Weather Reports
Jul06

Weather Reports

6 July 2012 The School of Arts held a day symposium to explore and celebrate the work of Professor Steve Connor. He had been employed by Birkbeck since 1979, serving variously as Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Head of the English Department, and Pro-Vice Master. From 2000 to 2012, Steve Connor was Academic Director of the London Consortium, an interdisciplinary initiative in which Birkbeck collaborated with other institutions like the British Film Institute, Tate Gallery, Science Museum and Architectural Association. In 2012, Steve left Birkbeck to take the Grace 2 Chair in English at the University of Cambridge. Steve Connor has profoundly influenced many colleagues and students. Several of them appeared at Weather Reports to pay tribute to his work and to demonstrate how their own thought had developed in its wake. Long-term colleagues from the University of London and the London Consortium were joined by Steve's former doctoral students. The panel chairs and audience members who did not give papers themselves included such former colleagues as Professor Tom Healy (now Head of English at the University of Sussex) and Professor Laura Marcus (University of Oxford). The event title reflects this thought from Steve Connor: "Nowadays, I actually feel it both more plausible and infinitely more soothing to think of a culture as a meteorological phenomenon. Almost immeasurably complex interactions of a small number of number of determinate variables – wind-speed and direction, pressure, temperature – produce determinate weather effects. There is no difficulty in establishing whether it is or is not, at any particular place and time, raining. But what is the 'it' that is raining, and that, so to speak, wills or weathers the weather? And where, or what is this it, before it becomes available to be presupposed as the action of an intending awareness? I hope we will want, or mean to learn to want, not to think of society as having self-consciousness and actively self-directing purpose on the analogy of an individual will. A cloud forms, a waterfall plunges and seethes; but not as a expression of the will, the desire or the unease of the cloud or the waterfall."   Programme Joe Brooker: Introduction   Contemporals Chair: Zara Dinnen Ben Cranfield: Chasing the Contemporary Will Viney: Curious Twins   Two Dubliners Chair: Laura Salisbury Ulrika Maude: ‘Furious Physical Contortions’: Beckett, Silent Film and the Curious Origins of Language Colin MacCabe: Portrait of a Joycean   Essays at Style Chair: Joe Brooker Matthew Wraith: Ebullient Thinking Brian Dillon: Steve’s Styles   Dickens Days Chair: Nicola Bown Nicola Bown: Disturbed by Dickens: thoughts on Barnaby Rudge Barbara Hardy: Birkbeck’s Dickens   Embodied Voices Chair:...

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