Insider/Outsider: Perspectives from Languages, Literatures and Cultures Postgraduate Conference

The aim of this conference is to explore the complex relationships between the insider, the outsider, and the space in-between. Ian Stronach, in his search for new metaphors to avoid unhelpful binaries, suggests that it is possible to conceive a world in which ‘it may be that “inside” and “outside” are not reliable distinctions’ (1996, 365). His reflections prompt us to question and reconsider the dichotomy, broadening its interpretations and analytical potential.

09:30: Registration

09:45: Welcome Note by Dr Jim Wolfreys

10:00: 1st Panel - Exploring Womanhood, Gender and Female Role Models

Seda Karamanali (SOAS) – Blurred Boundaries of Identity: Being a Loyal Non-Muslim Ottoman Woman at the Fin de Siècle

Theodora Broyd (KCL) – Citizen Building or Citizen Exclusion? Educational Trajectories of French Women, Descendants of Algerian Immigration

Katherine Smith (Uni. Oxford) – Maestressa, Doctoressa, Papessa: Narratives of Female Authority in Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi

11:20: Tea & Coffee

11:40: 2nd Panel - Crossing Borders: Migration, Transgression and Living in Between

Yasmin Akhter (Royal Holloway) – Inside/Outside Subjectivities: Life-Writing, Exile, and the Perilous In-Between

Emily Moore (UCL) – Border Crossing as Antiphony in Gayl Jones’s Mosquito and Wyclef Jean’s “We Trying to Stay Alive”: A Mode of Spatial Resistance

Gautam Joseph (KCL, NUS) – Writing Race and Migration in Singapore Through Misreadings of Animal Figures in Translation From Malayalam

13:00: Posters* and Lunch

14:00: 3rd Panel - Home, Belonging and National Identity

Hon Chan (Queen Mary) – “Home Konger?”, “Repat?”: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Identity Construction of Hong Kong Transmigrants

Hanna Komar (Uni. Brighton) – Writing in Exile: Belarusian Stories of State Violence, the Ethics of Writing Trauma and Reclaiming the Future Through Storying Ourselves

Shenghao Hu (Queen Mary) – Remembering for the Sake of Home-Making: The Politics of Memory and Home in Tash Aw’s Novels

Michal Shalev (KCL) – Rhetoric of the Daily: The Diurnal Form and Settlers’ Self-formation

15:20: Posters* and Tea & Coffee

15:50: 4th Panel - Intersection of Word and Image Across Borders

Stephen Dragos (KCL) – In Between the East and West or How the Polish School of Poster Art Came to Existence During the Cold War Period (1945–1991).

Leslie Wong (KCL) – Traversing Self and Other in the Neo-Victorian Far East.

Nancy Wilson (Queen Mary) – The Outsiders Are Among Us: Collaboration and Collisions in an Overlooked Early Postwar German Film

Amrita Ajay (NUS, KCL) – Insider as Outsider in the Biopic: The Afterlife of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi

17:10: Closing Remarks by Prof. Catherine Boyle

17:30: Entertainment and Drinks

*Posters by Fatma Akcay (Uni. Córdoba & KCL), Jung-Hsin Hsieh (KCL), Sangeeta Bhagawati (KCL), Camille Iuliano (KCL) and Felicity Moffat (KCL). 

Photo: Credit: Bridging Home, London by Do Ho Suh (b. 1962), photo credit: Gautier Deblonde, CC BY-NC-ND