We are delighted to announce that our annual Beckett Week will take in November at Minghella Studies on the Whiteknights Campus of the University of Reading. Beckett Week events will include:

  • SPECTRAL LANDSCAPES: ABSENCE, TRAUMA AND NATIONHOOD
    Thursday 4th November and Friday 5th November
  • BECKETT INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION SEMINAR
    Saturday 6th November

SPECTRAL LANDSCAPES: ABSENCE, TRAUMA AND NATIONHOOD

KEYNOTES
Our two keynotes will be delivered by Professor Emilie Morin (University of York) and Dr Sarah Jane Scaife (Trinity College Dublin). 

PANELS
4th November

Panel 1: Isolation, Instability and Absence

  • Olan Monk (University of Porto, Portugal): Olan Monk – Uaigneas (2021).
  • Mohit Abrol (Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi): “What Remains without Remains”: Spectral Figures and Enactment of Dharma in Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug (1953) and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953)
  • Douglas Atkinson (Vrije Universiteit Brussel,Belgium): Spectral Inversions of Beckett: On the Japanese Reception of Beckett’s Prose

Panel 2: Oceans, Shorelines and Histories

  • William Davies (University of Reading): ‘The tide of ebb, upon the level sands’: Reflections on the Deep Time of Coastlines and the Sea
  • Xander Ryan (University of Reading): ‘Ebb-Tide from Stevenson to Beckett: the Epistolary Shorelines of Menton(e) and Killiney’
  • Clare Finburgh Delijani (Goldsmiths, University of London): Spectral Seascapes: Ghosts in the Middle Passage

PGR Forum

  • Vanesa Cotroneo (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg): Intermediality, Ghostly Landscapes, and Sustainability in Samuel Beckett’s Theater
  • Bryony Taylor (Northumbria University, Newcastle): Systemic Trauma in British Theatre
  • JP McMahon (NUI Galway): “Lobster Ecology: Performing Animals with Beckett”
  • Hajin Park (University of Reading): Video cassette technology and the reproduced self-image in … but the clouds…: memory, creation and unconsciousness by means of an optical device
  • Scarlett Butchers (University of Lincoln): David Rudkin and his depiction of the relationship between people and the land

Panel 3: Sonic Landscapes

  • Tyler Bouque (University of Huddersfield): “ ‘From Inner to Outer Shadow’: Absence and Loss in the Musical Landscape of Feldman and Beckett’s ‘Neither’”
  • Robert Baker – White (William’s College, Massachusetts): Disembodied Voices/Necessary Landscapes: Beckett’s Radio Drama
  • Harry Parks (University of Glasgow): Segregating and Contouring the Soundscape: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Cascando’.

Panel 4: Margins, Borderlines and Identity

  • Trish McTighe (Queen’s University, Belfast): Drawing in the Margins: Borderland Godot and Across and In-Between
  • Hannah Simpson (St Anne’s College, Oxford): Invoking Beckett: Beckett’s Legacy in Northern Irish Poetry
  • Alicia Nudler (University of Rio Negro, Argentina): Stops in Krapp’s Last Tape. A reflection on individual and collective memory and archives

5th November

Panel 1: Spectres of Technology

  • Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading): Beckett’s Television for the Vast Wasteland
  • Celia Graham- Dixon (University of Reading): “A faint tangle of pale grey tatters”: Spectral materiality and the fabric of the screen in the 1990 television version of Footfalls (dir. Walter Asmus)
  • Evangelia Dandaki & Thomas Symeonidis (Central Saint Martins, UAL & National Technical University of Athens, Greece): System of vision, self-perception and narrative in Ill seen Ill said

Panel 2: Trauma and the Ghosts of Institutionalism

  • Shane O’Neill (University of Limerick): “‘…parents unknown…unheard of…’: Re-reading Not I in light of the ‘Mother and Baby Homes Report’, January 2021”
  • Chloe Duane (University of Reading): Institutional Scenography: Exploring historical and contemporary marginalisation in Company SJ’s The Women Speak.
  • Dunlaith Bird (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord): ‘You know what she died of, Mother Pegg? Of darkness…’: Samuel Beckett, Sean Keating, and the Shannon Scheme.

Panel 3: Memory, Landscape and the Revenant

  • Roger Owen (Aberystwyth University, Wales): The Horror of Returning in Meini Gwagedd (1944)
  • David Pattie (University of Birmingham): Who is this who is coming?: Beckett and MR James.
  • Feargal Whelan (Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, Dublin): The need for a Dr Petrie: Uncovering embedded history in the landscape of ‘Fingal’

Panel 4: Liminal Spaces

  • Mary Steadman (Bath Spa University): Dwelling: Embodying the eerie through a site-sensitive dramaturgy.
  • Paul Stewart (University of Nicosia, Cypress): “Hesitating to die to death”: St Augustine and the After-Life in “Echo’s Bones”

A full schedule for the Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma and Nationhood conference can be found here.

BECKETT INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION SEMINAR
The Beckett International Foundation will be holding a seminar on the 6th November with invited speakers. Details on seminar can be found here.

REGISTRATION
Registration for the Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma, and Nationhood conference is now available here.

Please note that registration for the BIF Seminar is separate to the conference. More information on registration for the BIF Seminar can be found here.