The Cultures of Memory II
York St John University 8th-11th October 2014
Symposium Programme
Wednesday 8th October
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6.00: Welcome Reception. Faculty of Arts Foyer.
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6.30-6.45: David Richmond and Jules Dorey Richmond.
Opening of their joint exhibition in the Arts Foyer:
Personal Archive # 1
[A work-in-progress]
Photo: Jen Todman
We have often claimed that our work occupies the space that lies in the void and the nexus
between fine art (the object) and performance (the living body). This work-in-progress is
offered as a furthering of a conversation which began at last years Cultures of Memory
Symposium and is conceived in response to a constellation of events:
In an after show discussion we were thanked for opening-up our personal archive, which
immediately excited us as we had not thought about our work in this way before.
In October 2013 we journeyed to Zagreb to the Museum of Broken Relationships and
wondered what a museum of unbroken relationships would look like.
This is the first step of our collaborative practice-led PhD. We are interested in the small,
everyday detritus of life and the various memories and associations that these simple objects
invoke. Whilst agreeing with Kuhn when she asserts that, ‘[T]elling stories about the past,
our past, is a key moment in the making of ourselves’ we are aware that this idea is
problematised within embedded lives. Lives in which time lived together out-weighs time
lived apart. Slippages and gaps of memory provoke doubt, contestation, frustration, and, an
unsettling feeling of an unknowable and unstable sense of the past and the present.
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7.00: Performance. Quad South Hall.
MA Theatre and Performance Students welcome Nicki Hobday
Nanna suggested the death of Elvis
Featuring:
Chloë Oldridge, Simon Bedwell, Charlotte Goodlad, Victoria Sharples, Mercedes Cragg
On August 16, 1977 Elvis Presley died. His body was found on the floor of his bathroom and
a tree fell down in Nanna's next door neighbour's garden. Using the students’ connections to
this event in popular culture the ensemble will devise a performance that collects shares and
explores the cultural memory of the King of Rock and Roll.
Nicki Hobday is a contemporary theatre-maker and performer based in the north of England.
She makes her own performance work as well as in collaboration with Drunken Chorus,
Proto-type Theatre, Until Thursday, Michael Pinchbeck and Reckless Sleepers. She cofounded Trace Theatre in 2007 and is currently working with 30 Bird on Domestic Labour: A
Study in Love.
This will be a new composition that will form part of the MA students’ experience of 4
weekend workshop sessions that feature a variety of artists and tutors.
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Thursday 9th October
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9.30-10.00: Tea and Coffee. Theatre 1
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10.00-1.00: Session One: Theatre 1
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Kingsley Baird
A cast of thousands: “Stela” at Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden
In July this year, artist, Kingsley Baird, built a temporary memorial in the German Army’s
Military History Museum in Dresden. The memorial comprised two elements: a stainless
steel ‘cenotaph’ and 18,000 biscuits in the shape of soldiers of different nationalities who
fought in the First World War. On 12 July 2014, almost 100 years after that conflict’s
beginning, Stela was formally presented for public viewing and visitors to the museum were
invited to take a biscuit from the memorial. For the previous 10 days, in the heart of the
museum, the sculpture evolved as the artist stacked the Anzac recipe biscuits around the
cenotaph form until it disappeared from view. During this ‘performance’, many ‘players’
contributed to the artist’s experience of Stela; this paper introduces some of them.
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Charles E Morris III
Sunder the Children: Abraham Lincoln’s Queer Public Memory
Derived from a book-length project on Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality, this talk surveys
ongoing controversy in the U.S. about the alleged homosexuality of the “Great
Emancipator.” It also argues for a worldmaking project in Lincoln’s queering through which
this irresolvable historical question is deployed to make a difference in the lives of those most
“at risk” from the bogey of non-normative sexuality: school children.
