Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture

CRMEP Public Lecture 7 – Samir Gandesha (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) ‘Transgressive Populism or Techno-Fascism?’

Mon 27 Apr 2026 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Lecture Theatre UG05, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW

Over the past decade, the concept of fascism has returned with a vengeance in attempts to understand the planetary shift to the far-right. As several commentators have rightly indicated, the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s is considerably different from the fascism that appears to be shaping the politics of the contemporary global order. The latter has been understood along two distinct axes. The first holds that it is a species of authoritarian populism in which movements purporting to embody or personify the will of the “people” are driven to transgress every moral, epistemic and aesthetic limit in manifesting sovereign power. The second mainatins that contemporary fascism is a form of what has been referred to as “technofascism,” which has been given politico-philosophical shape by “Dark Enlightenment” thinkers such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin who articulate starkly anti-democratic positions. While the first form could be said to undermine liberal democracy from within by pushing it in an increasingly “illiberal” direction, the second form brazenly attacks the very idea of democracy from without, by explicitly stating its incompatibility with capitalist social relations. In this lecture, I will pose the question as to which explanation best grasps the contemporary authoritarian turn and how can it be opposed.

Samir Gandesha is the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, and is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (2012), and co-editor with Johan Hartle of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (2017) and Aesthetic Marx (2017).

Free but please book via Ticketailor (link iin comments)

24 Revolutions Per Second: The Raymond Williams Society Annual Lecture 2026

Wednesday 27 May 2026, 16:00-18:00�Fyvie Hall, 309 Regent Street

Please join us on 27 May for this year’s Raymond Williams Society Annual Lecture, to be delivered by Professor Mark Steven (University of Exeter).

Mark’s lecture, ‘24 Revolutions Per Second’, will take its lead from Raymond Williams’s writings on film, and will consider the relationships between cinema and revolution twentieth century and into the present.

Mark Steven is Associate Professor of Literature and Film at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017), Splatter Capital (Repeater, 2017), and Class War: A Literary History (Verso, 2023). He is also editor of Understanding Marx: Understanding Modernism (2021), co-editor of the collections The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (2015) and Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2012), as well as the author of numerous articles in journals including Post45, Commune, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, Film-Philosophy and Screen.

All welcome, but please register in advance via Eventbrite (link in comments)

Organised by Elinor Taylor: [email protected]

Saturday, May 2 2026 from 9:30 am to 6 pm. 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

A one-day symposium on the ‘rediscovery’ of postwar women writers, such as Brigid Brophy, Ann Quin and Anna Kavan. Organised by Leigh Wilson, Carole Sweeney, and Victoria Walker.

Over the last fifteen years or so, postwar women novelists, particularly those who wrote innovative fiction, have been rediscovered. Writers such as Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy and Christine Brooke-Rose have been the subject of conferences, journal articles and monographs and have also gathered attention in broader literary culture. Postwar Women’s Writing Now will examine our interest in these writers now. Underlying the day will be two broad questions: Why these writers? And why now? In framing the discussion with these questions, the symposium addresses questions of academic fashion, the history of publishing, literary cultures, and feminist theory and practice.

For the full programme and to register for the symposium, please follow link in bio.

Saturday, May 2 2026 from 9:30 am to 6 pm
309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

A one-day symposium on the ‘rediscovery’ of postwar women writers, such as Brigid Brophy, Ann Quin and Anna Kavan. Organised by Leigh Wilson, Carole Sweeney, and Victoria Walker.

Over the last fifteen years or so, postwar women novelists, particularly those who wrote innovative fiction, have been rediscovered. Writers such as Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy and Christine Brooke-Rose have been the subject of conferences, journal articles and monographs and have also gathered attention in broader literary culture. Postwar Women’s Writing Now will examine our interest in these writers now. Underlying the day will be two broad questions: Why these writers? And why now? In framing the discussion with these questions, the symposium addresses questions of academic fashion, the history of publishing, literary cultures, and feminist theory and practice.

