Fabrication: KCL Arts & Humanities Festival 2015

Given that I started my PhD writing about the KCL Arts and Humanities Festival, it seems only fitting that I end in the same way. This year's theme is Fabrication. As usual, it's a broad theme, ambiguous enough to allow King's staff and students to shoehorn in their wide range of interests, but - to the joy of my inner five year old - staff from the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies department took it literally and got us engaging in arts and crafts.

Fabricating Across the Atlantic

My beloved supervisors, Professor Catherine Boyle and Dr Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, decided to celebrate the Andean tradition of making arpilleras, small tapestries sewn onto sacks, which have been used for decades as a form of protest or a way to share life stories. Chilean Human Rights advocate and researcher Roberta Bacic curated an exhibition of arpilleras from Chile, Argentina and Peru, with narratives of dictatorship, strikes, or making a stand against domestic abuse. Also on display was an arpillera created by Chilean exiles in Sheffield and South Yorkshire, telling the story of how they had started a new life.

Catherine and Elisa wanted to take the festival as an opportunity not only to display arpilleras but to consider how they can be understood in and adapted to our own context. They asked: 'What does it mean to tell our own stories of here and now in a city of movement and transition like London, through a creative form borrowed from elsewhere?'

To answer that question, they turned the Council Room of KCL into an arpillera workshop, led by artist Linda Adams who, inspired by the Andean example, explores political themes through tapestry. Armed with thread, fabrics, paper templates and PVA glue, we were challenged to make a collective tapestry narrating our own experience of London. Naturally, I made myself dancing.

The day ended in a dramatised reading of Tres Marias y una Rosa, a Chilean play by David Benavente and Taller de Investigación Teatral depicting an arpillera workshop. The four women of the title discuss their financial and marital struggles as they make arpilleras for export, the only way for them to support themselves and their families. Catherine had worked with the Head For Heights Theatre Company in a mixture of translation and devising to make the play work and resonate in an English context. While we had been busy cutting and sticking, Catherine, director Karen Morash and four very brave actresses spent the afternoon locked away rehearsing. After only a matter of hours with the play, they put on an incredibly engaging performance. I was surprised to learn that the original play had been written in 1979 as the frank discussions between the women and their struggles to support their families through economic crisis are just as relevant today.

Translation games: weaving translation into a poetic collage

I've been a fan of Translation Games since it launched in 2013, to the point where I invited the organiser Dr Ricarda Vidal to introduce her fascinating project at the Migrating Texts colloquium last year. Translation Games plays with translation across not only different languages but different media in a ‘public-facing programme of ludic workshops’. The project employs the arts to make languages interesting for the general public, while at the same time trying to discover whether there is an ‘essence’ of a text which carries through different media.

As Ricarda explained, Translation Games began with a project called What We Made in which a short narrative text commissioned from the American Colleen Becker was translated in a sort of telephone game from English to French to Italian and so on. Each translator only had access to the previous step, although the text was also translated back into English at every stage. At the same time, the text was translated from writing to film to ceramics to an audiovisual piece and finally to choreography, and simultaneously from text to textile. Translation Games has since run further projects, including translation from poetry to scents, and a challenge for students and artists to translate a photographic version of a poem by the Serbian Vasko Popa into an English poem.

My favourite Spaniard Dr Maria-José Blanco has now joined Ricarda and thanks to an AHRC grant the pair organised a translation train beginning with the poem Still by Denise Riley, through 12 artists, each using a medium of their choice. They then set a competition to translate the final image back into poetry. The original poem, 12 images and the winning poetry translation can be seen here. One of the artists, Sarah Sparkes (whose playful musings on death and the afterlife I was first introduced to at the launch of Ricarda and Maria-José's book The Power of Death), also teaches classes at the Tate on paper engineering, and so it was decided that participants at the Fabrication event would be challenged to translate one of the poems or the images into a paper structure.

After practising different cuts and folds, I chose the last image in the chain by Domingo Martinez to translate into paper. Although I had a great time cutting, sticking and drawing with ink, I did also reflect seriously on what were the key aspects of the image which gave it its meaning: the colours, the contrast between dark and light, the layering and the image of one hand grasping another.