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J.T. Welsch
‘Darklings’: Haunted Fragments from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’
Beyond its ghostly plot about memory’s dark power, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958) is
also literally haunted by the novel, D’entre les morts, which originally set the thriller in
wartime Paris, several discarded screenplays, the late replacement of Vera Miles as female
lead, Hitchcock's and his wife’s illnesses, and other issues during production. This sequence
of poems explores such disjunctions, shuffling false allusion and lyrical fragments, and
questioning the reader’s complicity in whatever narrative adheres.
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Gweno Williams
Psychic dissonance in cultural and literary memories of prolific C17 writer Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: 'If she be slighted now and buried in silence, she may
perhaps rise more gloriously hereafter...'
This paper explores complex misrememberings, obliterations and re-presentations of
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, with particular reference to her pioneering 1666
science fiction romance The Blazing World and Siri Husvedt's controversial recent invocation
of Cavendish in her new 2014 novel The Blazing World.
1.00-2.30: Lunch
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2.30-5.30: Session Two: Theatre 1
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Kendall Phillips
Affective Memorials: Artistic Interventions into the Experience of Memory
The past few decades have seen increasing attention to what James Young has called,
Counter-Monuments; those monuments that seek in their anti-monumentality to challenge
both the form and at time specific content of traditional monuments. In this essay, I argue that
the binary of monument/counter-monument is too limiting to encompass the various ways in
which artistic interventions within memorial space reconfigure our experience of memory. I
offer the notion of the “affective memorial” as a way of understanding artistic interventions
that not only counter traditional monumental forms but also seek through their intervention to
recapture other aspects of the experience of memory. Monumentality (either as monument or
counter-monument) seeks –or at least pretends – to concretize and solidify the malleable and
ephemeral aspects of the experience of memory. The affective memorial, on the contrary,
seeks to stimulate exactly these kinds of sensations and several examples of such artistic
interventions are considered. In particular, I attend to the works of Carrie Mae Weems, Anna
Schuleit and Shimon Attie.
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Kaley Kramer
Resurrecting the Dead: The Irruption of Public Memory
In ‘The job of the resurrectors is to wake up the dead’, Michi Meko explores the reenslavement of Black Americans after the American Civil War. Performed as part of ‘Flux
Night’ in Atlanta in October 2013, ‘resurrectors’ used a ‘sound theatre of Negro prison work
songs’ to ‘wake up the souls of Negro men forced to lay the tracks in and around Atlanta’
(www.fluxproject.org). The resurrected souls find embodiment and expression through
Meko, whose physical resurrection, movement, and eventual collapse are repeated throughout
the duration of the installation (5 hours).
There are several avenues for exploration that Meko’s performance inspires: firstly, the
performance itself calls attention to ‘convict leasing’, the system by which prisoners are
leased to major corporations as part of a workforce. Both the consumer products assembled
by the prisoners and the system itself are traded on the American stock market. This updating
of the connection between slavery and the zombie calls attention to the specifically racialized
‘dead labour’ that undergirds capitalism’s global gains. Secondly, the liminal and ultimately
insufficient ‘resurrection’ promised by and enacted through the performance invokes
contemporary critical discourse around the ‘zombie’. In Meko’s performance, the abstracted
figure of critical theory (the ‘zombie’ as global capitalism) returns to the specific historical
and cultural origins of the ‘zombie’: slavery and the American south. Finally, the title of
piece is taken from A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Jazz (We’ve Got’) from Low End Theory (1991).
The publicity for Meko’s performance invokes both the ‘prison song’ soundscape of the
installation and the hip-hop aesthetic of the title’s provenance. This paper will explore the
ways in which the zombie-figure, ‘resurrected’ on the streets of Castleberry Hills in Atlanta,
offers a complex negotiation of ‘silenced’ cultural memories.
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4.00: Tea and Coffee: Theatre 1
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Sarah Lawson Welsh
'"And nothing but. The Body"': Marlene Noubese Phillips' Poetics of Memory'.
Contemporary Trinidadian-Canadian writer Marlene NoubeSe Phillips is best known for her
innovative writing about 'difficult' Black Atlantic subjects such as the 1783 Gregson v.
