“In early 1946, 24-year-old illustrator and artist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995) met the autodidact rocket scientist and occultist John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952), one of the earliest followers of the religion Thelema, founded by the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Parsons, who was magically trying to bring the Thelemic goddess Babalon to earthly incarnation, was struck by Cameron’s flaming red hair and dramatic looks, and the pair became lovers. Playing a key role in Parsons’ “Babalon Working”, Cameron soon began studying occultism under Parsons’ tutelage. Following Parsons’ accidental death in 1952, Cameron delved deeper into Thelema, magic, and visionary states, experimenting with peyote and seeking the guidance of her Holy Guardian Angel. She devoted the rest of her life to occultism as well as her art and poetry, which continuously explored themes of metamorphosis, eroticism, and death. As an icon of the Los Angeles artistic avantgarde, Cameron inspired filmmakers Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger, starring as the “Scarlet Woman” in the latter’s Crowley-inspired Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome (1954). This talk will delve into Cameron’s art, poetry, and occultism, situating her as one of the most enigmatic mystical visionaries of the twentieth century.”
Manon Hedenborg White holds a PhD in the History of Religions from Uppsala University. She is the author of ”The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism” (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Why were surrealists so preoccupied with the imagery of the sewing machine? Artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Óscar Domínguez, and Joseph Cornell devoted artworks in different mediums to the iconography of the sewing machine. Elisa Breton, Alan Glass, Maurice Henry, Konrad Klapheck, and others followed suit later in the 20th century. Certainly, surrealists were inspired by the infamous simile of the late-19th century writer Comte de Lautréamont in his experimental text, Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) (1868–69): a desired male lover is as handsome “as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!” However, a closer examination of surrealist texts from the interwar period reveals that figures such as André Breton and Óscar Domínguez were also deeply interested in the sensational 19th century French medical discourse about the gynecological dangers of sewing machine work for women.
In this lecture devoted to surrealist sewing machines and the surrealist movement’s interest in female masturbation as a form of social-sexual resistance, art historian Abigail Susik will share research from her new book, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, October 2021). Focusing on paintings and objects by the Canarian artist Óscar Domínguez, as well as other surrealist artworks from the 1930s, this talk will uncover some of the secrets of surrealism’s sewing machines and its other objects of self-pleasure and autoeroticism.
Abigail Susik
is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021). She has written numerous essays devoted to Surrealism and is co-editor of Absolutely Modern Mysteries: Surrealism and Film After 1945 (2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2021). She is co-curator of the 2021–22 exhibition Alan Glass: Surrealism’s Secret at Leeds Arts University and also curated a major survey of Imogen Cunningham’s photographs at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR, in 2016. Susik is a founding board member of the International Study for the Society of Surrealism and co-organised its 2018 and 2019 conferences.
When walking around the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, in New Orleans, there is the sound of Jazz, steamy heat and Voodoo. In this lecture Dr Louise Fenton will take you on a journey through the history of Voodoo, explaining how it evolved in this part of the USA. She will introduce you to key figures such as Dr John and Marie Laveau, show you key sites both within the French Quarter and beyond, take a look at Voodoo dolls and how Voodoo permeates the very soul of New Orleans. This lecture will introduce some of the practitioners in the Quarter now and discuss how people incorporate Voodoo into their daily life. By exploring literature, tourist guides, shops and Museums Louise will also show how Voodoo has been represented and how the authentic Voodoo can be differentiated from the tourist version.
Dr Louise Fenton is a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton and a cultural and social historian. She teaches contextual studies in the School of Art and supervises PhD students; she is also an artist and illustrator and uses drawing within her research. Her interest in New Orleans Voodoo began when studying for her PhD which she was awarded from the University of Warwick in 2010. Most recently Louise has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Beyond Belief’ and is a consultant on a new drama for BBC 3. Her research covers Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo and Witchcraft, especially curses and cursed objects.
a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event
The wolf’s strange imaginative hold over us is reflected in the wealth of spurious falsehoods that persisted about it long after the species had been hunted and hounded to the dark edges of the British landscape. There seems little certainty about when the wolf became extinct here, though Anglo-Saxon place names that refer to wolves are relatively commonplace, indicating the species was still widespread (or at least recently had been) during the period; this is backed up by the considerable numbers of successfully hunted wolves recorded as late as the second-half of the tenth century.