At the end of the day, all the translations were sewn to canvas to be displayed in KCL. As you can see below, we each had very different ideas, which demonstrates the impact of the personality and interests of the translator on their output, but we still found elements in each of them which convey the meaning of the original poem.

This is just a tiny part of a packed two weeks of festival. For the highlights, check out King's Arts and Humanities' Storify.

Final Year Begins

With the new term upon us already, the countdown begins: just one year until submission.

Writing for King's Arts and Humanities life blog over my first two years at KCL really helped me to keep track of progress. Now that I need it more than ever, the blog is no more, so I've determined to keep up the blogging here instead.

So what's going on?

Migrating Texts
Three workshops about subtitling, translation and adaptation at the Institute of Modern Languages Research. The three of us organising have been working on this for over a year now and not a week has gone by without some emails, meetings or phonecalls related to it. It's amazing how a two-day event can take so much organising! We now have a website (migratingtexts.wordpress.com), social media presence (@MigratingTexts), and most of our speakers booked (I do a happy dance in my bedroom upon confirmation). Still to do: finalising some funding, registration, hoping enough people will come to cover costs!

Sticking with the IMLR, arranging the 7 sessions for next year's graduate forum was spectacularly easy by contrast. I sent an email to various mailing lists asking for participants, got lots of interesting proposals, matched people with dates. As my favourite meerkat would say, simples. Find us on Facebook: IMLR Graduate Forum

Then there's what I should actually be working on...my PhD. I now have a word document for every section of my dissertation, alrhough the conclusion at this point mainly reads:
WHAT?
SO WHAT?
WHAT NEXT?
(thanks to the @ThesisWhisperer)
I still haven't finished writing the section I had planned to have drafted by the beginning of June, but mainly because I keep finding new things to read (i belatedly discovered the Senate House treasure trove). I'm now flitting between rewriting/adding to my first section and drafting the second.

I'm also on a reading binge, working my way through my Sudaquia collection. I need to build up my Venezuelan literature website! As teaching begins next week, I'm alternating Venezuelan novels with Spanish travel writing, enjoying working on the peninsula again for the first time in years.

Most importantly, I've decorated my desk for inspiration. Hopefully my next blog will show that it has worked!

Celebrating interdisciplinarity, collaboration and the digital

(Originally posted 1 June 2014)

In the past few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to participate in a range of events at King’s and beyond which have filled me with enthusiasm both for my own research and for the future of academia. These events have shown me the possibilities for collaborative research across disciplines, for making the most of the digital and for sharing learning beyond the classroom.

First up, on Friday 16 May, was Research with Reach, a full-day event organised by Ella Parry-Davies and Penny Newell from the Department English, which brought together postgraduate researchers from across the Arts and Humanities and a fascinating range of speakers from within and outside academia. The day was born from Ella and Penny’s desire to learn more about how to share knowledge beyond the academy while hopefully supplementing our incomes in the process! We gained useful insights into journalism, running public workshops, speaking at festivals like Hay, and making the most of blogging and social media. It was a particular pleasure to meet Prof Alan Read, the driving force behind the Inigo Rooms and the Anatomy Theatre, as I really admire how those spaces have been created to bring art and performance into the university and allow innovative ways of exhibiting research.

Then on Tuesday 20 May, the Union conference, run by my fellow Arts and Humanities Life blogger Naomi Lloyd-Jones and a very dedicated team of postgraduate researchers from across the departments. The aim of the conference was to explore and celebrate interdisciplinarity by giving new researchers – including many MA students who had never presented a conference paper before – the chance to share their research beyond the restrictive boundaries of academic departments and find connections. I really loved noting how research in philosophy, for example, linked with my research on nationalist cultural politics, while the very novel ‘paper as performance’ which ended the day not only impressed me but left me with concrete ideas for improving my own teaching practice. Explaining my thesis to non-experts proved to me that I really know my research and don’t have to hide behind long words, and the final lively workshop and debate session only reinforced my enthusiasm for sharing my research with wider audiences.

