Mourning: Different Times, Different Forms

The conference is designed to be collaborative and interdisciplinary, bringing together academics from Modern Languages, English, and Science, as well as individuals from the creative sector. What is unique about our conference is that it seek to cross a number of different conceptual as well as disciplinary and linguistic boundaries.

Firstly, it will investigate the relationship between mourning and different genres: in particular, poetry, autobiography, the novel, the essay, and diaries. Secondly, it will also look beyond literature to consider the role of photography and the visual arts as expressions of mourning. Thirdly, it will be attentive to historical precedents and aim especially to bring the medieval and the modern into an unusual and productive dialogue.

The research questions concern, then, different relationships: between the medieval and the modern; between prose and poetry; between literature and criticism; between words and images; finally, and perhaps especially, between the individual and the collective as between life and literature.

Area

Arts & Humanities

UCL leads

• Dr Jennifer Rushworth, School of European Languages, Culture and Society