Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women’s Lives



In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf created an imaginary sister for Shakespeare to ask what life would have been like for an equally talented woman. When considering the Yiddish literary landscape, there's no need to invent a fictional female - nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's sister Esther Kreitman was also a novelist and short story writer; the probable role model for his depiction of Yentl, a woman desperate to learn. A recently discovered cache of letters from Esther to Bashevis has been translated by David Stromberg, the editor of the IBS estate, and published by Jewish Renaissance as a world exclusive, revealing how her gender, mental health and family relationships impacted her publication opportunities.





Dr Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK's Jewish arts and culture quarterly. She lectures on modern Jewish literature at the London School of Jewish Studies and JW3 and contributes to programmes on BBC Radio 4. She is also an award-winning poet whose residencies and commissions have included The British Museum, The National Gallery and Bradford and Hay Literature Festivals.



You can find event accessibility details here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women's Lives



Berta Rosenbaum Golahny (1925-2005) was a Boston-area painter and printmaker who blended abstraction and realism, often in a single work. Golahny's parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled in Detroit, promoted Jewish diasporic culture together with social justice, and Golahny's art shares her parents' humanistic, utopian impulse. Much of Golahny’s work is united by a concern with creation. Fascinated by the biblical account of the creation of the world (the Genesis series), the scientific account (the series Being and Becoming and the series Cosmos), the human and animal life-cycle, and the human imagination, Golahny depicted many originary moments. She also explored creation’s opposite, destruction, as in work on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Landscape of Man in Nuclear Age), the Holocaust, and the Korean War. At the same time, much of her work portrays daily and domestic forms of creation, such as Detroit ironworks and a mother nursing. Golahny explored creative and destructive forces in a life marked by quietly steady creation. This talk, by Golahny's granddaughter, Emily Kopley, is part of a book project that blends biography, memoir, and art criticism.



Emily Kopley (BA Yale, PhD Stanford), is the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (OUP, 2021), a critical biography. Her essays on Woolf appear in the TLS, Review of English Studies, English Literature in Transition, Teaching Modernist Women's Writing in English (MLA, 2021), Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2022), and elsewhere. She is on the board of Woolf Studies Annual and has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She teaches at McGill University, in the Department of Jewish Studies.



Accessibility details can be found here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Tamarin Norwood will discuss the process of writing The Song of the Whole Wide World, her new memoir interpreting the brief life of her baby son, written partly during pregnancy and partly during the silent maternity leave that followed. She will consider the ethical and poetic considerations of expanding fragmentary details into a meaningful life narrative, and explore parallels between the roles of poetry, myth, science and fiction in the creation of meaning. The question of how to address gaps in biographical evidence is critical to life-writing, but especially urgent when the subject of a biography has no voice at all. Her memoir—selected as an Editor's Choice in the Bookseller and as a favourite non-fiction slim volume by Pandora Sykes, with features in the Sunday Times Style and The Guardian—was completed while Tamarin convened the OCLW weekly writing sessions through lockdown, and she will close with some practical remarks on finding a writing community.



Dr Tamarin Norwood is a writer and academic with a background in fine art. She has written on drawing, metaphor, memorial and grief, and has an interest in ritual and rural history. Her academic research addresses the ad hoc beliefs that emerge in response to bereavement, with a focus on reproductive loss. Tamarin is a visiting fellow at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society, a Leverhulme ECR fellow at Loughborough University, and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.



Accessibility details can be found here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Sally Bayley is an acclaimed author whose books explore the relationship between autobiography, biography, memoir, literary fiction. She's the author of the auto/biographical trilogy which includes the volumes Girl with Dove (2018), No Boys Play Here (2021) and The Green Lady (2023): this tripartite coming-of-age narrative challenges traditional demarcations between literary categories to cast its own, unconventional form. Situated along the shifting relationship between fiction and non-fiction, the first two volumes are based on a story that builds momentum from a child's imaginative relationship between literary characters and artistic forms as she searches for ways of seeing around difficulties. The third volume pushes this experimentation even further, connecting personal and cultural memory, archival sources and ‘imaginary biographies’, in a composite narrative that shifts across epochs and is framed by imaginative and real contexts.