While the participants of Union enjoyed a tasty conference dinner, I headed off to Birkbeck Arts Week to celebrate the second birthday of Alluvium Journal, an open access, post-publication peer review journal of twenty-first century literary criticism. Having followed Alluvium and many of its editors/writers on Twitter for some time, I was very excited to meet them in person and to hear more about their pioneering developments in the production and dissemination of knowledge about literature. One particularly interesting case was Zara Dinnen’s use of Google docs to write papers collaboratively with friends and colleagues in other countries.

Overall, it was incredibly refreshing and inspiring – amidst all the doom and gloom that surrounds academia in the age of funding cuts and mounting bureaucracy – to meet like-minded people who are passionate about creating exciting new research and sharing it both beyond departmental borders and with the wider public.

K-Link Widening Participation Scheme

(Originally posted on 24 April 2014)

As a firm believer in the importance of widening access to Higher Education, I was very happy to be asked to take part in K-Link recently. K-Link is King’s widening participation programme, which gives children from less privileged schools throughout London a taste of university education. Through the programme, I had two – very different – opportunities to teach secondary school children.

Firstly, GCSE students from the three schools that the SPLAS department is partnered with came in to King’s for a full day: a Q&A with current students, a translation workshop, tour, and finally a taster seminar. One of the school groups – 16 boys and girls, plus two teachers – had an introduction from me to studying culture as part of a language degree. I began by explaining what a seminar is – ask lots of questions, try out new ideas, do lots of practical exercises. We then broke up into small groups and brainstormed definitions of culture, before looking at some Frida Kahlo paintings and an extract from a short story by the late great Gabriel García Márquez.

The students were clearly tired after such a demanding day, and many of the boys were too cool to show enthusiasm, so it was challenging to get them to participate, but I succeeded in the end (I’m very grateful for much needed help from their teachers in this). After the session, one teacher told me that although they were reluctant to speak, he could tell that they had gained a lot from it. He said he was really happy for the children to have had the chance to experience cultural studies when the demands of GCSEs allow no time for anything like this, which made all the effort worth it.

The following week I went into another of our partner schools. This time I was extremely lucky to be teaching four of the most gifted, enthusiastic girls I could hope for. We covered similar material but the small group size and eagerness of the pupils meant we could go much more in-depth. I was hugely impressed, as they were more engaged than some of my final year students! I felt privileged to teach them and really pleased to learn that they all plan to continue to language study at university.

Upgraded!

(Originally posted on 10 April 2014)

As I mentioned in my last post, it seems like for as long as I’ve been at King’s, I’ve been “preparing for my upgrade”. Now, after 18 months, I have survived the process and am finally a fully-fledged PhD candidate.

I really had no idea what to expect from the upgrade meeting. I had spent the day before rereading the 20,000 word chapter that I had handed in for examination back in February, assuming that I would be quizzed on it. As it turned out, I wasn’t expected to say much at all in the meeting. Instead, it was a chance for the examiners, especially my secondary supervisor who had not previously commented on my work, to share their comments, queries and advice. While my two supervisors work on literary/cultural studies like myself, my third examiner was from political science, so she brought an interesting alternative viewpoint to the discussion.

My supervisor insisted that it went really well and that all three examiners had been impressed with my chapter, but I must admit that at the time I was just completely overwhelmed by the amount that I still have to think about. The wealth of further reading recommended by the examiners, and their suggestions on how to expand or refine sections of the chapter will surely prove invaluable in the long-run, helping me to make my thesis better. However, at the time I just wanted to run away and hide from it all. Only now, two weeks later, having finally completed the paperwork, that it has finally sunk in that I’ve passed. Now I can relax for the next 18 months (well, except for researching and writing and teaching and conferencing!) until submission, which I’m sure will come around all too quickly.

Being a Graduate Teaching Assistant

(Originally posted 14 February 2014)

Last night I was one of the speakers at a training session for potential Arts and Humanities Graduate Teaching Assistants, which has prompted me to finally write the blog about teaching I’ve been promising for a while now.