For the full programme and to register for the symposium, please follow this link to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/postwar-womens-writing-now-tickets-1984757978542?aff=ebdssbdestsearch

CANCELLED

Against Organized Abandonment: Nat Raha’s Transfeminist Sanctuaries

Georgina Colby

Monday 23 February, 4.30pm

CANCELLED

Nat Raha’s collection apparitions (nines) (2024) was written between 2017 and 2021, a period the poet experienced as one of temporal reversal, rupture, and compression. This paper argues that Raha responds to these pressures by producing a series of ‘sonnots’ (niners) that refute the politics of neoliberal ‘encapsulation’ and act as counterweights to restrictive static political forms. Attending to the architecture of avant-garde poetic form, this paper argues that Raha’s niners can be seen as transfeminist sanctuaries that house the politics of resistance and futurity, and the emergent relations needed for radical change.

Independent Literary Publishing and the Legacy of Peter Owen

Thursday, Mar 19 from 6:30 pm to 8 pm GMT. 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

This evening of discussion will shine a light on the work and legacy of the publisher Peter Owen.

Peter Owen began his publishing company on a shoestring in 1951, and the firm went on to publish ten Nobel laureates. Committed to publishing translated fiction in a country famously resistant to it, Owen brought an amazing range of writers from around the world to the UK reader — Herman Hesse, Octavio Paz, Rabindranath Tagore, Tarjei Vasaas, Yukio Mishima and Shusaku Endo. He also published a whole range of important women’s writing in English — by Anais Nin, Anna Kavan, Ithel Colquhoun, Jane Bowles, May Sarton and Marguerite Young. Owen died in 2016, living to see the rejuvenation of independent literary publishing in the UK, but his company, unlike that of his sometime collaborators and rivals, Calder and Boyars, is rarely seen as a model for contemporary independent firms. This discussion will begin to consider Peter Owen’s legacies, and what they mean contemporary literary culture.

The panel will comprise:

- Michael Caines, an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, who is writing a book on Brigid Brophy.
- Leigh Wilson (chair), author of Republishing Postwar Experimental Novels by Women: The Case of Ann Quin (2026)
- Adam Freudenheim, publisher of Pushkin Press, who bought Peter Owen’s list in 2023.
- Victoria Walker, author of the first monograph on Anna Kavan, Anna Kavan: Mid-Century Experimental Fiction (2023)

Presented by Spiracle Audiobooks.

Admission free but please book a place via Eventbrite -- link in comments

Research Seminars
Semester 2, 2025-26

Monday 23 February, 4.30pm
Georgina Colby, ‘Against Organized Abandonment:
Nat Raha’s Transfeminist Sanctuaries’

Wednesday 4 March, 4.30pm
The Politics of the Humanities
Panel discussion with Leigh Wilson, Matthew Charles,
Elinor Taylor, Siavash Bakhtiar, David Cunningham

Wednesday, 25 March, 4.30pm
D-M Withers (University of Exeter), ‘Reproducing Q***r
Literary Futures: Intellectual Property and Survival’

309 Regent Street, Room 251

CRMEP Public Lecture 6 – Catherine Malabou (NYU & UC Irvine), ‘Of Another Nihilism’

On Jacques Rancière’s Distant Freedom: Essay on Chekhov and Beyond.

Setting out from Jacques Rancière’s Au loin la liberté, this talk examines nihilism both in its metaphysical sense of destiny and in its political sense of servitude and revolution. I suggest new ways of approaching nihilism not as pure despair or stasis, but as a dynamic space of interruption and transformation where freedom can emerge.