Gilbert legal case, immortalized in a painting by William Turner, in which 122 slaves were
thrown overboard by the captain of a British slave ship, the Zong, in an attempt to claim
insurance and the insurance company contested the claim. NoubeSe's creative writing is
characterized by eclecticism and formal experimentation and often takes a strikingly kinetic
form. Thus her poem cycle Zong! (2008) attempts to 'remember' and memorializes this event,
in what Simona Bertracco has recently termed an act of ' virtuosity', by using the Gregson vs.
Gilbert case as the sole source for its word store and 'Discourse on the Logic of Language'
and 'Universal Grammar' (1993) similarly bring together historical fracture and formal
fragmentation in an exploration of the politics of language (what NoubeSe calls 'M/Other
Tongues') in a transatlantic/colonial plantation context. NoubeSe's writing often eludes
generic classification and crosses genres in a mobile renegotiation and rewriting of concerns
in her earlier texts. Thus her Caribana: African Roots and Continuities (1996) takes the form
of a prose-poem-essay and her 1988 novel Harriet's Daughter is reframed/ rephrased in
dramatic form as a second Harriet's Daughter. The core tropological concerns of NoubeSe's
writing are history and memory, especially the problematic of ancestral and post-memory in a
transatlantic slave context. All her writing is concerned in some way with issues of
subjectivity/lack of subjectivity, space (what she calls 'Dis/place - The Space Between') and
its intimate connection to the black female body, as well as silence, voice and language.
Although she is a prolific essay writer, NoubeSe's critical writings have been less often
considered than her creative work. In this paper, I will focus particularly on her essay 'In the
Matter of Memory (A work in progress)' (2002) and consider some of the questions she raises
there as not only central to an articulation of a poetics of memory in her writing but also as
more broadly interesting to all those who work on the matter of memory and memorialization
in a context where (unlike the Holocaust, for example) there is little materiality
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Abi Curtis
Reading an extract from her novel in progress.
The Baleen is part submarine, part ship, created to save a small community from catastrophic
floods that have wrecked the world in a near, speculative future. Nerissa Crane is a vet, one
of the people chosen to work aboard, her duty to care for a number of domestic and wild
animals. We follow Nerissa both in her strange new life at sea, and through the story of her
past and how she came to be aboard. The story of Nerissa’s past, and an environment on the
brink of collapse, run in parallel with her experiences in the present. The novel explores the
relationship between the present moment, and memories of a lost world, in its content and in
its structure.
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7.30: Café 1331, 13 Grape Lane, York
Symposium Dinner
Friday 9th October
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9.30: Tea and Coffee: De Grey Foyer
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10.00-1.00: Session Three: De Grey Lecture Theatre
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Sally Morgan
Dissecting Memory: A Performance Practice
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Alexander Beaumont
From Subculture to Urban Pastoral: Zadie Smith's NW
Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth (2000) was written at a time when faith in
postmodern representational strategies and the politics of difference was at its height, and
ends with a resoundingly optimistic image which associates radical freedom with syncretic
ontologies. Just over a decade later, however, in NW (2013), the picture is considerably more
complicated. Like many British novelists currently engaged in a creative appropriation of
modernist style, Smith appears keen to move beyond a cultural politics that fetishises hybrid
identities; instead, she seems to identify in the phenomenology of everyday life the possibility
of a different kind of freedom which escapes the plastic cage of identity while remaining
subject-oriented and cosmopolitan in outlook. At the same time, however, the novel's elegiac
representation of lost urban community leads it to substitute the urban pastoral for the urban
subculture, and mourning for history. This, I argue, represents a kind of hiatus between two
different kinds of loss. The first relates to the multicultural settlement closely associated with
British cultural studies, in whose light Smith's work was read at the outset of her career. The
second relates to the social democratic settlement that built the (fictional) Caldwell housing
estate around which the novel is constructed.
