English: Shared Futures – Caring for our Discipline During COVID

Corona Time: Reading During the Pandemic – Ben Davies and Christina Lupton

This presentation will report on the results of a collaborative project that’s been running over the past 8 months, collecting the experiences of readers who have engaged closely with novels under Lockdown. We’ll be arguing generally for the ways in which novel reading has been important in this moment of crisis, particularly in relation to the way people have used, organised, and made time for themselves. But we’ll also be arguing methodologically for the way these results contribute, not just to a sociological understanding of reading, but to our understanding of the novel’s internal significance as a form influenced by its conditions of consumption.

Dr Ben Davies (University of Portsmouth) works on modern and contemporary literature and theory, with particular emphases on time, narratology and theories of reading. He is working on a collaborative research project on the temporal experience and phenomenology of novel reading during COVID-19 ‘lockdown’.

Professor Christina Lupton (University of Copenhagen) directs the School of English, Germanic, and Romance languages and is the PI on a Carlsberg funded research project, Lockdown Reading.

Discussion: Learned Societies in the time of COVID

Representatives of learned societies will discuss their responses to the pandemic, and how they might work differently in future.

Professor Dina Birch (British Association for Victorian Studies); Dr Cara Rodway (British Association for American Studies); Professor Jeremy Scott (International Association for Literary Semantics); Dr Rebecca Fisher (English Association); Dr Caroline Magennis (British Association for Irish Studies)

Green Unpleasant Land: Corinne Fowler in discussion with Raj Pal

The curator and historian Raj Pal talks to Corinne Fowler about her book Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (Peepal Tree Press, 2020). They will discuss empire’s relationship to the pastoral, country houses, moorlands, plants and gardens as well as considering literary texts’ contribution to the history of ideas about Englishness, English history and rurality.

Professor Corinne Fowler (University of Leicester) is Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. Professor Fowler is an expert in the legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism to literature, heritage and representations of British history.

Raj Pal is an independent curator and historian.

About English: Shared Futures

THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, LANGUAGE AND CREATIVE WRITING IS AN IMPORTANT AND DYNAMIC ENTERPRISE.

We will celebrate the discipline’s intellectual strength, diversity and creativity and explore its futures in the nations of the UK and across the world.

An academic conference with a festival feel English: Shared Futures is the largest event for academics in English literature, language and creative writing. It is run by the major organisations of the discipline: The English Association and University English, and supported by the National Association of Writers in Education with Institute of English Studies and National Association for the Teaching of English.

The first English: Shared Futures conference in Newcastle in 2017 had 600 attendees drawn from nearly every Department of English in the UK, over 150 panel sessions, with sessions from sixteen scholarly societies, and a vibrant cultural fringe (including readings from three poets laureate). Stefan Collini wrote that the event “contributed to a real lift in morale”; Amanda Anderson praised the “extremely rich and important array of talks and sessions”; others found it a “field-defining event of huge significance at this political moment”.

English: Shared Futures fosters inclusivity and diversity. We encourage representation and participation from minorities, and are proactively working to reduce physical, social, and economic barriers to participation, and to develop an environment rooted in equal respect for all.