The discussion will focus on the third volume of the trilogy, highlighting how, in Bayley’s works, lived experiences become material for her creative processes, producing a hybrid narrative that simultaneously reads as an autobiographical, biographical and/ or fictional work. Furthermore, focusing on the concept of relationality that sees auto/biographical narrative not as a solitary but as a relational story, the discussion will underscore the relationship between the individual life and wider webs of familial, social and historical structures, testified by a shifting narrative voice that alternates between subjective and collective consciousness.



Sally Bayley is a prize-winning author. She is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Sally was the first child to go to University from West Sussex County Council care services and she is a Lecturer in English at Hertford College. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence Visiting Programme at Wadham College. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and in 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.



Eleonora Maio is pursuing her doctoral studies in the Humanities Department at the University of Palermo, Italy. She currently is a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, working on her dissertation about Sally Bayley’s experimental auto/biographical trilogy.



For accessibility details please see: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Wolfson College Music Society presents DAVID EARL



Programme –

Mozart - Piano Sonata in C minor K457

Schubert - Piano Sonata in A minor D845

Schumann - Faschingsschwank aus Wien Opus 26

David Earl - Metta Bhavana



5pm Sunday 2 June 2024



Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College, Linton Road, Oxford, OX2 6UD



Free Admission. Donations welcome.

All donations from the concert will go to The Thames Valley Wildflower Meadow Restoration Project (Long Mead Foundation)

Listening to Maths



Euclid’s Elements has been translated more often than any book except the Bible. Within it, the author discusses harmonic relations with reference to the golden ratio, ideas that have influenced everything from Renaissance architecture to music and the making of Stradivari instruments. Dividing a string, as happens whenever a cello is played, creates an expression of harmonic ratios which are found in the design of the instrument and throughout nature, just as they are in music. When you listen to a cello, you are listening to mathematics.



In this event, these Euclidean ratios will be illustrated in various ways. Robert Brewer Young, a master luthier and professor of philosophy, will explain their origins and sketch them with chalk and compass on a blackboard. The same proportions will be simultaneously demonstrated in musical accompaniment on a cello made with OCLW Co-Director, writer and cellist Dr. Kate Kennedy.



Robert Brewer Young is a luthier who makes violins in the spirit of Stradivari, Guarneri and other Italian masters. He is also a Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and Director of the J&A Beare Scientific Research and Conservation department for rare violins.



Imaginary music made possible



Easley Blackwood's Twelve Microtonal Etudes give a glimpse of an alternative history of Western music, incorporating brand new notes that cannot be found on the piano. Using animated visualisations of the music, Matthew Sheeran will explain how he was able to record these "impossible" pieces with conventional orchestral instruments. No knowledge of music theory required!



Matthew Sheeran (born 1989) is a British composer and arranger. He studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the University of Sussex and King’s College London. In 2010 he won the Presteigne Festival’s Alan Horne Prize for composition and the Shipley Arts Festival’s Chairman of the Jury award. His music has been performed at the Aldeburgh Festival, St Edmundsbury Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey.

Foraging, or gathering food from our surroundings, is as old as human life on earth. Enclosure and privatisation of land, urbanisation, and industrialisation over the last centuries have shifted food practices away from local eating. This is compounded by mass production and trade under globalised food systems. However, the climate crisis, and unease at our increasing distancing from nature and biodiversity, are resulting in a revival of older relationships with food. Curious about ‘wild’ nutrition, and drawing on childhood memories of fruit, fish, leaves, and cactus thorns gathered in the mountains, plains, deserts of India, in early 2023, I chanced upon thriving foraging communities in the UK. This talk documents a year of rediscovering my surroundings through local herbs, spices (yes, its not all about cinnamon, cloves, pepper and nutmeg from afar), edible leaves and grasses, mushrooms, and fruit, and the range of products that have resulted—including a growing repertoire of wines and beers.

The Wolfson Engineering Society is back for Trinity Term 2024!



Come to the Levett Room at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesdays for fascinating presentations from a wide range of speakers.



See you there!

The Wolfson Engineering Society is back for Trinity Term 2024!



Come to the Levett Room at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesdays for fascinating presentations from a wide range of speakers.



See you there!