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Ian Horwood and Christopher Price
Tin Legs and Big Wings: Film, Historiography and the Public Memory of the Battle of
Britain
In 1940 Britain’s Royal Air Force defended the nation against sustained bombing attacks by
the German Luftwaffe. During this ‘Battle of Britain’ the so-called ‘Big Wing’ dispute whether, all else equal, it was better to concentrate fighters before engagement - erupted
between the two RAF officers most closely concerned with the operational conduct of the
battle: Air Vice Marshals Keith Park and Trafford Leigh-Mallory. The dispute culminated in
an Air Ministry meeting of October 1940, which led to the removal of Park and the
commanding officer of Fighter Command Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowding, and where ‘it
was generally agreed that ... the more we could outnumber the enemy, the more we should
shoot down'. Subsequent research, including our own, has indicated that what was in fact
needed to win the attritional battle was rather to maximize the number of enemy casualties
for each of one’s own, and Park’s parsimonious approach to the deployment of British fighter
resources was more effective in this respect than the ‘Big Wing’ all along. In the meantime,
however, the Big Wing had been popularised in the 1956 film Reach for the Sky (Lewis
Gilbert), starring Kenneth More, itself based on a best-selling 1954 biography of the
legendary ‘legless’ fighter-pilot Douglas Bader by Paul Brickhill. The film’s popularity, and
More’s performance as Bader, had an extraordinary impact on popular perceptions of this
controversy, such that the 1969 film Battle of Britain (incidentally also starring More within
an ensemble cast) moved to embrace developments in the historiography of the battle only
with the greatest caution. In this paper we seek to establish the context of the battle and
explore both the response of cinema to its historiography, and the impact of film on the
public memory of this historical event.
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1.00-2.30: Lunch
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2.30-5.30: Session Four: De Grey Lecture Theatre
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Amos Kiewe
Sanctuary as Redemptive Public Memory of Trauma: The Case of York, England
This paper was generated by the visit last year (2013) to York which included a visit to
Clifford Tower. I seek in this paper to address the massacre at Clifford Tower in 1190 and
put it in the context of cultures of memory. I address the notion of trauma as a conceptual
grounding to make sense of how memories are generated, linger as well as are transformed in
order to alleviate trauma. I discuss the trauma on this local as evolving, first of the victims
then of the victimizers, both directly and indirectly. The commemorative plaque at Clifford
Tower, the narrative of the massacre some 900 years ago, and contemporary actions by the
town of York are all part of memories functioning at multiple levels of trauma. The paper
focuses on trauma and its redemptive function, trauma as public memory and trauma as
public forgetting and reinvention. Collectively, I consider trauma as cultural narrative that is
elastic and adaptable to differing needs. In the case of York, a Jewish trauma was
transformed into a York trauma—a collective act of contrition as exemplified in the
Holocaust memorial, the plaque at Clifford Tower and the sanctuary designation of the City
of York.
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Sam J. Van Aken
Artist Sam Van Aken will examine his expansive creative practice through the lens of
memory. Introducing such works as the Mutliple Deaths of Willem Dafoe, oh my god, High
Lonesome, and the Tree of 40 Fruit; Van Aken will discuss how themes of Public Memory
take form and influence his "lived" works.
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4.00: Tea and Coffee: De Grey Foyer
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Robert Wilsmore
Dragged Down by the Media: Performing Memories of Childhood Heroes
The distance between the real and the fictional is not measurable because the locations
themselves are not fixed. Our childhood heroes might have some grounding in real people
though we never met them beyond the documentation, just as our fictional heroes similarly
appeared only in books and on the TV.
Simon Piasecki and I don't meet very often but when we do we are nostalgic. We have known
each other for a long time and we have collaborated on performances and texts. Our heroes
(Scott of the Antarctic, Kraftwerk, Winnie the Pooh) are where we make our work. We don't
start with anything other than a 'let's do this'. We shoot first and ask questions later. We're not
sure that what we've done has unveiled anything in particular but we have had a good time in
the making.
