. The wave of the 1950s has largely been seen as a kind of response to the social anxiety brought about by the nuclear threat exemplified by the cold war. The wave of the 1990s can be seen as the result of a rapid increase in special effects technologies and a decade of mild paranoia brought about by millennialism, as well as being a kind of nostalgic reinvention of the SF disaster films of the 1950s, appropriating the imagery whilst detaching it from any real social anxiety.

This paper focuses on a third wave of science fiction (SF) disaster films that has come about in the 21st century as a response to present social anxiety. This anxiety is fuelled by a multiplicity of events, including but not limited to those of September 11; the Iraq war and the subsequent shift in the standing of the United States; as well as the theory of global warming. This wave, like that of the 1990s, appropriates and references the films of the 1950s. However, unlike the films of the 1990s, these films self-consciously declare their own status as representations of contemporary social anxiety, drawing comparison between the first wave’s preoccupation with the nuclear and the contemporary wave’s preoccupation with present concerns. These films also differ from predecessors in their aesthetic of realism and a shifting of focus from images of destruction themselves, to a focus on the way in which characters react to these disastrous environments – the imagery of destruction being too close for comfort in the 21st century.

• Full details and schedule here

On July 24, Adrian Martin presents: Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944, USA)

• Room S704, Menzies Building, Clayton Campus, 4:00pm
• Full schedule of screenings here

Bias and Culture: Reforming the ABC

Burchill Room (Clayton Campus, Performing Arts Complex Bld.68), 2:00 to 3:30 PM

Cultural issues go to the root of what is wrong with the ABC. The major problem is the conformist culture of the institution. The fact that the one program on the ABC that challenges the orthodoxy by exploring conservative and liberal views is called ‘Counterpoint’ tells the story of the ABC’s virtual political monoculture. A cultural and value perspective sets it far apart from the major political parties and most of the Australian population. Katherine Betts has termed a ‘new class’ whose object was not old wealth but instead ‘the Australian mass, and its materialism, racism, sexism, and insularity’. The ‘knowledge-class’, which includes ABC journalists, is an important segment within the new educated class who have more distinct values that increasingly set them apart from business and the general community. Examples will be given with comparisons with the BBC. Cultural change in the ABC is essential for it to fulfill its own charter of balance, impartiality and diversity.

• Full details of the Communications seminar series here

Boot Camp

The famous photojournalist Tim Page will present a lecture about his career that spans over four decades. Page has worked in diverse places such as South East Asia, covering the Vietnam War, and Africa. Page will present a photo story from 1965 until the present with anecdotes and how to possibly make a freelance living.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Faculty of Art and Design.

• Full details may be found here

“I Swear I Saw That”: A talk on the act of giving witness

Professor Michael Taussig (Columbia University)

This talk will gather together different disciplinary interests across literature, performance, visual media and communication. It concerns drawings in fieldwork notebooks (Taussig’s own), the relation of text to image, drawing, and the act of giving witness.

Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist, best known for his engagement with Marx´s idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. His highly innovative writing pays primary attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, story-telling, meta-ethnography, performance and theory.

Taussig has spent over ten years cumulatively doing fieldwork in Columbia, Putumayo, and Venezuela. His work has investigated the history of African slavery, abolition in Western Colombia, popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, the sociology of malnutrition, the impact of colonialism on shamanism and folk healing, the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, especially shamanic healing, the making, talking, and writing of terror, mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism and secrecy.

Currently a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, he has been a faculty member at distinguished universities around the world, including professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has been guest lecturer, visiting professor, and keynote speaker at distinguished centres of learning around the world. In addition, Taussig has published numerous articles, written and publicly performed two scripts, and has been awarded many honours, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. His most recent book is Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006). Other Representative Publications: The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993); The Magic of the State (1997); Defacement (1997); Law in a Lawless Land (2003); My Cocaine Museum (2004).

