The Southern Lives Workshop at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing is convened by Professor Elleke Boehmer and rises out of her British Academy funded Southern Imagining and Tracing Southern Latitudes projects. The Workshop will bring together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial and Global South studies and polar studies, to explore how the high southern latitudes are imagined through life-writing.



We are interested in how southern worlds (the southern extremities of the large continents, including Australia, and the southern oceans and islands) are often seen as interconnected or in relation to each other, including in biography, memoir and auto-fiction. This reciprocity forms an important part of the imaginative mapping that life-writing stimulates.



Our research questions include:

What does it mean to view the world from a southern hemisphere perspective?

What perspectives do global southern writing and story-telling offer to northern imaginative norms, including that of the ‘Global South’?

How might the postcolonial and world literature fields be approached from a consciously antipodean or about-face viewpoint?

How do we build comparative and lateral links across southern spaces and lives, and what is the epistemological and environmental traction of doing so?

In collaboration with Photo Oxford Festival 2021, hosted by the Maison Française d’Oxford, and supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme, the international and interdisciplinary Conference “Women, Memory & Transmission: Postcolonial Perspectives from the Arts and Literature” will explore what it means for women to transmit memories in postcolonial contexts. What strategies do women develop to tackle postcolonial issues? What are the issues to address and the struggles to lead to be heard and valued as tellers of History? What ethical and political issues does the reception of their works raise? The conference will bring together art-world figures and scholars in the fields of gender studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies, and Global South studies to adequately contribute to show how the Humanities can lead to a better awareness of the key social and political role of women in reinterpretation of colonial History as acts of resistance and empowerment.

The conference will coincide with a photographic exhibition by Elisa Moris Vai, showcased during the 2021 Festival at the Maison Française d’Oxford (15 Oct. – 15 Nov.). The French photographic artist Elisa Moris Vai will present her series Catherine, Kiambé, Surya. The exhibition shows her photographic response to three female characters in La Quarantaine (1995) and Révolutions (2003), set in Mauritius, by Nobel Prize J.M.G. Le Clézio. The images closely intertwine fiction and reality, literature and photography, to better understand how the transmission of memory can be a tool of resistance and empowerment by women in postcolonial contexts.

The International and Multidisciplinary Conference "Utopia and Migration" aims to contribute to the analysis of the borders imagination in the context of international migrations in the 21st century. It will raise the more specific question of how contemporary literature deals with the current issues related to borders from the perspective of utopia. What are these other ways that utopia traces to denounce and overcome discursive, media and state strategies aimed at making invisible, spoiling or stigmatising migrants, and thus strengthening borders? What alternatives to current border experiences can be explored through fiction? In what forms do they take place in the literary text? Which borders are targeted, those of the dream continent or the left one? How do these imaginative practices shed light on, or challenge, the relationship of contemporary societies to human mobility, to hospitality? The Conference invites the literary scientific field to a discussion with the Social Sciences in order to adequately address an issue whose study can contribute to rethinking the definitions of utopia, and in particular utopia as a literary genre, and to enriching migration studies.


A more detailed description is available on Fabula.

In response to George Floyd’s horrific murder, the Black Lives Matter movement has grown and caught the attention of many. This time, really focused discussions are happening in regards to Black people’s economic power and the colonial structures that underpin practices and recruitment in significant sectors like Education; Television and Media etc. It’s important that we do not solely engage in discussion, but actively engage in facilitating and creating change.

We have invited three special guests, who will speak about their own experiences as Black people In the UK and they will share the ways that they are engaging with improving the experiences of Black people in their chosen field.

WWI and WWII Symposium: Legislation, Recovery, Identification and Burial of Human Remains. Coordinated by Dr Nicholas Márquez-Grant and Dr David Errickson. 

*THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED BY THE ORGANISERS* 

From the recent success of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite at the Oscars to the BTS phenomenon that has generated a unique kind of fandom, Korean popular culture has made waves around the world since the dramatic rise in popular culture exports that kicked off at around the turn of the millennium. The big question is, how did this dramatic transformation happen and why? What strategies have been employed throughout industries? What bigger picture of Korea's economic development is this phenomenon a part of? Today’s speakers will provide answers to these questions, each from their own area of expertise, on what is behind the recent stories of Korea’s economic success. As well as being informative, I hope this can open some new discussions on this popular topic.

*THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED BY THE ORGANISERS* 

The non-commercial creation of BTS (South Korean Pop artist) piano covers represents a form of productive and participatory fandom with potential relevance for the field of artistic research and music education. Framed by an overview of artistic research and its relation to jazz and popular music education, this analysis focusses on student-led engagements with BTS piano covers by referring to aspects of identity formation, artistic expression, aesthetic development, music theory, harmonic analysis and pianistic practices. The lecture-recital involves an improvised solo piano performance by the presenter, audio-visual recordings of performances and statements of two productive fans as well as some analyses of musical transcriptions. Dr Michael Kahr is a jazz pianist and musicologist, serving as Senior Lecturer at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz as well as Dean and Head of Master Studies at the Jam Music Lab Private University of Jazz and Popular Music in Vienna.

You will recall that at the end of last summer, the College appointed architects to undertake the development of a new Estate Masterplan for the College.  A series of focus groups were held and many of you attended and provided useful information and views.  The development of the masterplan is going well and the architects are now in a position to present to you, for discussion, their ideas on how the Estate should be developed.

This event will take place on the 29 January at 4pm in the LWA.  The session will be introduced by the President, after which Penoyre & Prasad will take you through their ideas for the Estate development over the long term.  There will be time for you to give feedback and ask questions on the draft masterplan.

The architects will also be placing an exhibition on the draft masterplan in the Upper Common Room from the evening of the 29 January, so that you can look through the plans at your convenience, particularly for those who are unable to attend the session at 4pm, over the following week and provide any further comments on the draft plans (all comments and feedback should be sent to bursars.office@wolfson.ox.ac.uk).

The conference sets an exclusive focus on modelling the costs of construction over the course of 1,500 years, from Archaic Greece to the early middle ages. Over the last decade, the general interest in building costs and organisational aspects of historical construction has seen a rise in popularity amongst scholars working on pre-modern architecture. Indeed, this seems exactly the right moment to reflect more widely on the methodological propositions and future directions of this particular field of research. By considering both broader issues of methodology and particular case studies, the papers of this conference will facilitate a new debate on the nature of our archaeological evidence. Bringing together established experts in the field and young scholars working on pre-modern architecture, the aim of the conference is to create a platform for discussion and establish a more comprehensive framework of methods and approaches for the future.

This event celebrates the centenary of Robin Gandy, a leading figure in Mathematical Logic, close friend of Alan Turing, and a Fellow of Wolfson College. It will be a full day meeting with an outstanding set of speakers, including several of Gandy's former students, and ranging across topics in mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and computer science, as well as personal reflections and historical perspectives.

List of speakers: 
Marianna Antonutti Marfori (Munich)
Andrew Hodges (Oxford)
Martin Hyland (Cambridge)
Jeff Paris (Manchester)
Göran Sundholm (Leiden)
Christine Tasson (Paris)
Philip Welch (Bristol)