Books
"Masculinities", Persian
I'm very pleased to let people know that a translation of my book "Masculinities" into Persian (Farsi) has just been published. Coming soon, to a bookshop near you!
There are also translations of this book into Italian, German, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew, Slovenian, Hungarian, Korean and French.
Some recent publications
Connell, Raewyn. 2020. Veinte años
después: Masculinidades hegemónicas y el sur global. Pp. 37-58 in Sebastián
Madrid, Teresa Valdés and Roberto Celedón, ed., Masculinidades en América
Latina: Veinte años de estudios y políticas para la igualdad de género,
Santiago de Chile, Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano.
This book comes from a terrific conference
in Santiago, Chile, which brought together researchers on masculinities from
across Latin America, to discuss the last twenty years' work on this topic. My chapter
is based on the keynote address I gave - remotely, I regret to say - discussing
'hegemonic masculinities and the global South'.
Connell, Raewyn. 2020.
Linguistics and language in the global economy of knowledge: a commentary. Pp.
150-157 in Ana Deumert, Anne Storch and Nick Shepherd, ed., Colonial and
Decolonial Linguistics: Knowledges and Epistemes. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
A group of linguists have brought
together a fascinating set of studies on the coloniality of knowledge in the
discipline of linguistics, with particular attention to Germany. They asked
some colleagues to write commentaries on groups of chapters in the book, and
this is my contribution.
Connell, Raewyn. 2021. Transgender health: on a
world scale, Health Sociology Review, vol. 30 no. 1, 87-94, DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2020.1868899
The journal Health
Sociology Review has just published a special issue on studies in transgender
health. I was asked to write a commentary, and took the opportunity to reflect
on how the issues of trans health might appear if we prioritised experience and
knowledge from the global South. The
paper might still be available on open access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14461242.2020.1868899
If a reader would like to see
any of these pieces and can't get hold of it, please contact me at
raewyn.connell@sydney.edu.au, and I'll do what I can.
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Book Release Announcement: ‘Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker and Philosopher’
I’m pleased to make note here that my book ‘Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker and Philosopher‘ has been released by Bloomsbury Books. Here is the book cover and the jacket copy:
For almost fifty years now, Shyam Benegal has been a leading artistic, political, and moral force in Indian cinema. Informed by a rich political and philosophical sensibility and a mastery of the art and craft of filmmaking, Benegal is both of, and not of, the Indian film industry.
As a philosophical filmmaker Benegal brings to life the existential crisis of the downtrodden Indian, the ‘subaltern’—the landless serf, the lower caste peasant, the marginalized woman—and imposes a distinctive philosophical vision on his cinematic reworkings of literary products. Focusing on its philosophical depth, Samir Chopra identifies in this book three key aspects of Benegal’s oeuvre: a trio of films which signalled to middle-class India that a revolt was brewing in India’s hinterlands; movies which make powerful feminist statements and showcase strong female characters; and Benegal’s interpretation, ‘translation’, and reimagining of literary works of diverse provenances and artistic impulses. Running through this body of work is an artistic and moral commitment to a political realism and an intersectional feminism which continually inform each other.
In Shyam Benegal: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Chopra shows how to understand Benegal’s cinema is to understand, through his lens, modern India’s continued process of political and social becoming.
Live Event: The Social Life of Books: A History of Reading Together at Home
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. If we were able to step inside the parlours and drawing rooms of the eighteenth century we’d find homes busy with home-made culture - book groups and tea table parties; amateur dramatics; groups of women reading and weeping their way through popular sentimental fiction; children stumbling through poems before their maiden aunts, and men at punch parties singing songs about dogs. We used to read aloud, and we used to do it together, at home. This event, presented by Professor Abigail Williams, gives us a glimpse of that older world of domestic culture and performance, with some thoughts on its revival in the current climate. In a short 'masterclass' with Giles Lewin, Abby will also give some tips on what eighteenth-century reading aloud might have looked and sounded like.
Biographies:
Abigail Williams is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at St Peter's College, University of Oxford. Her monograph on reading aloud, The Social Life of Books was published by Yale in 2017. She is currently working on a book on the history of misreading.
Giles Lewin is a performer and composer, primarily a violinist, specialising in medieval music and the traditional music of Europe and the Middle East.He has written and performed music for theatre and radio, and played on many film and television scores. He is a founder member of the folk band Bellowhead, and the early music groups The Dufay Collective, Alva, and The Carnival Band.
What’s beneath the words: a paper journey
Presented in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book. Contemporary letterpress artist David Armes (Red Plate Press) and book conservator Andrew Honey (Bodleian Libraries) share their appreciation for paper and for the craft and art that goes into the making of books. Armes explains how he printed a new book on 'Oxford India Paper,' very thin but opaque paper used to print Bibles, encyclopaedias, and other lengthy works. The resulting work, Curses, exploits the paper's unique qualities. Find out how demanding this was, and hear about Armes's printing residency in Oxford, where he created the work 'Between Sun Turns,' a response to the environment and cityscape in and around the city. It has been thought that ‘Oxford India paper’ was locally produced at the Wolvercote Paper Mill; Andrew Honey discusses this idea, and reveals other historical paper research taking place at the Bodleian.