Already on the wane as a British species, however, the increasing penchant of the monarch and the ruling class for the pursuit of deer led to an escalation of wolf-removal efforts after the arrival of the Normans. In 1281 Edward I commissioned Peter Corbet, a Shropshire knight, to bring out about the final extermination of the species from England – a feat he is said to achieved nine years later (though there is written documentation of eight cattle being killed by wolves at Rossendale in Lancashire at the start of the fourteenth century); by this point wolves had already likely long-vanished from Wales. Canis lupus lingered much later north of Hadrian’s Wall (and later still in Ireland), with a 1427 law passed during the reign of James I of Scotland making wolf-hunting a compulsory activity there. This did not lead to a nine-year removal like the purported extirpation south of the border, as Mary, Queen of Scots was still enjoying the hunting of wolves in the Forest of Atholl during 1563. However, the intensive forest exploitation of the period would have meant that any remnant wolf populations still clinging to Caledonian survival must have been approaching their final days by the end of the century. Perhaps the animal’s last stand was made in 1743 along the lonely middle stretch of the River Findhorn, thirteen miles east of Inverness. There, according to Victorian accounts composed nearly a century later, a six-foot seven-inch giant of a man named MacQueen slayed a huge black wolf: the last of its kind left in the land.
Derek Gow is a farmer and nature conservationist. Born in Dundee in 1965, he left school when he was 17 and worked in agriculture for five years. Inspired by the writing of Gerald Durrell, all of whose books he has read – thoroughly – he jumped at the chance to manage a European wildlife park in central Scotland in the late 1990s before moving on to develop two nature centres in England. He now lives with his children at Coombeshead, a 300-acre farm on the Devon/Cornwall border which he is in the process of rewilding. Derek has played a significant role in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole and the white stork in England. He is currently working on a reintroduction project for the wildcat. Derek’s book, Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways, was published in 2020.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
For more than a thousand years, the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have been retold across Europe. They have inspired some of the most important works of European literature, particularly in the medieval period: the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In the nineteenth century, interest in the Arthurian legend was revived by Tennyson, Wagner and Twain, with T. H. White’s 1958 novel The Once and Future King – as well as Hollywood and the small screen – showing a more-recent interest.
Elizabeth Archibald has been Professor of English Studies at Durham since 2012, from where she is due to retire in August 2021. Before that she held posts at King’s College, Cambridge, the University of Victoria (Canada), and Bristol University. She specializes in medieval romance and the classical tradition in the Middle Ages, with a particular interest in the Arthurian legend. She is co-editor of the journal Arthurian Literature, and a past President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society. Her current research project is an interdisciplinary study of bathing in medieval literature and society. Elizabeth has published monographs on Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Variations (1991), and Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001), and has co-edited A Companion to Malory with A.S.G. Edwards (1996), and The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend co-edited with Ad Putter (2009). Her many essays and chapters range over classical and medieval themes and texts, including Chaucer, Malory, and Scottish literature.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Join us in this Zoom lecture to learn about the material evidence of witchcraft beliefs which have been discovered in the fabric of buildings throughout the British Isles – and far beyond. Objects such as witch-bottles, dried cats, horse skulls, written charms and markings which have been carved onto surfaces all testify to these strong beliefs which were once commonplace.
Brian Hoggard has been studying history, archaeology and folk beliefs since his teens; his Twitter account enigmatically states that he has been a ‘Researcher of strange things found in walls and under floors since 1999…’ Brian’s undergraduate dissertation focused on folk beliefs and witchcraft, when he noticed there was a huge amount of further work that could be done to explore the archaeology of witchcraft. At that point his research escalated into a major project which has culminated in the publication of Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft (Berghahn 2019). For more information see: www.apotropaios.co.uk, https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HoggardMagical
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Despite its rich visual culture and aesthetic traditions, there has never before been an art history of the tattoo. Beginning by explaining the origins of the art form – with Captain Cook ‘discovering’ the tattooing practices of Polynesians – Tattoo: An Art History will then trace the history of tattooing as a professional artistic practice in Britain from 1870, when the first professional tattoo studio opened, to the present day. In this enthralling talk (which accompanies a forthcoming book of the same name), body art and modification expert Matt Lodder establishes a chronological survey of an oft-misunderstood and much mythologised mode of art-making from the sumptuous, gilded artisanal studios of Victorian London, via the bawdy dockside spaces of the 1950s, through to the seemingly ubiquitous tattoo culture of the twenty-first century.
Lodder reveals how tastes and technologies have affected the type of images being tattooed; how innovations in both style and method percolated within, to and from Britain; who the most important and influential tattoo artists were and how, despite common misunderstandings to the contrary, tattooing has always been a permanent fixture of the visual culture of Britain’s entire social spectrum – popular amongst sailors, aristocratic ladies and even kings.