Thu 29 Jan 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm
UG05 Lecture Theatre, University of Westminster,
309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW

***SOLD OUT***

Q***R STUDIES NOW: ETHICS AND METHODS
Simon Avery (chair) and speakers including How Wee Ng, Zoe Few, and Molly Caenwyn Warren

Wednesday, December 3 · 4:30 - 6pm
309 Regent Street, Room 357

CRMEP Public Lecture 5 – Antonia Birnbaum (Paris-8),
‘The Courage Also to Walk on One’s Head’ (Master and Slave)
Thu 4 Dec 2025 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW

CALL FOR PAPERS

Postwar Women's Writing Now
University of Westminster, 2 May 2026

Over the last fifteen years or so, postwar women novelists, particularly those who wrote innovative fiction, have been bought back into contemporary literary culture. Writers such as Ann Quin, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy and Christine Brooke-Rose have been the subject of conferences, of journal articles and of monographs. They have also begun to gather attention outside of academia, and have been featured in newspaper articles, radio programmes, and podcasts. Many of these writers have been republished, and their books now appear on the front tables of bookshops, rather than being available only second hand. Some critics have read the return to these writers as a revival of the work of recovery carried out during the second wave of feminism, in particular by publishers such as Virago. Joanna Scutts wrote in 2019 that the current rediscovery of 20th century women writers is ‘a revival of an older form of feminist activism, on the part of publishers, editors, and critics, to find women writers and make their work available to a new readership’. But there has also been circumspection about the motives behind this ‘recovery’. In the London Review of Books in 2024, Sophie Smith suggested that that forgetting – the basis of the trope of recovery – ‘is a useful – and exculpatory – frame for patriarchy. But it is also a boon to capitalism.’

Postwar Women’s Writing Now will ask about our interest in these writers now. Underlying the day will be two broad questions: Why these writers? And why now? In framing the discussion with these questions, it hopes to scrutinise questions of academic fashion, publishing, the determinants of literary culture, and feminist theory and practice. While being framed by these questions, papers on a range of questions and writers are sought, including but not limited to the following:

• A number of writers have dominated recent returns to the postwar decades, but others have not so far been included in that return. Who are these writers, why have they not been included, and what might be at stake in their return?
• What does the return of postwar women writers to literary significance suggest about the relation between academic literary studies and wider literary culture?
• What is the role of contemporary publishing in this return? How has it inflected it?
• What is the role of the archive in the rediscovery of women novelists?
• Biography has long been a difficult question in the critical appreciation of women writers. How has the biographical both spurred and hindered the contemporary return to these writers?
• What can the 21st century return to these writers in particular tell us about the valence of recovery as a model?
• Is the trope of feminist recovery still useful in the 21st century?
• Sarah Brouillette has recently written that ‘the real economy has an absolutely foundational structuring role in transformations in the fate of the literary as a set of affects and dispositions’. How has contemporary economics shaped and inflected our return to postwar women writers?
• During the time of revival of interest in these writers, experimental writing in English by contemporary women writers has also had something of a boom. Writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Isabel Waidner, Danielle Dutton and Joanna Walsh have all written about their relation as writers to, for example, Ann Quin and Anna Kavan. What is the relation between contemporary writers and the postwar women writers?
• How do curricula choices shape contemporary literary culture?
• Is the idea of a ‘tradition’ of women’s writing useful when considering more innovative or experimental writing?

Please send abstracts of up to 500 words to Carole Sweeney ([email protected]), Victoria Walker ([email protected]) and Leigh Wilson ([email protected]) by 31 January 2026.

Hostile Environments: On Habitability, Museums, Space Junk and Star Dust

John Beck (IMCC) and Neal White (CREAM)

Wednesday, November 19 · 4:30 - 6pm, 309 Regent Street, Room 357

John Beck and Neal White will talk about their ongoing art and science project that takes as its starting point the First National Symposium on Habitability organised by American artist Robert Irwin and NASA perceptual psychologist Ed Wortz in 1970. Extrapolating from Irwin and Wortz’s interest in the control of closed environments and thinking in the context of a recent visit to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the talk will explore the idea of the museum as an analogue for the space capsule, questions of conservation and contamination, and the curious situation of a museum charged with providing optimal environmental conditions for the display dust and debris brought back from outer space. Moving from Jeff Bezos’ project of recovering NASA debris from the ocean floor to prospecting for micrometeorites, the talk will also reflect on the research process as a speculative, process-driven experimental practice