Published on 30th January 2016 in Book Announcements
Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker
by Eugene O’Brien
Published by: Syracuse University Press
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A Word from the ESSE President
Published on 20th January 2016 in ESSE Matters
The time has come to embrace our changing world and its new technologies: with this in mind, the board of ESSE, convened last year in August in Braga, decided that The Messenger should finally go electronic. Our Newsletter was traditionally sent to you twice a year from Portugal, sometimes with real difficulties and at a considerable cost. The move to an online and electronic version seemed a most effective move, not to mention a timely one, considering The Messenger is now well beyond the age of the majority (being 25 in 2015 as we advertised in its last Winter issue).
This was a difficult decision to take, as quite a number of our members, I am sure, still hold their paper copies in great esteem as they reminded them of the presence of ESSE in their lives. We were fortunate to find in Adrian Radu (Romania) – in cooperation with Jacques Ramel, our website webmaster – a ready individual to undertake the challenging task of transferring The Messenger into its new format. I want to thank here the former editors of the paper version who performed a brilliant (often difficult) task; in particular Dr. Hortensia Parlog who helped make the transition and was in charge of the last edition of The Messenger.
We still have our academic scholarly Journal of English studies, EJES, in paper form and let me say that The Messenger will not compete against it or play the same role. Having realized that our website plays the role of a Newsletter with all kind of information published quickly and easily, The Messenger, as of January 2016, will be our new online Journal. It will retain part of its former duty as newsletter continuing 25 years of tradition of spreading information, but also publishing poetry and book reviews; it will also be an online journal publishing articles dedicated to professional issues, as well as more academic papers (such as the best papers given by doctoral students during our – now as of 2016 – yearly PhD sessions).
This year will be a year of transition, as The ESSE Messenger will move from paper version to the electronic format. It will continue its policy of offering a variety of contributions, some of which will be selected by the new editor, Adrian Radu, for peer-reviewing following the established tradition of this publication.
Let me add that it seems of the utmost importance that The Messenger should have a wider international spread for we know that today this the sine qua non condition for us, working in the field of humanities, to be read and to have our results quickly shared in our academic community and beyond.
Let me then wish The Messenger a fruitful further 25 years of good services in the interest of us all.
Liliane Louvel
Emeritus Professor,
Poitiers University
ESSE President
Conference Report: “Afroeuropeans 2015”, Münster 2015
Published on 19th January 2016 in Conference Reports
“Afroeuropeans 2015”: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe
The 5th Biennial Afroeuropean Studies Network Conference
Münster, Germany
Jean d’Amour Banyanga (PhD Student, Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
Turku (Finland)
From 16 to19 September 2015, the fifth biennial Afroeuropean Studies Network conference took place in the beautiful city of Münster, Germany. There were 170 participants from 15 countries: Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The conference featured keynote lectures, paper presentations, panel discussions, and cultural events on the literature, history, music, art, politics, and youth culture of Africans and their descendants in Europe. Since a full report on all events and sessions would be impossible, the following account is limited to a representative selection. The conference opened in the evening of Wednesday 16 September 2015 with the screening of the film Real Life: Deutschland, followed by a discussion with the director, Nancy Mac Granaky-Quaye from Cologne. Continue reading “Conference Report: “Afroeuropeans 2015”, Münster 2015″
A Word from the Editor
Published on 5th January 2016 in ESSE Messenger Matters
The ESSE Messenger is now online. It will continue the good tradition of the printed version and host messages from the ESSE President, other members of the ESSE Executive or the Editor, offer current information, notes and details about events, conferences, book launches, in memoriam notes, and publish book reviews, (themed) articles, interviews, original literature. The Editor’s aim, hope and efforts are to offer a publication of good quality that readers appreciate, find useful and enjoy reading.
Contributors are invited to observe the Editorial Code, format their materials according to the Messenger’s Stylesheet and send them to the Editor at: esse.messenger.outlook.com.
Conference report: “Theatre and Spectatorship”, Barcelona 2015
Published on 2nd January 2016 in Conference Reports
“Theatre and Spectatorship”: 24th Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE)
University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 4–7 June 2015
Sarah Heinz (Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany)
Barcelona (Spain)
Research into spectatorship and the role of audience has stressed that the spectator is a corporeal presence and indispensable to a performance but that as a concept spectatorship is slippery and difficult to define. Seminal publications like Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences (1990) or Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator (2009) have highlighted both the interest of theatre practitioners in the role of the spectator and its comparative scholarly neglect up to the 1980s. In this context, scholarly work has increasingly focused on the productive, collaborative role of audiences and spectators, contributing to a decisive paradigm shift in the field which, with its emphasis on ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ respectively, has long linked spectatorship with passivity. Since then, there has been a gradual yet sustained increase in interventions in the field. The 24th CDE conference at the University of Barcelona, hosted at the 15th-century Residència Salesiana Martí-Codolar, reflected on such theoretical, methodological as well as artistic work on spectatorship in the context of contemporary theatre and drama in English. Continue reading “Conference report: “Theatre and Spectatorship”, Barcelona 2015”