Simon Piasecki is Professor of Performance and Head of Department at Liverpool Hope
University. I am Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts at York St John University. Quite how
that happened is a mystery; we were just two boys at play. At this point I would burst into
song and start to sing 'Two little boys had two little toys...' but that would not be appropriate,
except that of course it is wholly relevant. Our childhood memories have lives of their own
and shift along unexpected lines of flight throughout our (their hosts) lives. Heroes become
zeroes, fiction is reality and vice versa. Winnie the Pooh didn't 'really' know what it was like
to be dragged down some steps. But I do.
Gary Peters and Matthew Reason
Research Updates
Looking at back at our presentations at last year’s Cultures of Memory symposium, we will
summarise the current situation regarding our research as it relates to memory.
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6.30-8.00: Planning Meeting: Venue TBC
Saturday 11th October
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Memory Matters
De Grey Lecture Theatre & De Grey Foyer.
Memory Matters is a day-long Masters Symposium on Cultural Memory. Memory Matters
will bring together Masters students from different disciplines from Syracuse University,
York St John University and other universities in Yorkshire. Memory Matters will be a
vibrant and fast-moving event with all presentations will take the form of Pecha Kuchas
(20x20 presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds).
Schedule:
9.30. Registration, Tea and Coffee, welcome from Matthew Reason.
All PK presentation to be loaded onto computer in advance.
10.00 Pecha Kucha Keynote. Kingsley Baird. Massey University, NZ
10.30-12.30 SESSION 1
12.30-1.30 LUNCH
1.30- … SESSION 2 and OPEN SESSION (ending when we end)
Presentations will be grouped in the following thematic categories:
Autobiography – Body – Postmemory – Order – Oblivion
We also invite anybody attending to put together a Pecha Kucha during the lunch break and
present it during the final Open Session.
End of symposium
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Students
Chloë Oldridge
Simon Bedwell
Charlotte Goodlad
Victoria Sharples
Paul Dressen
Jake Giovanini
Eli Show
Devon Bouffard
Brent Erickson
Beth Savage
Marsha Mack
Andrew McIntyre
Patrick Sopko
Ozan Atalan
Tyler Champine
Quinton Fletchall
Albert Rintrona
Jacoby Cochran
Michael Fong
Laura Lucia Sanz Giraldo
Kiran Tanna
Mercedes Cragg
Julia Cormack
Emily Rowan
Clara Challoner Walker
Elaine Nightingale
Lawrence Crawford
Peter Hitchin
Delegates
Kingsley Baird
Associate Professor, Research coordinator, Whiti o Rehua - The School of Art, Massey
University. NZ.
Kingsley Baird is an artist and writer whose primary research platform is memory and
memorialisation. His sustained investigation of these fields is undertaken through the design
of commissioned public memorials such as the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (New Zealand,
2004) and The Cloak of Peace (Japan, 2006); making artefacts that investigate new
conceptual, aesthetic, and material ways of creating memory forms; and published textual
outputs.
Dr Alexander Beaumont
Lecturer: English Literature
Alex completed his PhD at the University of York in 2011 and taught there until Autumn
2013, when he took up his position as Lecturer in English Literature at York St John. He has
published essays on Channel 4, Thatcherism and the development of British cultural studies;
Jeanette Winterson, exile and the British inner cities; and apocalypse and reproductive
politics in the novels of Maggie Gee. He is currently completing a monograph entitled
Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015) and is in the early stages of a second project on ideologies of nation, region
and the urban everyday in post-war English culture.
Alex is a member of the Northern Theory School, a new interdisciplinary network which
gathers together researchers at universities in the North of England who work in the field of
critical and cultural theory.
Dr Abi Curtis
Head of Programme: Creative Writing
Abi was one of the first to gain a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of
Sussex, and went on to teach there until 2010 when she joined YSJU. Her latest poetry
collection The Glass Delusion (Salt, 2012) was a winner of the 2013 Somerset Maugham
Award.
