Title: An incursion into the oppressor’s mind that led to writing a novel-in-verse



Abstract: Lt. Major Cecilia Diaconeasa was a Cold War secret police informant who in March 1983, several weeks after the birth of her baby daughter, was assigned to extract confessions from a woman suspected of collaborating in a public political protest, and to prevent her from committing ‘unthinkable acts’. Her ‘target,’ my mother, was under arrest in the infectious ward of the district’s children’s hospital with her own new born son, who was struggling for his life. The talk will discuss working with Cold War surveillance family archives and the process of getting inside the Lt.’s mind, in order to understand the narrative of oppression. In the course of locating the appropriate form which could transform the historical documents and the life experiences into literature, I found myself asking deeper questions about what constitutes literary language.



Speaker Bio: Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America, a Poetry Society Special Commendation. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter, called by the Sunday Times ‘a modern classic,’ won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her poems have been anthologized in the Penguin’s Poems for Life and Joining Music with Reason among others, and her work has been translated into several languages. She wrote a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile and reviews regularly for Harvard Review Online. Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. She appears on current affairs and history programmes on the BBC, NPR, Monocle, and ABC. Bugan has a DPhil in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.



While the video is available to watch online, if you would like to participate in the Q&A and discussion with the speaker from 1.30pm, immediately following the broadcast of the talk, you need to register in advance at https://oclw.web.ox.ac.uk/event/writing-a-novel-in-verse

Title: A Life in Text: the Biographical Material in Constance Garnett’s Translations



Abstract: In this talk Natasha Randall explores the task of biographical research into the figure of the literary translator Constance Garnett. Translators notionally produce non-original text but are there aspects of their work, their semantic tendencies perhaps, that can expose something of their personal nature, or their lived experience? Garnett brought seventy volumes of Russian literature to English readers over the course of her lifetime, often first translations, and yet her existing letters and diaries betray relatively little of her interior life. Can her translations provide additional insight into her life and character? What are the detectable choices in Garnett’s work that can contribute to a portrait of her?



Speaker Bio(s): Natasha Randall is a literary translator of the works of Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin, Gogol, and others, for publishers such as Penguin Classics, Canongate’s Canon, and the Modern Library. Her writing and critical work has appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Moscow Times, BookForum, The New York Times, Strad magazine, The Yale Review, Jubilat, and on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor to the New York-based literary magazine A Public Space. Her novel, Love Orange, about modern anxieties and opioid addiction, was published in September by riverrun (Quercus).



While the video will be available online, if you would like to take part in the Q&A and discussion with the speaker via Zoom from 1.30pm, immediately following the broadcast of the talk, you need to register in advance at https://oclw.web.ox.ac.uk/event/constance-garnetts-translations

Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for a biographer in writing the life of a living subject.

With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee has built a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he’s ever lived in, every piece of writing he’s ever done, and every play and film he’s ever worked on. This is the revealing story of a very public and very private man.

Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017, and is the founder and advisory director of OCLW. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, and before that taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York. Her work includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and, co-edited with Kate Kennedy, in a collection based on an OCLW conference, called Lives of Houses (2020). Her biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber in October 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature (where she serves on the Council) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature.

The video of Hermione's lecture will be available for 24 hours only, from 5.30pm on Tuesday 3rd November 2020. Click here to watch.

Parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental principle shared by democracies around the world, based on the belief that political power should be subject to scrutiny by elected representatives accountable to the people they serve.

Yet in recent years, this reciprocal democratic settlement between politicians and citizens has been under attack from nationalist authoritarian regimes, anti-liberal populist movements, and disinformation wars – so-called ‘fake news’ – designed to divide and mislead electorates.

The UK Parliament, widely seen as the model for parliamentary systems worldwide, has been the centre of competing claims around national sovereignty generated by both the Brexit debate and the devolution of power to the constituent nations of the United Kingdom.

The longue durée of the COVID-19 lockdown and the contested prorogation of Parliament prior to that have called into question just how sovereign parliament really is.

Join us for this year’s Oxford Putney Debates, as we examine The Sovereignty of Parliament to determine who really wields ultimate power – and expose the shifting power dynamics at work under the fault lines of post-Brexit Britain.