I began teaching – leading seminars for a final year module about the Latin American ‘New Historical Novel’ – five weeks ago now and I absolutely love it! Since October I’ve been taking a teacher training course run by King’s Learning Institute called Enhancing Academic Practice, so it’s great to put all of my theoretical learning into practice and this experience has confirmed to me that university teaching really is my dream career. I get such a buzz from sharing my passion for literature with the class and getting them to really engage with it.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much freedom I have been given to design the class around the set source material. I can come up with my own activities and choose  my favourite extracts for the class to analyse. I’ve also been given a lot of scope to bring my own expertise to the module, and was even asked to lead the lecture last week based on my research. The trust my lecturer has placed in me and my students’ appreciation of the knowledge I bring to class has been an invaluable boost, and I’ve also learned or revised a huge amount that will directly help my thesis too.

One of the main concerns potential GTAs expressed last night was about how time consuming it is, particularly with the ever-increasing pressure to finish your PhD within three years. However, all of the speakers – myself from SPLAS, and others from history, classics, English and Film – said that we spend no more than one day a week preparing and all agreed that this was a valuable use of our time. We would all certainly recommend taking the opportunity if it is available in your discipline.

Making connections: Latin American literature in China

(Originally posted 4 February 2014)

This academic year I have been co-organising our departmental seminars (www.splas-seminars.com) with a fellow PhD candidate. These seminars give current students a chance to try out their research in an informal setting, usually before a big scary conference, and get constructive feedback. Other weeks we get a external speakers in to share their expertise. I love the opportunity these seminars afford to learn about other aspects of my field that I never usually encounter, but this week’s was a particular joy.

Last Wednesday we welcomed Tianai Wang to the department to talk about the influence of Spanish language literature in translation in her native China. Tianai has recently graduated from the MA in Comparative Literature here at KCL so her presentation was also a homecoming, as staff were certainly very happy to see her back.

What I most enjoyed was the opportunity to learn about a culture that I know shamefully little about and the surprise of how much Latin American literature (my own speciality) has influenced contemporary Chinese writers. Mo Yan, for example, was praised for his ‘hallucinatory realism’ when awarded his Noble Prize in 2012 in much the same way that Gabriel Garcia Márquez was for his ‘magical realism’ upon winning the prize in 1982. Tianai’s presentation therefore gave me a new way of thinking about literature that I am very familiar with, as well as an entrance to a whole new literary world.

Tomorrow’s seminar is Dr Juliet Perkin’s talking about translating the 15th century chronicles of Fernao Lopes, worlds away from contemporary Chinese literature, but another topic that I look forward to learning more about.

A Room of One's Own

(Originally posted 19 September 2013)

When I first started at King’s a year ago, my enquiries about a postgraduate office/workspace were met with blank stares and mumbles of ‘try the British Library’. I was disappointed as I’ve always had an aversion to working in libraries, especially the silent kind, and I’d been hoping that a workroom would be a space where catching up with colleagues would brighten the otherwise lonely business of doctoral research.

Now with our shiny new Virginia Woolf building on Kingsway, I’ve got all I wanted and more. Not only bright, open-plan research space, but a kitchen and comfy sofas too. The best part is that SPLAS now shares this area with the German department. I’ve often said that one of my favourite aspects of the PhD is getting to know other researchers and learning from them. The daily contact with German PGRs and staff opens a whole knew world of research specialisms to fascinate me, from contemporary Austrian theatre to the reception of Hollywood rom-coms in Europe. Then when the study-guilt kicks in and we leave the sofas, knowing there are other people at the neighbouring desks powering through that journal article or rewriting their next chapter is a great motivator to keep on working. We’ve only been moved in for a week, but I already feel like the new building will make this a very productive and enjoyable year!

Back to reality...

(Originally posted 12 September 2013)

Every summer, I leave normal life behind for a few months and enter a parallel universe, or at least that’s how it feels working in the Social Programme Office at the English Language Centre at the University of Bath. Having always taken every opportunity to meet people from other countries and learn about their cultures, when a job first came up at the SPO, just as I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Bath, I jumped at the chance to spend all day every day looking after a large and diverse group of international students. I loved it so much that I kept going back every year, and this summer I wasn’t going to let a little thing like my PhD get in the way!

Life in the SPO is exciting, although sometimes exhausting, because it’s constantly changing. One day you’re making information packs for 250 new arrivals or dragging their suitcases through the rain to their new dorms, the next you’re leading a giant crowd around Stonehenge. As well as a different social activity every day and a coach trip every Saturday, we were the people for students to turn to when they were worried, lonely, homesick, confused by English customs, or just anxious to practice their English. All of this means we really get to know so many wonderful people from all across the world and learn a lot about how what we take for granted varies so greatly from other people’s experiences.

