Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research

Summer term 2007/08

All seminars took place at the University of Sussex, in the Pevensey Building 1 Room 2A2 (2nd Floor, wheelchair accessible), unless otherwise specified, on Tuesdays from 12.30-1.55 pm.

In Love and Struggle : Letters in Contemporary Feminism

Date: 3 June 2008
Time: 12.30 - 1.55pm
Speaker: Margaretta Jolly (University of Sussex)
End of Year Party in the Library Meeting Room, 2nd Floor, The Library
Come and celebrate the beginning of summer! Margaretta Jolly will be launching her new book on the art and history of personal letters and emails as part of an informal end of year party hosted by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and the Centre for Continuing Education.

Psychoanalysis and Cultural Memory

Date: 20 May 2008
Speaker: Graham Dawson, University of Brighton
Graham Dawson's research focuses on the interrelation of cultural memory, narrative and identity, and the memory of war in modern times. He is author of Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994), and Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles, (2007).

Family Secrets : Law and Understandings of Openness in Everyday Relationships

Date: 8 May 2008
Venue: Special Joint Lecture with Sociology and Law, BSMS Lecture Theatre
Time: 2pm - 4pm
Speaker: Carol Smart, The Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, University of Manchester
Carol Smart will explore some of the complexities of family secrets and the growing desire to force such secrets out into the open. Using research from the Mass Observation Archive she will argue that we need to locate secrets in their cultural and historical context, and that a simplistic ideal of truth does not fit easily with complex relationships.

Postmodernism, smoking and life history

Date: 6 May 2008
Speaker: Donna Hetherington and Sheila Selway
Graduates from the MA in Life History Research will talk about their work, including commissioning a Mass Observation directive on the new Smoking Ban and using a postmodernist approach in presenting life history.

Oral Histories on the Run

Date: 22 April 2008
Speaker: Andrew Holmes, University of Sussex
Andrew Holmes will explain how he used oral history interviews to develop conservation policy in the River Ouse Project, including gaining the trust of Sussex farmers and taking the microphone to the meadow.