• Tuesday 15 July @ 4pm
• S/Link Theatre^*, Caulfield Campus
• Followed by drinks at 6 pm at Mama Dukes Bar (on campus)

^* The Link Theatre is located on the first floor of the S Building on Sir John Monash Drive, 150 metres from the entrance to Caulfield Train station. A map can be found here. Location in Google Maps is here.

Monash Conference Centre, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne

Provisional Insight: Siegfried Kracauer in the 21st Century

At the start of the 21st Century this colloquium will draw together scholars from a diverse range of fields to provide a forum in which the actuality of Siegfried Kracauer’s writings can be analysed, debated and explored. Through a detailed engagement with his writings on topics as diverse as film, photography, architecture, popular culture and history, the colloquium will seek to illuminate the many continuities and shifts in Kracauer’s thinking that span his early Weimar writings, his work in the immediate post-war period, and the books that he wrote while living in exile in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s.

Speakers include:

• Graeme Gilloch (Lancaster University)
• Lesley Stern (University of California, San Diego)
• Adrian Martin (Monash University)
• Ian Aitken (Hong Kong Baptist University)
• Helen Grace (Chinese University Hong Kong)
• Andrew Benjamin (Monash University)
• Jodi Brooks (UNSW)

• More details at the colloquium home page
• Download a flyer here (PDF)

Eleanor Kaufman is associate professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies, and an affiliate in Jewish Studies. She received an A.B. in English and French from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University and has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. Her primary research is on twentieth-century French philosophy, with secondary interests in Medieval Christian philosophy, literature and philosophy of the Jewish diaspora, Maghrebian literature, and modern American literature. She is the co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minnesota, 1998) and the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). She is working on three additional book-length projects: “Gilles De leuze and the World without Others”; “The Incorporeal in French Phenomenology” (the subject of the Gauss Seminars that she will be delivering at Princeton in spring 2009); and “The Jewry of the Plain,” on the archives, museums, and cemeteries that commemorate Jewish settlement in remote regions of the American West at the end of the nineteenth century, and simultaneously a meditation on the work of Jacques Derrida. She has published essays in journals such as diacritics, parallax, SAQ, Postmodern Culture, The Oxford Literary Review, Criticism, Polygraph and Angelaki.

Refreshments will be served. This is part of Film & TV’s Under Construction seminar series. Click here for full programme details.

The Centre for Postcolonial Writing Presents:

An Alternative Postcolonial: Language, Location and Culture

Followed by a discussion with Bill Ashcroft, Bruce Bennett, Lynette Russell and Paul Sharrad (Participating Chair)

Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi. A former Vice-Chair of the International Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Prof Trivedi presently holds the position of Vice–President of the Comparative Literature Association of India. He is also co-ordinating the international project in writing a History of World Literature.

Prof Trivedi is the acclaimed author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Manchester University Press). His co-authored books include Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Routledge), Literature& Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (Routledge), and Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Prof Trivedi is currently working on two monographs: Translation in India: India in Translation and Anthology of Indian Literature in English Translation from 1500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

• This lecture was recorded, and will be available soon from the English Podcast

Hot Water: The Sacred and the Sonic

By Gordon McCall, Purdue University

There’s little doubt that many people today remain suspicious of abstract notions and concepts, such as Global Warming. Hot Water: The Sacred and The Sonic, hopes to contribute to the shifting of public attitudes about this issue by illuminating the beauty and necessity for preservation of precious water. Beginning with months of intensive research into the impact and nuance of sound upon our perceptions of water we will create a foundation block for our developing international theatre presentation, which is intended to include collaborators from educational institutions and professional theatres in America, Australia and Canada.

• Click here for more details

Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and has been visiting professor at the University of London and the University of Chicago. He is the acclaimed author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. His co-edited books include Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice; Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990; Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context; The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Heritage of English. Professor Trivedi is Chair of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS), and also Vice–President of the Comparative Literature Association of India. Professor Trivedi is the Distinguished Resident Scholar of Centre for Postcolonial Writing from 10-20 June 2008.

