Rural Reads is the MERL book club, focusing on books with a rural theme in the atmospheric setting of the Museum or garden. There are plans afoot to expand the book club’s remit over the following year, and we’ll be looking at our publishing collections and other special collections material.
Even if you haven’t been before, do come along to the birthday party to help us decide what we’ll be reading over the next year – and enjoy some cake! For more info, see the Rural Reads webpages.
Wednesday 9 to Friday 11 July
As a University museum and service we are delighted to be able to host graduation day parties for students and their families celebrating the occasion. The Museum, exhibitions and reading room will be open as usual throughout the week, but our garden will be very busy, and not quite the usual peaceful haven for visitors! Our car park is not used by graduation visitors but there will be no overflow parking available on the adjacent Acacia Road, and the entrance is likely to be busy. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have any queries, please call 0118 378 8660 or email merlevents@reading.ac.uk.
UMASCS Director Kate-Arnold-Forster appears in a new University Museums Group video
The University Museums Group has released a new video exploring how university museums engage the public with research – take a look! It features our own Director Kate Arnold-Forster (and a glimpse of our MERL collections, from wagons to our Landrover).
In 2013 the University of Reading acquired the hand-written manuscript for Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel and the first major expression of the central themes that would occupy much of his later work. This has been added to the Beckett Collection. The manuscript, described by Sotheby’s as the ‘most important manuscript of a complete novel by a modern British or Irish writer to appear at auction for many decades’, had been in private hands for the last half century. The manuscript fills six notebooks and provides a text that is substantially different from the final printed edition in 1938. Further details may be found in our earlier blog post.
The Murphy notebooks will be on public display on 11 June 2014, from 12.30 to 7pm at the Museum of English Rural Life, as part of Universities Week 2014. This will be as part of the Research showcase on the creative industries. The event will showcase how the University of Reading’s world-leading research feeds into the UK’s creative economy, with emphasis on theatre and film. Fore more details, please visit our Universities Week 2014 pages.
Exciting news! We’ll be running two summer schools here in the museum this year. The University of Reading has a whole suite of International Summer Schools designed to give people a taster of academic life and we’re looking forward to welcoming some new students over the summer months.
Introduction to Museum Studies is aimed at students who want to explore some of the theoretical and practical challenges which face museum curators. This course will include the opportunity to explore: UK Museum History and Ethics; Interpretation and Education; Collections Management and Conservation.The course runs 7-18 July 2014 right here behind the scenes at the museum.
Performing the Past is being offered via an exciting collaboration between the University of Reading’s Museums and Collections, our Film, Theatre and Television Department, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Historical Royal Palaces andPast Pleasures. Learn the basics of costumed interpretation in beautiful surroundings with guidance form the UK’s oldest costumed interpretation company. The course runs 21 July-1 August 2014.
Baroque interpretation at Hampton Court Palace (credit Past Pleasures Ltd)
The application process is outlined by the International Office on their Summer School website. Reading alumni and their families get a special discount. Book now!
Nicola Wilson, Patrick Parrinder and Andrew Nash write:
New Directions in the History of the Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, published March 2014)
edited by Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson
We were excited to see our edited book, New Directions in the History of the Novel, appear in print this month. This is a collection of 15 essays that examine various aspects of the history of the novel and includes methodological reflections on the writing of literary history. It is grouped into four sections – ‘The Material Text’, ‘Literary Histories: Questions of Realism and Form’, ‘The Novel in National and Transnational Cultures’ and ‘The Novel Now’. The book comes out of a conference we co-organised at the Institute for English Studies in London in 2009 and includes chapters from Thomas Keymer, Nancy Armstrong, Max Saunders and Simon Gikandi.
We also have chapters in it – Andrew Nash writes on ‘Textuality Instablity and the Contemporary Novel: Reading Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing On and Off the Page’ which draws on his teaching of Galloway in Modern Scottish Fiction and students’ increasing use of e-readers in class; Nicola Wilson’s chapter ‘Archive Fever: The Publishers’ Archive and the History of the Novel’ draws on her research here in Special Collections to question what ‘business’ archives can bring to literary history and our understanding of the novel form; and Patrick Parrinder’s chapter ‘Memory, Interiority and Historicity: Some Factors in the Early Novel’ considers the early development of the novel and the genre’s dependence on the idea of a silent reader.