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For the first time ever, we will be staging the Putney Debates as a free, interactive, online-only series of debates, open to all and accessible from the comfort of your own home.

The 2020 Oxford Putney Debates will be chaired by the renowned legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg and the founder of the Oxford Putney Debates Professor Denis Galligan.

Our expert panellists include Court of Appeal judges, legal and political commentators, philosophers and campaigners, and constitutional experts, who will set out their vision over a unique series of video commentaries and live webinar debates, staged online throughout October and November.

The Debates will be launched on 21 October with a livestreamed Keynote Lecture on The Future of Parliamentary Sovereignty and the video release of the opening presentations for the first debate.

Each week thereafter, we will release a new video package of expert commentaries from our panellists, culminating in a final debate on 18 November.

In the week prior to each debate, you can watch the video to get an expert primer on the issues at hand, before joining the debate and putting your question to the panel.

Click here to register.

Mark is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson and a Departmental Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Department of Social Policy & Intervention. He teaches quantitative methods for the MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention & Policy Evaluation and convenes the department's Methods Hub for DPhil students. Mark’s research interests are in spatial economic inequality, its measurement, causes and consequences; the social and economic policies that aim to address these inequalities; and the spatial impact of public policy that is 'place blind' but nonetheless has uneven geographic effects. He also has interests in population geography and the methods used in the production of official demographic statistics. Mark is also a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute (III) of the London School of Economics & Political Science. He acts as an advisor to the Office for National Statistics on the UK Population Theme Advisory Board and the Government Statistical Service Migration Expert Group.

Many of you will have travelled from other parts of the world to be here in Oxford. Some will be considering careers which involve moving from one country to another. In this event we have invited four people to speak about their personal experiences of combining a successful career – often an academic career – with a deracinated lifestyle. For some this is a choice, for others a necessity, for others a compulsion. Join us to hear about four peripatetic lives; why people move as they do, and what moves them to do so.

For 35 years Tim Hitchens, President of Wolfson, served successive governments, offering advice on issues as varied as constitutional principles to EU legislation, handling negotiations to helping end conflicts. Emeritus Professor Anne Deighton, a specialist in government affairs and European politics, will interview him, asking about the state of politics in the UK and around the world, from Brexit to China, from Boris to the royal family.

Interested in the research being done on COVID in Oxford at the moment? Want to ask questions of the doctors and academics who are helping Oxford rise to the challenge? Have an interest in resilience and mental health issues during the crisis? This is the session for you. Three Fellows from Wolfson College will talk on their areas of medical specialisation, and take questions from the audience. Professor Paul Harrison (Psychiatry), Dr Adam Mahdi (Medical Engineering) and Professor Jon Austyn (Immunobiology) will form this evening’s panel, hosted by The President Tim Hitchens.

Wolfson is holding two online Q&A sessions with our President, Sir Tim Hitchens. At each event, Sir Tim will give an update on the last few months at Wolfson – throughout lockdown as other colleges shut their doors, Wolfson remained home to some 200 students and their families. He will also look ahead to the prospects for the coming year – how Wolfson will sustain all that’s best about a collegiate experience at a time of social distancing.

It’s also an opportunity for you to ask questions about Wolfson today and our plans for the future, either by submitting your question prior to the event or live during it. The sessions will take place live on Wolfson's YouTube channel.

Click here to register for the online Q&A on Wednesday 21 October at 9.00pm UK time

Wolfson is holding two online Q&A sessions with our President, Sir Tim Hitchens. At each event, Sir Tim will give an update on the last few months at Wolfson – throughout lockdown as other colleges shut their doors, Wolfson remained home to some 200 students and their families. He will also look ahead to the prospects for the coming year – how Wolfson will sustain all that’s best about a collegiate experience at a time of social distancing.

It’s also an opportunity for you to ask questions about Wolfson today and our plans for the future, either by submitting your question prior to the event or live during it. The sessions will take place live on Wolfson's YouTube channel.

Click here to register for the online Q&A on Thursday 15 October at 9.00am UK time