Dr Matt Lodder: Matt completed his PhD in 2010, having submitted a thesis entitled ‘Body Art: Body Modification as Artistic Practice’. Before his current role at the University of Essex, Lodder taught contemporary art and theory at the Universities of Reading and Birmingham. His current research is principally concerned with the history of Western tattooing, and the artistic status of body art and body modification practices. He has lectured on topics including body modification practices, tattoos and tattooing; contemporary performance art; deconstructivist architecture; lowbrow and outsider art; pop surrealism; digital and internet art; art & science; and Deleuzean approaches to art.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
The cult of Mithras was an esoteric religion that existed in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th centuries CE. Known also as the Mysteries of Mithras, its origins are vague. Scholars have suggested a link with the ancient Indo-Iranian god Mitra and the Iranian Zoroastrian deity Mithra, but the full extent of the connection is swathed in controversy. Followers of Mithras are, however, believed to have taken part in various rituals, including communal meals and a complex initiation system featuring seven stages. Depictions of Mithras often show him being brought forth from a rock, eating food with the sun god Sol and fighting with a bull. Places of Mithraic worship have been found throughout the Roman Empire, including the impressive London Mithraeum (unearthed in 1954) and the Carrawburgh Mithraeum on Hadrian’s Wall. However, the rise of Christianity sent Mithraism into decline in the 4th century CE, with it eventually disappearing completely. Today, many elements of the cult provoke debate, especially as we have no written accounts left behind by its members. Resultingly, archaeology has been of huge importance in the study of Mithras and has provided new insights into Mithraism and its adherents.
Dr David Walsh works for Canterbury Archaeological Trust and is an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Kent, where he taught Classical and Archaeological Studies for three years. He also undertook his PhD at Kent, which looked at the development and demise of the Mithras Cult in third to fifth centuries AD. David’s thesis was published as a monograph in 2018, and he has also written various articles on temples in the Roman Empire, as well as hosting a podcast ‘Coffee and Circuses’ in which he discusses with guests their work on the ancient world.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Join Professor Carolyne Larrington on an exploration of the strange folkloric world of animal transformations. From selkies – seal creatures caught between the pull of the human and maritime worlds – to the shape-shifting werewolves of the Middle Ages. Or the rather less threatening witch-hares, a common transformation beloved of witches – often undertaken, it is said, merely in order to steal milk from a neighbour’s cow… These complex stories speak to us of issues of power and control, and of how we look at the female body and issues of gender, enabling us to think about and question contemporary ideas.
Professor Carolyne Larrington teaches medieval English literature at St John’s College, Oxford. She studied medieval English language and literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and has a DPhil on Old Norse and Old English wisdom poetry. Her research interests range widely. She primarily works in Old Norse-Icelandic and Arthurian literature, but Arthurian literature in particular is a European phenomenon and so she writes about romances composed in Old French, Middle High German, Italian, and Old Icelandic-Norwegian. She has a number of recent publications on the subject, including the popular guide The Norse Myths from 2017.
Carolyne also writes on medievalism and folklore, in 2015 publishing The Land of the Green Man. A BBC Radio 4 series based on this was broadcast in 2015 and can be heard here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06b8vxv. With Dr Fay Hield of the University of Sheffield, she was Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded research project ‘Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies’. This involves working with creative artists – musicians, poets, painters, photographers – to produce new mediations of tales from British folk traditions about fairies. Also in 2015, Carolyne wrote Winter is Coming: the Medieval World of Game of Thrones, exploring the historical inspiration behind the fantasy phenomenon. You can hear a short talk she gave at the
Ashmolean Museum on the book at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjlxMT3Pt1o Her most recent book on
Game of Thrones, All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones was published in January this year.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Join Vivian Nutton to learn about the most-celebrated doctor in the ancient world: Galen of Pergamum (129-ca. 216 CE). Galen was Greek by birth (Pergamum is close to the present-day city of Bergama, Turkey) but spent most of his career in Rome, where he was the personal physician to three Emperors. Galen was one of the most prolific authors of his age, and around a sixth of all surviving ancient literature in Greek was written by him. Celebrated in his own lifetime, he was regarded as the preeminent medical authority for centuries after his death, both in the Arab world and in medieval Europe, with much of our later medical knowledge stemming from his pioneering work. It was only the scientific discoveries of the Renaissance that removed Galen from his preeminent position in the pantheon of medicine.
Professor Vivian Nutton is a medical historian, specialising in the history of the classical tradition in medicine, from antiquity to the present. He is perhaps best known as a historian of the life, works and influence of Galen, but his research interests extend into broader areas of the history of medicine, and of the classical tradition in Europe and the Islamic world. Much of his recent work has also focused on the history of anatomy in the sixteenth century.
Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
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