In 2004 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for poets under 30,
and her first collection, Unexpected Weather, was the winner of Salt Publishing’s inaugural
Crashaw Prize and was shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Poetry Award 2010.
Abi’s work often engages with other disciplines, such as visual art, science and history: a
recent project was the result of collaboration with the Darwin Centre at the Natural History
Museum. As well as writing poetry, Abi writes fiction and has an interest in psychoanalysis.
Her writing explores such topics as mushrooms in Freud; the power of the squid in literature;
and the relationship between poetry and ventriloquism. She has also written on the role of the
unconscious in the teaching of creative writing.
Jules Dorey Richmond
Senior Lecturer: Theatre
Jules Dorey Richmond is a sculptor who makes books, video installations and performances.
She is fiercely committed to making work drawn from the autobiographical - framing and
connecting what impels her fine art practice to a larger field of feminist thinking and
wondering.
Over the past 20 years Jules has made a diverse range of performance and art works with, for
and by various communities throughout Britain and Northern Europe. These range from
large-scale out-door spectaculars, to happenings & interventionist works for night-clubs,
parks, the streets, museums and cafes through to small-scale touring shows, performance
installations, film works and gallery pieces. She was co-artistic director of Clanjamfrie from
1989 – 1997, a Glasgow-based performance group, and has worked extensively with her
long-term collaborator David Richmond, most notably on the Artist as Witness series of
works with veterans, witnesses and survivors of WW2.
Dr Claire Hind
Associate Professor: Theatre
Claire has an international reputation as a performance maker and has toured her work to
professional institutions such as The Stephen Joseph Theatre Scarborough, The York Theatre
Royal, The Dramatikkuns hus Oslo, The Sibiu International Theatre Festival Romania (where
she has presented professional work for over 10 years), The State University New York, Axis
Art Centre UK, and The Freud Museum in London to name a few. Claire collaborates with
Gary Winters from the internationally renowned company Lone Twin and they work
specifically on performance writing projects that examine the slippage between self and
character, for a variety of audiences and through the use of old and new technologies.
Dr Ian Horwood
Senior Lecturer: History
Dr Horwood holds a BA in politics and modern history from the University of Manchester,
an MA in history from the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA and a PhD in history from
the University of Leeds. He has served as a Teaching Assistant at the University of MissouriColumbia, and the Pennsylvania State University, USA; a Special Collections Assistant at the
Ellis Library of the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Research Assistant at the State
Historical Society of Missouri. Since 1994 he has taught History and American Studies at
York St John University, England where he is a Senior Lecturer. His principle areas of
academic interest are in United States Military History, airpower history, and the wars in
Indochina. His monograph, Interservice Rivalry and Airpower in the Vietnam War was
published by the US Army Combat Studies Institute in 2006.
Dr Kaley Kramer
Lecturer: English Literature
Kaley Kramer’s primary research is in literature from 1688-1830, particularly questions of
identity and gender in fictional and non-fictional writing. She is interested in the intersections
between fiction and non-fiction as well as how the literary marketplace, political and cultural
movements, and the strategies of reading inform literary representation. She is also interested
in Gothic literature and culture more generally, particularly its 18th-century origins and 21stcentury transformations.
Kaley teaches modules on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, Gothic literature and
film, Romantic-period literature, and literary theory.
Professor Amos Kiewe
Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University, USA
Amos Kiewe's areas of research are in rhetorical theory and criticism, political
communication, presidential studies, argumentation, and persuasion.
He has published in journals such as Communication Studies, Legal Studies Form, Journal of
American Culture, Argumentation and Advocacy, and Southern Communication Journal. He
is the author of several books, including FDR’s First Fireside Chat: Public Confidence and
the Banking Crisis (Texas A&M Press, 2007), co-authored FDR’s Body Politics: The
Rhetoric of Disability (Texas A&M Press, 2003), A Shining City on a Hill: Ronald Reagan's
Economic Rhetoric, 1951-1989 (Praeger, 1991), co-edited Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The
Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan (Greenwood, 1992), and edited The Modern Presidency
and Crisis Rhetoric (Praeger, 1994).