Recommended Readings: Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi

• This seminar was recorded, and will be available soon from the English Podcast

• Contact: Peter Snow at Peter.Snow@arts.monash.edu.au

Distinguished Canadian theatre director Gordon McCall will deliver a lively presentation on how Canada found its voice as a theatre nation. While providing an overview of Canadian plays and key artists, Professor McCall will point to how Canadians uncovered a collective consciousness while shedding a colonial mentality.

Gordon McCall is Currently Associate Professor of Theatre and Head of the Directing program at Purdue University, Gordon hails from Canada where he was recognized as a major contributor to the creation, development and dissemination of a Canadian theatrical voice on the national and international stage.

• Click here for further information

The prize is open to Undergraduates of the University and is awarded on the recommendation of the Head of School. If you are a current Monash Undergraduate student you are eligible to apply.

The author of the prize-winning poem will receive a certificate and a cheque to the value of $150.00. Prize winners’ names/nom de plumes and poems are published on the ECPS website and in the Monash Memo. Entries close 17th June.

• Full details on how to enter may be found here

Film & Television Studies presents Robert Stam

University Professor in Cinema Studies, Tisch School of Arts. New York University, New York City.

From Revolution to Resistance: Alternative Aesthetics in Brazilian Film/Media/Music Video

Stam’s talk will consist of a taxonomy of aesthetic strategies in Brazilian media aimed at critiquing social/racial exclusion. He will present a series of brief clips (about 15 or so) drawn from fiction films/documentaries/and music videos. The talk will be followed by audience discussion.

Robert Stam’s books include: Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006); Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004); Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997); Reflexivity in Film and Literature (UMI Press, 1985); Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Presses, 1982), as well as many co-authored and co-edited books. His works are translated into and published in: French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Refreshments will be served.

• Thursday 5th June 2008 @ 4pm
• Room S704, Building 11 (Menzies building), Monash University Clayton campus

Launch of DVD Indonesia at the Margins

David Hanan (Monash)

In this session David Hanan will introduce and screen two films from the DVD he has recently completed, entitled Indonesia at the Margins: Political Documentaries and Essay Films by Garin Nugroho (1991-2002). The screening will be followed by a paper exploring issues pertinent to the films, including the filmmaker’s discourses on culture and multi-culturalism in an Indonesian context.

Garin Nugroho is Indonesia’s leading director of features and documentaries, having had a new film in international film festivals every two years since 1992, his most recent feature being the acclaimed Opera Jawa (2006). This new DVD, produced for distribution by the Monash Asia Institute’s ‘Between Three Worlds Video and DVD’, makes available for the first time a properly subtitled collection of four of Nugroho’s rarely seen documentary and essay films. The films to be screened are My Family, My Films and My Nation (1998), a unique 30 minute essay film, in which the film-maker reflects on five of his own films at a time of crisis in Indonesia, and Icon: A Cultural Map (2002), a 20 minute essay film about the May-June 2000 West Papuan Congress, in which Nugroho explores the significance of this opportunity—briefly provided during the Wahid era—for the West Papuans to celebrate their own culture and to openly express their views about their incorporation into Indonesia.

Included in My Family, My Films and My Nation are excerpts from the two other films on the DVD, Romi and Water (1991), a documentary (which Indonesian intelligence agencies attempted to ban) about pollution in the river systems of Jakarta and the delivery of clean water to slum areas, and Kancil’s Story of Independence (1995), a one hour documentary about street kids in Yogyakarta, deeply critical of Indonesia’s ability to support its own young people. Both these films were funded with foreign money, and are rare examples of critical documentaries made by an Indonesian during the repressive Suharto era.

