UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Psychoanalysis and the arts have always been companions: Freud draws on Sophocles and Michelangelo, Jung on Hesse, Lacan on Sophocles too. These are acts of translation between different ways of thinking and working, different ways of experiencing society and each other. In this podcast Timothy Mathews talks with renowned psychoanalyst and gender theorist Juliet Mitchell about psychoanalysis and a...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Elizabeth Shepherd Past, Present and Future: the Archive, the Academy and the Community This lecture tells the story of archives and archivists in 20th century England by examining the contributions of some characterful pioneers in the archives. Since 1947, archivists have been represented in the academy, initially through professional graduate education, but more rec...

In April 1817, opera in London changed: Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni (1787) was finally performed at the King's Theatre 30 years after its Prague debut. Why did it take so long for this masterpiece to reach London audiences? Londoners preferred works such as Cimarosa's Gli Orazi ed Orazi (1796). From Mozart it was only a small leap for to endorse Rossini, whose operas were to become the soun...

A chamber orchestra perform the world premiere of the compositions of Belinda É. S., conducted by Christopher Petrie. Have you ever listened to music but wished you could better connect with it? ‘Landscapes Within’ is a debut musical performance offering the opportunity to experience music in a new way. You will be encouraged to engage with the music by becoming aware of your body and its response...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Melissa Terras A Decade in Digital Humanities In 2004, Blackwell published their Companion to Digital Humanities, lending a new name to the use of computing in the arts, humanities and heritage sectors: the term 'Digital Humanities' has been much used, and much criticized, since. Pixellated Image of Medieval Stained Glass In this lecture, Professor Terras looks back a...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Maxine Molyneux (Institute of the Americas) Full title: Transnational Americans: Latin American Perspectives on Recent Trends in Pan-American Migration Commencing around 1960, two new waves of migration began in the Americas, one from the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean to the USA, Canada and Spain; the other, a more moderate but still significant trend o...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Vanda Broughton Since the beginning of civilization how to organize recorded knowledge in libraries and personal book collections has been a matter of practical and intellectual concern. Many of the systems devised are idiosyncratic, or reflect world views which seem strange to the modern mind. Today there is still a proliferation of classifications, and their applica...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Dorian Fuller Full title - Growing Societies: the Archaeobotany of Food Production and Globalization of Agriculture The origins of agriculture irrevocably changed the relationship of humans and the earth, literally transforming earth at local scales of cultivation, and over the long-term, promoting population growth and economic specialization globally. While archaeol...

Where do we come from, where are we going? How can family and personal heritage change the world? Origins preoccupy us today. From politics through television period dramas to family histories, we want to know about our collective pasts, the ones that lie beyond our individual memories and that involve lives other than our own. BBC genealogist Nick Barratt talks about the power of personal heritag...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Margot Finn Full title - The East India Company at Home: Private Fortunes, Public Histories This lecture has two main purposes. The first purpose is to discuss key findings from a three-year collaborative research project that explores the impact of the East India Company - the state-sanctioned monopoly that established Britain’s empire on the subcontinent - on Englis...

What is the art of translation? This conversation responds in material and practical ways. It explores how translation acts as an agent of creativity. Speakers discuss how translation has made them think, affected how they understand works of art, and how translation has inspired works of art. Speakers: Sharon Morris (Slade School of Fine Art) Timothy Mathews (UCL French) Elise Aru Eugenia Loffred...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Susan Collins From In Conversation (1997) which provided a live link between the street and the internet and Transporting Skies (2002) which relayed sky live, in real-time, between Penzance and Sheffield, to more recent pixel-by-pixel transmissions from remote locations including Fenlandia (2004), Seascape (2009) and London 2013; the lecture will present a number of w...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Charles Stewart We have had history and anthropology, historical anthropology and the history of anthropology, but as yet there has been no concerted anthropology OF history. What is needed are ethnographic studies of how the past is known, understood and represented in world societies past and present. This does not amount solely to the appreciation of “others” deleg...

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Axel Körner Verdi’s hugely popular American opera Un ballo in maschera (1859) was completed during the final stages of the Unification of Italy. Why did Italy’s compositore nazionale celebrate Unification with an opera set in Boston? Verdi depicts an altogether rather dark and disconcerting image of life in the New World. When president elect Abraham Lincoln attended...

"The beer houses are decorated like palaces. Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly. Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility." - Dostoevsky in London,1862. How have visitors seen and experienced London? Join us for an exciting and interactive evening of literary discussion to find out. UCL researchers working on how London has been written and pictured through time discuss Londo...

An exploration of the vampire figure, in literature, myth, and film. What difference does it make whether the vampire is male or female? Why was Snow White really a vampire? What is the role of science and religion in the vampire film? Speakers: Professor Susanne Kord (UCL German) Dr Titus Hjelm (UCL SSEES) Joseph Wilde (director of Cuddles)

(Image © 'Crocodilian', Hannah Battershell, 2012) Hear excerpts from our exciting first Café Culture session on fairy tales and find out how the language and images of the fairy tale were chosen to appeal to children, whilst their stories are often anything but child friendly. Our speakers Mererid Puw Davies (UCL German) and Tom Lundskaer-Nielsen (UCL Scandinavian Studies) explore the language of...

Award-winning Dutch poet Ester Naomi Perquin reads her poetry, which has recently won the highly esteemed Dutch VSB Poetry Prize. The event was organised by the UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) in partnership with Poet in the City. Audio recording copyright © The British Library Board, 2013.

Between the Lines - Steve Waters by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Between the Lines - Maureen Freely by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Artist Grayson Perry joined a panel discussion on the Future of the Arts, as part of UCL's Festival of the Arts. The panel also included: • Professor Lisa Jardine (UCL Historian and Broadcaster) • Professor Malcolm Grant (UCL President and Provost) • The Rt Hon David Willetts MP (Minister for Universities and Science) Chaired by the Dean of Arts and Humanities, Professor Jonathan Wolff. The panel...

Between the Lines - Adam Freudenheim by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Javier Marías, Bernardo Atxaga, Luis Fernando Verissimo and Alberto Barrera Tyszka. She has won various prizes for her work, most recently, the 2012 Calouste Gulb...

Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella are the co-editors of Translation and Creativity (Continuum 2006) and One Poem in Search of a Translator (Peter Lang 2008). They met in 1998 at the University of East Anglia, UK, while studying for postgraduate degrees in literary translation, Eugenia specialising in experimental translation, Manuela in theatre translation, and have since collaborated in se...

Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus at UEA. He has written on many aspects of French and comparative poetics, on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, particularly in Impressionism and Symbolism, on the literature of travel, on photography, and on literary translation which he discusses widely here. In 2012 he published Translating the Perception of Text (Legenda), and Literary Tr...