Dr Sarah Lawson Welsh
Associate Professor and Reader in English & Postcolonial Literatures
From 2007-11 Sarah was Head of Programme for the PgCert/PgDip/ MA programmes in
Literature Studies and Creative Writing and she continues to teach and supervise on the
Literature programme. Sarah gained a first class degree in English & American literature at
the University of Kent in 1987 where she met a number of emerging young Caribbean
writers. She went straight on to the newly founded interdisciplinary Centre for Caribbean
Studies at the University of Warwick and was one of the first to graduate from the Centre
with a PhD in Caribbean Studies (Language and Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean) in
1991. Since then she has taught at the Universities of Hull, Warwick, Northampton and York
St John (twice: 1992-97 and 2005 to the present). She has won travel grants to research in the
Caribbean and has guest lectured on Black British and Caribbean literature. Sarah’s research
interests are in contemporary postcolonial literature and theory, especially Caribbean, Black
British and women’s writing with particular interests in postcolonial pedagogies and gender
studies. Her latest research centres on performances and representations of food in Caribbean
and diasporic contexts, with particular interests in cookery writing and questions of
‘authenticity’, culinary versions of nation and food hierarchies and social order in early
accounts.
Professor Sally J Morgan
Director of Doctoral Research, Toi Rauwharangi College of Creative Arts, Massey
University, NZ.
Sally J Morgan is a conceptual artist and cultural historian whose research spans creative
works and text-based inquiry. Her writing on visual artefacts as ‘historical texts’ informs her
performance, installation and publically located contextual artworks. She has presented work
in France, Switzerland, Germany, the USA, Japan, Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands as
well as in the UK and New Zealand.
Career highlights have included work being presented at the ICA in London, the Arnolfini in
Bristol, and Belluard Bollwerk, International Live Art Festival, Fribourg Switzerland.
Morgan has also published in international journals and has chapters in a number of scholarly
collections.
Professor Charles E Morris III
Interim Department Chair, Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University,
USA
Chuck Morris describes himself as an archival queer, an activist scholar committed to
recovery, critical engagement, and diverse modes of deployment and performance of gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) pasts as resources for queer worldmaking
in the present and future. His previous books include An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk's
Speeches and Writings, Remembering the AIDS Quilt, and Queering Public Address:
Sexualities in American Historical Discourse. He is currently completing a book on the
memory politics and promises of Abraham Lincoln's sexuality.
For his work on GLBTQ memory and history, Morris has twice received the Golden
Monograph Award for article of the year from the National Communication Association
(NCA), as well as NCA's Karl Wallace Memorial Award for young scholars and Randy
Majors Award for Achievement in GLBTQ Studies.
Professor Gary Peters
Gary Peters is currently Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at York St John University.
His book Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas was published in
2005 by Ashgate. His second book, The Philosophy of Improvisation was published in 2009
by the University of Chicago Press. He is currently working on a book entitled
Improvisations on Improvisation also to be published by The University of Chicago Press in
2015. Recent publications include: ‘In the Moment’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical
Improvisation Studies (2014); and ‘Certainty, Contingency and Improvisation’, in The
Journal Of Critical Improvisation Studies (2013). He has also co-edited with his wife Fiona
Peters Thoughts of Love, Cambridge Scholars Press (2013). He is a musician, improviser and
composer.
Professor Kendall Phillips
Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, Communication and Rhetorical Studies,
Syracuse University, USA
Kendall Phillips' research and teaching interests are in contemporary rhetorical theory and
criticism. His work engages broad theoretical questions of advocacy, controversy, dissent,
and public memory. He explores these concepts through a variety of rhetorical artifacts
including comic books, film, political speeches, and scientific controversies. He is the author
of Testing Controversies: A Rhetoric of Educational Reform, Projected Fears: Horror Films
and American Culture, and editor of Framing Public Memory.