David Hanan has a long history of engagement with film in South East Asia and particularly with the film industry in Indonesia, where his work has included film subtitling, film restoration projects, and film distribution, in addition to a variety of lengthy articles. He was the editor of the book Film in South East Asia: Views from the Region (Hanoi: SEAPAVAA and the Vietnam Film Institute, 2001). In the last two years he has had major projects with three of the most important film-making groups in Indonesia. He is currently completing a book entitled Moments of Renewal in Indonesian Cinema.

• Full Programme at the Under Construction homepage

Ageing rockers and die hard punks: When youth culture meets middle age

Andy Bennett (Griffith University)

In the study of popular music reception, ageing audiences have never been a major focus of attention. Occasional references to ageing audiences that do appear, both in academic and popular texts, often tend to cast such audiences in a negative light - as cultural misfits or overgrown teenagers. It could, however, be argued that such representations of ageing popular audiences are increasingly out of step with a world in which definitions of ageing and generational boundaries are radically shifting. Indeed, within this context popular music may be argued to take on a critical new significance as a form of cultural authority; just as music functions as a cultural beacon for youth, so, it could be argued it is used by ageing individuals in the framing of their identities and lifestyles. As such, ageing popular music audiences can be situated in the context of a late modern cultural territory where issues of age, identity and lifestyle are becoming increasingly complex.

• English Library (Clayton Campus, Menzies Building, W710), 2 to 3.30 pm
• For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website

Adam Powers and Tanya Barnes (MA candidates)

Dr Maryrose Casey (Monash)

• Full Programme on the DTS website

The History of Charisma

John Potts (Macquarie University)

The term ‘charisma’ emerged in the early Christian church of the first century; it lay submerged for many centuries, with intermittent appearances; charisma was re-invented in Max Weber’s sociology in the early twentieth century; the word is widely used in contemporary western culture, in media, academic scholarship, and popular discourse. The analysis of the history of this term its invention, eclipse, re-appearance and transformation explores its shifting cultural role over two millennia.

• English Library (Clayton Campus, Menzies Building, W710), 2 to 3.30 pm
• For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website

Social Mise-en-scene: A New Idea in Film Analysis

The idea of mise en scène has become a classic - meaning historic and traditional – tool in film analysis. Conceived as the ‘creative gesture’ par excellence, the director’s mise en scène (the positioning and moving of actors and camera in relation to an environment) has long been imlicitly or explicitly seen as a way for cinema to give ‘form to the formlessness’ of space, time, body and place. But, more recently, particularly in various parts of Europe, a new idea has emerged: the idea that the ‘pro-filmic’ reality with which cinema frequently works is itself already (as sociology has long investigated) a complex matter of cultural or social mise en scène: a series of customs, rituals and manners that set bodies in circumscribed places and behaviours. Cinema, then, would be the interleaving or collision of two kinds or levels of mise en scène: social mise en scène and artistic mise en scène. My presentation will offer examples, from fiction films by John Ford to Roy Andersson, also taking in comedy and documentary, to demonstrate this fertile new idea in cinema analysis.

• Full Programme at the Under Construction homepage

The Lands St George Forgot: Visions of the North

Kevin Foster (Monash University)

This paper will examine how, in a range of travel, literary and historical texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shifting ideas about England’s ‘essential identity’ shaped responses to and representations of its industrial regions. It will explore how the North has been employed (and unemployed) to validate a range of contentions about what constitutes authentic national identity and, in the light of these postulates, in what senses it can be considered a part of England.

• Berwick Campus, Room G87, 2 to 3.30 pm
• For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website

Call for papers now extended.

A call for papers from Staff, Postgraduates, Honours Students and Undergraduates.

A two-day symposium organised by the Sìdhe Literary Collective, Monash University, 19 & 20 September 2008.