The book is described by Professor Carolyn Steedman (Warwick) as ‘an important, accessible, and highly intelligent contribution to the history of the novel in a global perspective’.
We hope people enjoy reading it!
Spring has sprung, and the daffodils here at Special Collections are out in full force! If you’re coming in or even just passing by, take a moment to enjoy them.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
‘Winter is dead’.
AA Milne, When We Were Very Young
(Children’s Collection 821.9-MIL)
Professor Daniel Göske, Christian Weiß (Universität Kassel), ‘Inside Narratives: What Archives Tell Us about the Making of World Literature in the 1920s and 1930s’
Marketing international modernism in the 1920s and 1930s was a complex business, not least because of different structures in the publishing world in the U.S., Britain and Europe. Daniel Göske and Christian Weiß will approach this intriguing problem of texts in transit (across borders, literary markets and languages) by looking at some of the often forgotten “middlemen” (and “-women”) of literature: publishers (and their wives), literary agents and, mainly, translators who sometimes acted on their own in making contacts with “their” authors. The focus of the talk will be on the early German reception of, among others, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and it will draw on unpublished material held by Reading’s very special Special Collections.
Wednesday 19th March, 6pm, HumSS 127
All welcome!
You can learn more about the series co-organised by the Departments of English and Modern Languages on their blog.
It’s #WorldBookDay: a day to celebrate everything book and reading related, from authors to illustrators to publishers…
Since 1995, the first Thursday in March has been celebrated as World Book Day, with school children across the UK being given book vouchers and many given the opportunity to go into school dressed as their favourite character from a book.
On this day of celebration we thought we would bring you a few highlights from our Ladybird and Children’s Collections. Enjoy!
Come to the Farm [CHILDREN’S COLLECTIONS 360 GUN]
A History of a Banbury Cake, 1835
Books are Exciting, Ladybird, 1979, World Book Day
Princess Naska, by Stirling, Talwin Morris binding, 1899
A Chum Worth Having, Blackie & Son, Childrens Collection
Claire (Graduate Trainee)
Have you heard about the collections-based research programme here at Reading? This October, we’ll be welcoming the second cohort of a unique doctoral skills training programme here at Reading. Drawing on the extensive research potential of the University’s internationally recognised museums and collections, this programme will train doctoral students in the practical skills and intellectual sensitivities essential for quality collections-based research.
Applications are open until 31 July for the following fees-only bursaries commencing October 2014:
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (English Literature) Project title: Beckett and the City
Department: Department of English Literature
Supervisors: Dr Conor Carville and Professor Steven Matthews
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/graduateschool/GS-CBR8.pdf
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (English Literature and History)
Project title: Four local parish libraries: Henley, Abingdon, Didcot and Buckland.
Department: Department of English Literature and Department of History
Supervisors: Dr Rebecca Bullard (English Literature), Dr Mary Morrissey (English Literature), Dr Helen Parish (History)
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/graduateschool/GS-CBR7.pdf
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (Typography)
Project title: Edward Johnston’s Underground typeface from inception to ‘New Johnston’
Department: Typography & Graphic Communications
Supervisors: Professor Paul Luna and Dr Rob Banham
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/graduateschool/GS-CBR9.pdf
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (History and Geography)
Project title: Preservationism and Development in Rural England, 1926-2016: Policy and Practice
Departments: History and Geography
Supervisors: Dr Jeremy Burchardt, Department of History and Dr Hilary Geoghegan, Department of Geography and Environmental Science
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/graduateschool/GS-CBR10.pdf
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (Literature and Science)
Project title: Nature’s Stories: Francis Cole, Zoological Collections and Narrative
Department: English Literature
Supervisors: Dr Andrew Mangham and Dr John Holmes
http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/graduateschool/CB11_-_Cole.pdf
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (Archaeology)
Project title: Roman ceramic building material
Department: Archaeology
Supervisor: Professor Michael Fulford
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AIA443/phd-studentship-in-archaeology/
PhD Studentship in Collections-Based Research (Archaeology)
Project title: Technological Innovation in the Late Iron Age: Ceramics as a Case Study
Department: Archaeology
Supervisor: Professor Michael Fulford
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AIA560/phd-studentship-in-archaeology/
