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On Hope: a workshop & conversation about creative critical writing
26 March 2025, 1:00 pm–6:00 pm
This is an invitation to hope. To take a leap of faith. To experiment. To play. A workshop and conversation with Emily Orley, Timothy Mathews, Mathelinda Nabugodi, and Mererid Puw Davies
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
-
Mathelinda Nabugodi
In these dark times, we are inviting you to an afternoon dedicated to hope. We will explore how creative and critical modes of inquiry can come together to offer joy and comfort and resistance in a historical moment when calamity threatens to engulf us on all sides.
The humanities are in crisis, as we live under an intellectual (or anti-intellectual) regime that privileges STEM subjects: the simple certainties of algorithmic reasoning over the slow work of critical examination. More globally, the world is in crisis: escalating war and conflict and ecological disaster are posing a real threat to the survival of life on earth. In this global context, we know that business as usual means certain death. The analogy is not perfect, but we may wonder whether – even within the narrow confines of academic inquiry – business as usual may not imply, too, a certain intellectual death?
The humanities are beautiful because they engage with what makes us human. Not in any materialist sense, not bread and butter, not curing cancer, but no less essential for all that. Through humanistic inquiry, we are tending to our collective soul, our cultural heritage and the bonds that keep us together in our diversity. We explore different manners of seeing the world.
We return again and again to the past, in order to nurture the seeds of our present, to help us envisage a common future.
This event is a chance to examine the role that the creative critical writing and inquiry might play here. The creative critical is not a fixed method. It is not any particular way of doing research. It is not a set of rules. Rather, it is best understood as an encounter: an encounter with the unknown and unchartered. It is a willingness to depart from the familiar forms and formats of academic writing in order to discover something new. In finding new ways of writing, we also open up new avenues for thinking - anew, afresh, outside and athwart the conventional and stale.
This event marks the (re)launch of the Creative Critical PhD programme at UCL and has two parts: a creative critical methods workshop and a conversation. You are welcome to attend either one or both parts, but please make sure to register for them.
Creative Critical Methods Workshop
1-3pm, Room 736, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
This is a workshop for people at the start of their academic career – postgraduate students (MA and PhD) as well as ECRs. Come along if you are curious about introducing creative critical methods in your future work. Emphasis will be given to developing a convincing research proposal that includes creative critical elements. The workshop will be led by Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi and Professor Mererid Puw Davies.
Refreshments will be provided.
The workshop is open to all; you do not need to be a UCL or University of London student to join. Attendance is free, but prior registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1279037729279
Conversation on Hope
4-6pm, Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Room 230, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW
We are pleased to invite you to a reading and conversation with creative-critical writers Prof Timothy Mathews and Dr Emily Orley. Two brief readings of their recent work will unfold into a conversation about the relations between writing, thinking, performance and hope. A drinks reception will follow, 6-7pm
Attendance is free, but prior registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1279040377199
Image credit: Flowers of Bugloss (Echium cf. plantagineum) by Alvegaspar. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spring_April_2010-3.jpg
About the Speakers
Timothy Mathews
Timothy Mathews is a creative critical writer and translator. Whether in writing criticism, translations, or creative pieces, he is driven by what relating to art can tell us about relating to people. His book Chronicles of Art and Hope: On Demagoguery and Beyond is published by Ma Bibliothèque in the autumn of 2025. His other recent work of creative nonfiction is There and Not Here: Chronicles of Art and Loss, Ma Bibliothèque, 2022. His most recent work with translation is Guillaume Apollinaire, Seated Woman, Shearsman Books, 2023; and Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover's Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again, co-edited with
Patrick ffrench, CounterText, 2023. With Sarah Kay, his most recent co-edited book is The Modernist Bestiary, UCL Press, 2020. His most recent book of art writing is Alberto Giacometti: the Art of Relation (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). He is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, University College London.
Mathelinda Nabugodi
Mathelinda Nabugodi is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic (2023) and one of the editors on the six volume Longman edition of The Poems of Shelley. Her new book, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive explores the connections between British Romanticism and the Black Atlantic, and is due to be published in summer 2025. She was the first to be awarded a PhD in Creative Critical Writing from UCL and is proud to now be convening the programme.
More about Mathelinda NabugodiEmily Orley
Emily Orley is a London-based artist, writer, researcher and educator, working with performance, audio-visual material and text. She is interested in exploring ideas around memory, maintenance and solidarity, as well as investigating ways to un-fix notions of time and place. Always open to new forms of experimentation, she is inspired by lively discussions, new encounters, and unlikely assemblages.
As a practitioner-researcher, with a mixture of academic, artist and physical theatre training, she is a firm believer in breaking down the false binaries that separate practice and theory, making and thinking, and writing about making. She might call this practice creative-critical.
At the moment she works at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she is Programme Leader on the MA in Collaborative Performance Making and Research Lead for Production Arts.
Mererid Puw Davies
Mererid Puw Davies is Professor of German Studies at UCL. She researches and publishes on many aspects of modern German literature, film and culture. She is also deeply interested in Welsh literatures and cultures, which is an increasing, often comparative focus in her work. Mererid is also an essayist and poet, interested in creative-critical writing.
More about Mererid Puw Davies