Despite the rise of academic interest in vampires in popular culture, vampire romance has been largely ignored. From Dracula (1897) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), romance themes have been inextricably linked to vampire narratives and the image of the vampire more broadly. Due to the commercial success of the emerging sub-genre ‘Paranormal Romance’, there has been increasing utilisation of vampire romance and related themes in other genres (such as contemporary fiction, young adult fiction and horror). Contemporary feminist scholars have not reflected upon this recent phenomenon despite the pioneering studies of Tania Modleski (1982), Janice Radway (1987) and Linda Christian-Smith (1990). The two-day symposium is an opportunity for scholars to discuss and critically examine the impact of the Undead upon the romance genre and the burgeoning industry created in its wake.

Topics of interest include:

• Vampires in Gothic and Romantic literature
• Vampire Romance and the reader
• Vampire ‘chick lit’
• Vampires in film and television
• Representations of the Slayer
• Vampires, sex and gender
• Vampires and violence
• Vampires, fashion and aesthetics
• Vampires and consumption (food, fashion and capitalism)

To submit a proposal, please forward an abstract of c. 250 words with contact details by Friday 27 June 2008 (previously 30 May) to sidhelc@gmail.com, or or in hard-copy to Dr Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, or Dr Patrick Spedding (Department of English, ECPS, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800).

Postgraduates, honours students and undergraduates are welcome. Notification of outcome will be provided by provided on 1 July 2008. The symposium will be held at the Japanese Studies Centre. Details regarding registration will be announced on the Sìdhe Literary Collective blog http://sidhelc.googlepages.com/.

This event is funded by the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

• Download the poster for this event

The Business of Creativity: the Tension between Aesthetics and Commerce in Serious Fiction

Adib Khan is the author of five novels. His first novel, Seasonal Adjustments won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Book of the Year in the 1994 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book. His second novel, Solitude of Illusions was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Ethnic Commission Award in the 1997 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1997 Tilly Aston Braille Book of the Year Award. His other novels are The Storyteller and Homecoming. His latest work Spiral Road was listed among the twenty books for the 2008 State Library of Victoria’s summer reading program. Currently, Adib is a PhD (Creative Writing) Scholar, Centre for Postcolonial Writing.

• A podcast of this presentation is now available

God to Christian: Playing Yahweh in ‘Ot: Chronicles of the Old Testament’ at Malthouse 07

• Full Programme on the DTS website

Paradox and Indirect Communication

A Symposium with Peter Murphy, Markus Locker, Justin Clemens and Dimitris Vardoulakis.

Paradox is a potent form of communication—allowing us the capacity to talk about things that otherwise are practically impossible to talk about, things that otherwise would reduce us to withering silence. This seminar explores the nature of paradox as a form of meta-communication, and the role that it plays at the core of human culture—enabling human beings to pose religious, philosophical, artistic and other central questions of existence that otherwise could not be postulated or even conceived. The paper givers will consider the role of paradox in dramaturgical acts, in the religion-science dialogue, in decision-making, and in artistic representation—and will consider the kinds of strange truths and powerful cultural enigmas that can only be represented in, through and by paradoxical forms of communicative action.

• Full details and programme here.

A special Apitchapong Weerasethakul screening

Tropical Malady (Sud Pralad)

A film by internationally acclaimed experimental Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul. Cannes Festival Jury Prize winner (2004), Tropical Malady at first appears to be a relatively straightforward story of the developing, and at times tentative, gay relationship between a soldier and young villager. But the film takes an abrupt, unexpected and emotionally charged change of direction into the jungle. This highly personal, feature-length, experimental narrative, characteristically pushes boundaries and has puzzled critics. From the mundane to the mythical or supernatural and in “the space between”, the film operates on many levels, especially on the senses and heart, and can’t be easily categorised.

Thai films have created recent global interest with what has been described as a New Wave of Thai filmmakers since 1997. Few Thais work in experimental film and Apichatpong, also an artist, is one of the few filmmakers working outside the local studio system. He’s been described as “transnationally cosmopolitan” (Brett Farmer), and his films, despite their distinct “Thainess”, strike a chord with international audiences. Influences include Andy Warhol, Buddhism, early Thai melodramas and American B-grade grizzly bear movies. His latest feature, Syndromes and a Century (Sang Sattawat) 2006, which premiered at the 63rd Venice Film Festival, was banned in Thailand. Apichatpong refused to cut the film. Subsequently, he and other directors formed the Free Thai Cinema Movement. Apichatpong promotes experimental and independent films through his production company, Kick the Machine.