Leaving Bath at the end of the summer always makes me sad, because I miss all these new friends and the constant challenges that the work throws up, but I’m excited to be back in London now entering the second year of my PhD. Although I managed to grab a few hours in the library here and there over the summer to keep my PhD ticking over, I’m really looking forward to intense studying again and making headway with my first few chapters. There’s also a lot to keep me occupied over the next few months, including the upcoming Arts and Humanities Festival and running our departmental seminars. I also found out this morning that I’ll be teaching in Spring semester, which has been my dream for years now. I can’t wait to get on with it all, and of course blog about it all here!

King’s Cultural Institute: Academia, Art and Engagement

(Originally posted 10 May 2013)

The last few weeks have been very busy but very exciting for me. In between writing 11,000 words for my upgrade, I’ve been lucky enough to have been working part time for King’s Cultural Institute. As a passionate believer in the need to bring together academia and the cultural sectors to reach wider audiences, I am really inspired by the work of KCI and their innovation in public engagement.

By first involvement with KCI was as a gallery assistant at the Integrating Knowledge exhibition at Inigo Rooms  The project paired King’s academics and PhD students with MA Communication Design students from Central St Martin’s to create art installations and videos that share academic research in a way that entices the public. Working at the gallery was an amazing opportunity to meet the artists and learn about their work, as well as seeing first hand how visitors appreciated both the artistic and the educational qualities of the works. (See my full blog about the event here).

Then, as of last Friday, I am working on the Arts and the Digital Creative Lab project, taking notes and writing reports. The project is a collaboration between KCI and digital creative agency Caper, which brings together about 50 participants, including academics from across the nine schools and representatives of the cultural sector, from museum curators to theatre company directors.  The first session on 3 May gave participants the chance to discuss their work, find shared challenges and consider opportunities for collaboration. In the next stage, on 23 May, the participants will try to find ways to solve the problems they identified, in the form of collaborative projects, which they can then bid for £2500 of funding for. The winning projects will then be presented on 3 July. I can’t wait to see where all the ideas identified last week lead!

Contested Spaces: Social Media, Big Data and Politics

(Originally posted 23 April 2013)

Being an unfunded full-time PhD student means having to find ways to earn money without long time-commitments. Luckily, King’s offers many temping opportunities that are far more interesting than the usual data entry or envelope stuffing. Last week, I got to be an event assistant at the Contested Spaces conference organised by King’s Policy Institute and eBay. From greeting VIPs in the morning to being a roving microphone, I basically got paid to meet and learn from some of the leading experts in politics and digital media.

 

The conference, focusing on social media, ‘big data’ and politics, had two sides/ Firstly, how politicians can use social media and big data to improve campaigns – for connecting with voters, spreading messages, organising networks of volunteers and tailoring their campaigns to the specific needs of voters identified through the data about ourselves we scatter across the internet. Secondly, what social media can (and can’t) tell us about politics, such as the public reaction to the Arab Spring which has been so widely connected with Twitter in the press.

The event brought together speakers from all over the world, from professors to some serious VIPs in the digital world, including Tod Cohen. Vice-President of eBay, and Jen O’Malley-Dillon, Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama’s re-election. If you’d like to learn more about the link between digital media and politics, videos of all of the panels are available to watch here. You can also listen to Ms O’Malley-Dillon, together with Ian Spencer and Bret Jacobson from Red Edge, discuss What can UK politics learn from the success of ‘Obama 2012’? here.

As you would expect from a conference on digital and social media, the event created quite a buzz on Twitter, as people tweeted their thoughts and questions to the speakers. You can catch up on the conversation from the conference at #ContestedSpaces.

Looking for a PhD topic? Try the British Library

(Originally posted 21 March 2013)

This week in our SPLAS seminar, we were lucky enough to be joined by Dr Geoff West and Dr Elizabeth Cooper, subject curators for Spanish and Latin American Studies respectively at the British Library. They explained the many facets of curating: acquisition, maintaining the collection, organising material for exhibitions and other public engagement exercises, and one thing not many people are aware of: supervising PhD students. 