Professor Matthew Reason
Matthew Reason is Professor in Theatre and Performance at York St John University and
Visiting Professor at Roskilde University, Denmark. His has authored two
books. Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance,
(Palgrave 2006); The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experience of
Theatre (Trentham Books/IOE Press 2010). In 2012 he co-edited Kinesthetic Empathy in
Creative and Cultural Contexts (Intellect).
Dr Chris Price
Christopher Price is lecturer in History and American Studies at York St John University. His
research focuses on Anglo-American relations in the twentieth century and the influence of
economics, science and technology on the political and cultural development of the British
state in its response to the two world wars and the Cold War. His doctoral thesis was awarded
the British International History Group Thesis Prize in 2000 and a developed version was
published with Palgrave in 2001. His other publications encompass a range of disciplines,
most recently in collaborative research investigating the influence of scientific theory on the
institutional culture and performance of the British armed forces.
David Richmond
Senior Lecturer: Theatre and Senior Teaching Fellow
David has worked as a performer, designer, deviser, director, writer for: Clanjamfrie
(Scotland), Collectif Organum (France), Theatre of Public Works (England); was a founding
member of Pants Performance Association, and for the past 25 years has been collaborating
with Jules Dorey Richmond. David has also worked in film, in particular with Daniel Reeves
(USA). He has worked with the European Council running workshops with young men as a
means to prevent violence in everyday life.
Sam Van Aken
Associate Professor; Program Coordinator, Art, Design, and Transmedia, Department of Art
Sculpture, Syracuse University, USA
Sam Van Aken's art combines sophisticated technology with traditional modes of artmaking. Van Aken's projects cross boundaries between artistic genres, including
performance, installation, video, photography, and sculpture. With each body of work, he
selects practices and new perspectives that provide a kinesthetic perception of objects and a
visceral charge. Dr JT Welsch
Lecturer: Creative Writing
JT Welsch joined the literature and creative writing teams at York St John in January 2012,
after completing a PhD at the University of Manchester and MAs at Royal Holloway,
University of London. His main areas of interest, for teaching and his own work, are
contemporary poetry, Modernism, scriptwriting, gender and sexuality, critical and cultural
theory, film, and music. As a modernist scholar, he is currently writing a book on William
Carlos Williams’ manifestos. As a writer, he is especially interested in the relationship
between creative and critical practice, and has several on-going projects and collaborations
that attempt to bridge the two.
Professor Gweno Williams
Gweno Williams is Professor of Creative Arts Education at York St John University and
Visiting Professor at the Norwegian Study Centre, University of York and the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. She is past President of the International
Margaret Cavendish Society; her original 3.5 hour DVD Margaret Cavendish: Plays in
Performance won the Arts and Media Award of the Society for the Study of Early Modern
Women
Dr Robert Wilsmore
Associate Dean – Faculty of Arts
Robert’s Doctoral studies were in music composition (with Nick Sackman at the University
of Nottingham graduating in 1994). Since then his practice has been a mix of composition
and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Gillygate Sleeps
A project by Gary Winters & Claire Hind
Panoramic photographs in the windows of Gillygate Framing and Wackers Fish and Chip
Restaurant, Gillygate, York.
We celebrate the independent nature of Gillygate by photographing it over a whole day. In
July 2014, we set up a camera on Gillygate and worked over two, 12-hour shifts. Beginning
at noon at the north end of the street, we took a photograph and then repeated this every 12
minutes, 3 paces apart for 24 hours, witnessing the street in all different lights.
Gillygate is not a well-documented or archived street but it has a catalogue of modern threats
of closure and an eccentric artisan past. We are currently in a research and development
phase about the street and we are working with its residents, collecting memories and
researching its history for a series of interdisciplinary arts projects.
We have heard that Dick Turpin’s bones remain here.
We have heard Mr Vickers fought for it and was the soul of the street.
Gillygate Sleeps is supported by The National Lottery Arts Council England
www.garyandclaire.com