Dianne has a background in the print media and film and television (including Thailand). She teaches journalism at Monash (part-time) and has just begun work, at Monash, on her PhD thesis: “Beyond Eurocentric and exotic views of Southeast Asian cinema: gazing empathetically at the works of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul”.

• More details on the Under Construction web page

April 28

Phenomenology and Performance Studies: With Particular Reference to Group Phenomenology

An overview of group phenomenological enquiry and its potential for application in the study of performance. How the method worked in the Audience group project. Reporting from the investigations of the third year comedy class who have turned their unit into an instance of research as pedagogy.

• Full Programme on the DTS website

International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media

Call for Papers

• Within current understandings of globalization, it is difficult to think of any topic in the field of media and communications studies which does not consider the international and the intercultural as they function within digital media environments. Nevertheless, this diversity also raises interesting questions about what is central in the field.
• What are the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, and how are they shaped by the discipline’s international, institutional contours?
• What does the desire to ‘de-westernize’ media & communications studies say about relations between the empirical and the theoretical; where we find examples of media cultures in action, and what ideas we use to make sense of them?
• Is disciplinarity still a workable idea?
• How do all of these questions work their way into studies that are not directly about any of them?
• Or are these even the right questions to ask?

We invite you to consider these questions.

250 word abstracts for individual papers or 300 word panel proposals should be sent to Andy Ruddock by 11th June 2008. Please include a brief bibliographical note. Presenters will be given 20 minutes to speak to their presentations. We particularly encourage submissions from postgraduates and postgraduate panels. The final day of the conference will be dedicted to postgraduate papers and held at the Monash University Berwick Campus.

Conference proceedings will be collected and published.

• Visit this page for more details

The Protection of Traditional Cultural Expression and the Limits of Moral Arguments from Culture and Religion

Elizabeth Coleman (Monash)

This paper explore a problem in moral philosophy concerning the rights of religious and cultural groups. In theory, religion and culture are often blurred. Religion may be defined as culture, and, when discussing indigenous cultures, culture may be defined in terms of religion. This creates problems when we are considering the rights of indigenous people, as within political philosophy the limits of rights of freedom of religion are different to the limits of the rights to culture. The paper will use the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s draft protocols for the protection of Traditional Cultural Expression as a means of exploring the practical implications of this problem.

• Berwick Campus, Room 901/231, 2 to 3.30 pm

For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website

Blocks to the Creative Process in Developing Theatre Performance

Jeffrey Hood

Synopsis not available yet.

Working With Dinosaurs: Narrative Techniques in the Arena Spectacular

Felix Nobis

This paper examines some unique performance challenges presented to the narrator / presenter of a 21st century arena spectacular. The paper draws on the experience of narrating the premiere production of “Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience” in Australia and the United States. The paper explores the liminal territory between ‘acting’ and ‘storytelling’, as well as the relationship between single performer and mass audience.

• Full Programme on the DTS website

31 March 2008

Time, Entimement, Temporality? Experiences of the Time in Performance

Ed Creely

This paper examines critical philosophical, practical and dramatic issues to do with understanding the nature of time for an actor in performance. How is time or temporality linked to experience in performance? How should we understand the abstraction of ‘time’ and the discourses that accompany the use of concepts about time? These, among other questions, are examined in the light of the current debate about the application of time to performance phenomena.