Speaker Biographies:
David Armes is an artist working with print, language and geography. His work is frequently site-specific and considers how sense and experience of place can be represented. He works primarily with letterpress printing on paper and, through using what was once an industrial process, he is interested in where the multiple meets the unique, where the ephemeral meets the archival. The final work varies in form and size from small chapbooks to large hanging scroll installations. He travels frequently for residencies and worked as artist-in-residence at Bodleian Libraries at University of Oxford (2019), Zygote Press fine art printmaking studio, Ohio (2018), BBC Radio Lancashire (2017) and Huddersfield Art Gallery (2016). He has recently shown work in the USA, UK and Germany, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Flourish Excellence in Printmaking award.
Andrew Honey is a book conservator at the Bodleian Libraries with a teaching and research role. He has recently completed the conservation and rebinding of the Winchester Bible and is the conservation advisor to The Mappa Mundi Trust. He has wide interests in the materiality of rare books and manuscripts, and a particular interest in historic paper. His paper research has ranged from the writing papers used by Jane Austen (Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, Oxford 2018) to the faults found in the Shakespeare’s First Folio (‘Torn, wrinkled, stained, and otherwise naughty sheets’ – how should we interpret paper faults in seventeenth-century paper)
Secrets from Missing Manuscripts
Oxford’s libraries house many beautiful books copied by hand before the arrival of print. What, though, about the many more books from the past which have not survived? Dr Daniel Sawyer, Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature, Merton College, Oxford
Secrets from Missing Manuscripts - Oxford’s libraries house many beautiful books copied by hand before the arrival of print. What, though, about the many more books from the past which have not survived? How might we study lost manuscripts, and what might the process teach us about the experience of losing things more generally?
Humanities Light Night – Oxford Research Unwrapped!
As part of the national Being Human Festival, and Oxford’s Christmas Light Festival, Humanities Light Night - Oxford Research Unwrapped! was a spectacular explosion of colour, sound and activity for all, including a huge video projection onto the 3-storey Radcliffe humanities building, premiering SOURCE: CODE which featured the work of Oxford Humanities Professors Jacob Dahl, Richard Parkinson and Armand D'Angour, and co-created by Oxford Humanities researchers and The Projection Studio, world-class projection and sound-artists. A series of talks took place during the evening, relating to the theme ‘Discovery’.
This event was part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
From UFO cults to Nietzsche: John Gray picks the best books on atheism and faith
The philosopher chooses five books about the rejection of religion, including Arthur Koestler’s study of faith during communism and The Gay Science
Modern atheism is mostly a continuation of monotheism by other means, and nowhere more so than in radical political movements that claim to have rejected religion entirely. The seminal work on faith-based politics is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), where he shows how the patterns of thinking of late medieval millenarians, who believed a new world was coming into being as the result of divine intervention in which the old one was destroyed, have been replicated by modern secular revolutionaries. In communism the agent of this transformation was the human species and in nazism the leader of a “superior race”. But the faith in a redeeming catastrophe was the same.
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) is the story of a communist who is swept up in the purges. Arrested and interrogated for crimes against the revolution he did not commit, he ends by confessing to them and being executed. The novel is a study in the ruthless logic of faith, which – whether transcendental or secular – demands human sacrifices as the price of salvation. Koestler renounced his own faith in communism in 1938, partly as the result of a mystical experience he had while awaiting execution after being captured by Francoist forces while working as a Comintern agent in Spain. He was freed in a prisoner swap, but his life has changed for ever.
Reading Beyond the Code
A Book at Lunchtime Seminar with Terrence Cave, Deirdre Wilson, Ben Morgan (Worcester College, Oxford), Professor Robyn Carston (Linguistics, UCL). Chaired by Professor Philip Bullock (TORCH Director). Is language a simple code, or is meaning conveyed as much by context, history, and speaker as by the arrangement of words and letters?
Relevance theory, described by Alastair Fowler in the LRB as 'nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle's', takes the latter view and offers a comprehensive understanding of language and communication grounded in evidence about the ways humans think and behave.
Reading Beyond the Code is the first book to explore the value for literary studies of relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of examples-lyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton-nine of the ten essays are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as a broad framing perspective and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final essay, by Deirdre Wilson, co-founder (with Dan Sperber) of relevance theory, takes a retrospective view of the issues addressed by the volume and considers the implications of literary studies for cognitive approaches to communication.
Edited by Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow, St John's College, Oxford, and Deirdre Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, UCL and Research Professor in Philosophy, IFIKK, University of Oslo.
Terence Cave is recognized as a leading specialist in French Renaissance literature, but has also made landmark contributions to comparative literature and the history of poetics. His most recent work focuses on cognitive approaches to literature.
Deirdre Wilson's book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, co-written with Dan Sperber, was described in Rhetoric Society Quarterly as 'probably the best book you'll ever read on communication.' Translated into twelve languages, it has had a lasting influence in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics and is now regarded as a classic.
Contributors: Kathryn Banks, Elleke Boehmer, Guillemette Bolens, Terence Cave, Timothy Chesters, Neil Kenny, Raphael Lyne, Kirsti Sellevold, Wes Williams, Deirdre Wilson.
More higher ed summer reading
2017's edition of the finest selection of higher education summer reads. Featuring 'BUCS for Schmucks', 'Footnoting for fun', and 'A month in the country - it really is research not vacation'.
The post More higher ed summer reading appeared first on Wonkhe.
Unsilencing the library: An exhibition at Compton Verney
Research into how books make us feel.