As one of the two biggest libraries in the world (the other being the Library of Congress in Washington DC), the British Library has over 150 million resources to explore; not just printed books and manuscripts, but sound recordings, microfilm, even a lock of Simón Bolivar’s hair! With so many treasures lurking unexplored in the archives, there is plenty of material on offer for an exciting PhD based on first hand analysis and investigation of these invaluable literary and historical documents.

Beyond allowing access to its resources, the BL supports doctoral research by offering joint supervision with universities including King’s. One notable example of this partnership is Tom Overton, whose joint PhD between the BL & King’s on John Berger lead to the recent Art and Property Now exhibition at the Inigo Rooms. Tom told us how he was the first person in decades to look at Berger’s private documents, which offered him a unique glimpse into this key figure in British art history.

So if you’re on the hunt for a PhD topic and you would enjoy exploring original documents, why not investigate the BL. You can find out more about PhDs jointly supervised by the British Library here.

Library Love

(Originally posted 19 March 2013)

Don’t worry, I haven’t succumbed to one of those ‘Spotted in the Library’ Facebook groups to declare my lust for ‘Hottie in the blue t-shirt reading Sartre’, it’s just that after six months at King’s I’m finally starting to make the most of the library.

The Venezuelan shelf in the stacks

My project is about a collection of novels, which aren’t in the library, or indeed any library, expect maybe one in Pennsylvannia or Texas. As a result, I spent most of the first few months reading the books that had been smuggled to me by Venezuelans on holiday in London or emailed to me by the authors themselves. Now, however, I’ve been using the library to the full and finally feel like a real PhD student.

I was far too excited about my first ever Inter-Library Loan. I could have bought the book in question for £40 and waited several weeks for it to arrive from Venezuela, but thanks to the library, I got it in a matter of days for free 

After lots of getting lost in the labyrinth of stacks, I also finally found the Venezuelan shelf. It’s a real treasure trove of classic texts, which I am now slowly working my way through. I was so geekily happy at my discovery, I thought I had to share it with you!

A Typical Friday?

(Originally posted 8 March 2013)

Life as a PhD student can be unpredictable. Of course there’s a certain amount of reading and note-taking that forms the basis of daily life, but not having to go to class and a distinct lack of deadlines (except for that big one looming in the distance) means that I can structure my research time around whatever events I want to attend.

Last Friday is a great example of just how diverse a day in the life of a PhD student can be. It began with my first trip into LSE for their ‘Branching Out’ Literature Festival and a talk by leading historian Professor David Abulafia based on his book The Great Sea: A human history of the Mediterranean. Professor Abulafia presented a history of the Mediterranean from 22000BC to 2010 that focuses on the sea itself: naval conflicts, trade, and migration. “I like people getting on ships” he joked. I particularly appreciated Professor Abulafia’s dedication to bringing history to a popular audience:

“Historians should try to reach a wider audience.There is too much pressure from the REF (the dreaded measure of research output) to publish monographs for half a dozen people”.

After a free lunch from the Hari Krishnas outside LSE (top tip for students on a budget), I headed to Chancery Lane to spend several hours power-reading (like power-walking) in the Maughan Library café – I find it easier to concentrate there than in the main body of the library where everyone is stressing. Just when I was craving chocolate but determined not to move until I finished my book, a very kind gentlemen who works in the café gave me a free Kit Kat on his way out to “reward me for studying so hard”. Made my day!

Book finished, it was back to LSE for The Art of Parodies, where biographer, critic and novelist D.J. Taylor, political cartoonist Martin Rowson and author Ewan Morrison had a passionate debate about what parodies are, whether they matter, and how we should judge them. I particularly enjoyed Ewan’s presentation about how parody has become obsolete in a “world of domestic parodists”, featuring some terrible YouTube clips. You can read all about it on my personal blog.

Amused and enlightened, I ran back to King’s Student Union for the Brazilian Dance Carnival Marathon where members and friends of King’s Brazilian and Portuguese Society danced for 8 hours through the night to raise money for the ABC Trust.

Picture from the Brazilian and Portuguese Society.

From learning about the Mediterranean to dancing the Macarena – just a normal day in PhD life!