Fear in the Academy: an Exploration of Academic Stage Fright

Amanda Burrell

This paper reports on a pilot project exploring the effectiveness of theatre training to reduce stage fright in academics. A self-selected sample of Advertising and Marketing Communication academics were given intensive theatre training by theatre scholar/practitioners. Semi–structured depth interviews which informed the training content, preceded multiple observations. Participants’ lectures were observed (with students present) prior to and after training. Additionally participants were filmed at the start and end of training. One final measure, an electronic survey, was administered six months after training. Participants’ initial felt symptoms matched the description of stage fright from the literature. Final observations showed massive and enduring improvements in entrances, vocal and physical ease and dialogical delivery style. Theatre training can be an effective method to reduce academic stage fright and increase academic confidence and effectiveness in lecture performance.

• Download the audio recording of this presentation, or subscribe to our podcast here

Poetry and the Trace: An International Conference

State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

The study and practice of poetry is crucial to our society’s ability to reflect upon its self, its divergent subjectivities and values. Poetic language, in all it diversities of style and idea, can be described as the distilled heartbeat of language, the place where attention is focused upon the reciprocal and dynamic acts of looking – looking at the world and at the self. Poetry and the Trace seeks to bring together a range of voices, national and international, poets and critics, to foreground the centrality of the poetic impulse, and to celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which poetry as a genre can speak to the questions which drive our human experience – in particular, the elusivity of what Derrida described as the “trace,” be it of memory, desire, the past, the goal of ethics etc.

Poetry and the Trace will be the first international, broad-based poetry conference to be held in Australia in over a decade. It is hoped that this conference will inspire ongoing dialogues between poetries from different regions, and encourage debate about the role of contemporary poetries and their histories both in the context of Australian culture and beyond.

The conference will be held across three days at the inspiring and central venue of the State Library of Victoria. It will commence with a welcome reception and poetry reading (open to the public) and offer three days of concurrent academic papers and plenary sessions designed around key issues to draw all delegates, both practitioners and academics, into the liveliness of shared debate. A refereed publication of conference proceedings consisting of both scholarly and creative work is planned.

“I dwell in possibility…”
Emily Dickinson

Visit the Poetry and the Trace website for details.

A Welcome to Dr Janine Burke

Podcast of this event now available

The School of ECPS is delighted to welcome Dr Janine Burke as a new Monash Fellow (co-located in the Centre for Women’s Studies in the School of Political and Social Inquiry). Janine is a renowned independent scholar, and author of many books of art criticism including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1995) and Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002). Janine recently convened the successful Inside the mind of Freud Exhibition. Her fellowship work will focus on artistic collaborations and will involve exhibitions locally and internationally.

On March 19 2008 at 5.30pm, the The Dean of Arts, Professor Rae Frances, will officially welcome Janine on behalf of the Arts Faculty at an event at the MUMA Gallery. Dr Burke will give a short presentation on her fellowship plans titled “Geniuses Together: Exploring Creative Partnerships”.

Title: Geniuses Together: Exploring Creative Partnerships: a short presentation by Dr Janine Burke
Date: 19 March 2008
Time: 5.30pm
Location: MUMA Gallery, Gallery Building, Clayton Campus, Monash University.

Food and wine will be provided.
Any queries, contact:

• Dr JaneMaree Maher 9905 2949
• Dr Ron Gallagher 9905 2146

Find out more about Dr Burke’s work.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Cultural Diversity and Social Cohesion

Recordings of this conference are now available from our podcast.

The city has become central to the ways in which contemporary society is imagined, not only in the industrialised West but in the industrialising economies of Asia. Public bodies utilise cultural activities to promote ‘civic’ identities, and the creative representation of the city to its inhabitants through public and quasi-public events provides a sense of pride in place, tradition, and belonging. Yet as Bridge and Watson have noted: ‘As cities have become more complex, more global, and more diasporic it is harder to construct cultural markers which make for a simple image of the city with which to identify’ (Bridge and Watson, 2000).

The Bloodless Head of Longinus: Political Interventions and the Decapitation of the Moriones Tradition in Marinduque

Dr Will Peterson (Monash)

This seminar presentation maps out the political interventions and competing social interests that have altered the Moriones Festival on the island of Marinduque in the Philippines over the last forty years. The three-night sinakulo or passion play and attendant events associated with the festival are known largely for the ways in which they utilise local men donning elaborate masks and wearing costumes meant to resemble Roman centurions. This talk will examine the social forces and multiple and competing political and economic interventions that have shaped and significantly modified this multi-faceted event since the 1960s, with particular attention given to the ways in which the local elite through the power of the provincial government under Governor Carmencita Reyes has used this festival to effectively shore up the country’s existing, highly stratified social and economic order.

Video of this presentation was recorded on Monday 17th March 2008 at the Centre for Drama & Theatre Studies:

• Download the video in MP4 format.
• View or subscribe to the Drama & Theatre Studies Podcast
• More about Dr Will Peterson

Art and the Political

This is a series of six graduate seminars (3 per semester during 2008) and two public lectures organised by the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts and co-sponsored by ECPS. Visiting international professors will run these seminars, which will generate high quality critical discussion and foster cross-institutional relations with the University of Melbourne.

The first two seminars are by Eduardo Cadava and Jalal Toufic.

For further details visit VCA’s page.
For further information please contact Dimitrios Vardoulakis

New Podcasts

We’ve added several audio podcasts to our site. You can now subscribe to a podcast for each section/centre of ECPS for in-depth coverage of specific interest areas - or you can subscribe to the ECPS Events Podcast, which has highlights from events held by all sections of the school.

Highlights include:

• Professor Agnes Heller delivering a series of papers and lectures.
• Five papers presented by international scholars at The Greeks conference.
• Distinguished visitor Professor Jeffrey Alexander discussing Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action at the ECPS seminar.
• John Bull presenting the keynote paper at the Music, Culture and Society conference.

Visit our feeds & podcast homepage to subscribe, and listen on your iPod, MP3 player, or computer - or go directly to a specific podcast via the following links:

• ECPS Events Podcast
• Communications & Media Studies Podcast
• Drama & Theatre Studies Podcast
• Film & Television Studies Podcast

The English Studies Podcast is not yet available, but will launch soon with Rebecca Do Rozario discussing fairytales.

Music, Culture and Society Conference

Recordings of this conference are now available from our podcast.

There is now widespread agreement that ‘music is more than notes’, a growing recognition that music is culturally formed and serves diverse social purposes. But the social life of music is inherently paradoxical. Music both announces social change and consolidates collective memory; it both gives expression to personal identity and connects us to others. Furthermore, in modern life, music is both a vehicle for transcending the everyday and an integral part of it. It is the soundtrack to much of our existence and that soundtrack is highly technological. Musical technologies deeply impact the musical experience and the social relations that music enters into.

This conference aims to bring together scholars from fields as diverse as musicology, communications and media studies, sociology, social history, political theory, philosophy and Asian studies, to examine the paradoxical, deeply-felt and often contradictory roles that music plays in social life and culture more broadly. Presenters will address the socio-cultural role of music through diverse genres and styles – from pop to classical, experimental to conventional - and from various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. The conference will feature an afternoon involving presentations from students pursuing postgraduate research on the socio-cultural aspects of music.

Grimm: Fractured fairy tales for young and old

Take a walk on the wild side, with an original theatre piece celebrating the quirkier side of the Grimm Fairy Tales. From the romantic to the grotesque, Grimm offers a mixed bag of delights and thrills to enrapture a young audience. If you go into the woods tonight, you’re sure of a big surprise…

Presented by Black Apple Theatre Company and the Centre for Drama & Theatre Studies. Click here for further information.

Performances: February 7th, 8th & 9th @ 7:30pm; Matinee February 9th @ 2:00pm
Venue: The Drama Theatre, Building 68 Clayton Campus
Tickets: $10, bookings via ccad1@student.monash.edu.au or 0411 987 712