Hello, Saloneers!

Apologies for the late post; I'm rather afraid we've run out of steam towards the end of the term! However, I can confirm that December's Salon session will be taking place this Wednesday 7th December from 13:00-15:00 in Room 202, ATT 202, Attenborough Tower. It will be a general AGM to organise next term's agenda and hopefully relaunch The Salon from January so that we can let everyone know about events well ahead of time. If any of you fancy getting involved in this either come along, or drop us an email - all help is gratefully received!

We already have potential events lined up involving senior members of departmental staff (we hope to have Professor David Ekserdjian come and give us some tips on getting published early in the New Year), and interdepartmental seminars on visual culture and ethical sources. Once we have these events confirmed, we'll publicise them from the beginning of the term, something on which I'm afraid we've rather fallen down this semester.

You can also keep up to date with what's going on at The Salon by email, follow us on Twitter @thesalon_haf, or join the Facebook group at

https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/155452421216246/. If you would like to contribute to the blog with posts about ongoing research, issues that you've come across as a postgraduate student or even just interesting links, then we would be happy to have you! You'll need a Googlemail account to be able to post, so if you forward your details to me, I will be able to add you as a blogger. If you'd like to suggest topics or presentations for next semester, we'd be delighted to hear from you as well!

 

As ever, the Salon is open to everyone, so please feel free to come along to have a cup of tea and a biscuit, and share your opinions!

Exciting opportunity to represent your fellow postgrads!

The Student-Staff Committee for the Department of History of Art and Film is looking for a Postgraduate Course Representative! A Course Rep represents all the students within their cohort and there is currently a vacancy for someone to represent the History of Art and Film postgraduate students. 

Course Reps will attend regular meetings with the staff and heads of department in order to facilitate communication between the student body and the department, raise issues of concern, and contribute meaningfully to the running of both the department and the University of Leicester as a whole. If you want to be more closely involved in the day to day running and representation of the Department of History of Art and Film and your fellow students, then you should express your interest through an email to Dr Guy Barefoot at gb80@le.ac.uk.   

This is an excellent opportunity not only to engage with the staff, administration and governance of the department and university, but also to develop your C.V and gain valuable experience of teamwork and negotiation.

Further details can be found on the University of Leicester Blackboard on the History of Art and Film page.

The Salon Presents: A Cock and Bull Story

Hello, Saloneers, Leicester postgraduates, and those who have merely wandered in from the internet having exhausted the amusement value of LOLcats. Welcome! Some of you may be a little dispirited by Autumn's encroachments, the demands of the postgraduate workload, or the failure of memers to use the appropriate font on their funny cat pictures. The Salon will be countering these woes with a showing of the comedy, A Cock and Bull Story, three short interdisciplinary presentations, and tea and biscuits. I know, I know; we're so good to you!

Taking inspiration from the upcoming Literary Leicester festival (http://www2.le.ac.uk/institution/literary-leicester), at next week's Salon we will be showing A Cock and Bull Story, the 2006 adaptation of Sterne's Tristram Shandy starring Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan. The film will be introduced with three short interdisciplinary presentations from within the department: Miriam Cady will look at the use and representation of the country house within the film, Emma James will consider its status as a literary adaptation, and Victoria Byard will look at the film in terms of genre and form. Tea, coffee and biscuits, and possibly cake depending on how everyone's research is going, will be provided. 

The Salon will take place from 13:00-15:00 in Seminar Room ATT 202, Attenborough Second Floor on Wednesday 2nd November. You can also keep up to date with what's going on at The Salon with Twitter @thesalon_haf, or join the Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/155452421216246/. If you would like to contribute to this blog with posts about ongoing research, issues that you've come across as a postgraduate student or even just interesting links, then we would be more than happy to have you! Just talk to either myself or Julie at the Salon meeting. I will be the one doing a convincing impression of the Cookie Monster.

Hope to see you next week, and, as ever, the Salon is open to everyone so please feel free to forward this information on to anyone you think might be interested.  

The Salon in October

Welcome back, Salonblog readers! The Salon Summer Trip went off without a hitch and was comprehensively photographically documented by your humble chronicler as well as Salon cabalist, Miriam, and we hope to have some of the less awful photos up very soon. Threat or promise? You decide! I leave you with a fairly innocuous but intriguing picture of a sculpture made entirely out of butter. Yes, butter. And no matter how hard it may be to carve something out of butter, it is infinitely harder trying to take a photo of it inside its refrigerated glass case with the sun shining on it.

I hope that you too have had productive yet entertaining summers, even if they were sadly devoid of butter sculptures! 

The Salon has already started off the year in fine style with a well-received presentation from Julie Ives, titled 'Give It Some 'Ommer: ITV regional programming and the performance of the Black Country', and we hope to carry that quality on into upcoming Salon sessions. Traditionally, the Salon meets on the first Wednesday of every month, but with the start of the new academic year and incoming postgraduate students, we have made an executive decision to move this month's Salon session back. Consequently, October's The Salon will be meeting on Wednesday 12th October, 13:00-15:00 in ATT 202  (Attenborough Second Floor SR 202) and will be a general introductory session for new students and a chance to reconnect with fellow postgraduates for everyone else.

To this end, we are asking for Saloneers to attend and share their hard-won wisdom about the strategies, resources and pitfalls that they have used and experienced within their postgraduate studies. This will be an informal discussion session with brief representations from those Salon volunteers. If you would like to be one of those brave volunteers, please feel free to comment here or email me at victoriabyard @ gmail dot com and let us know. Regardless of how active you wish to be within the session, we would still be delighted to see you there, as we feel that the Salon can be a useful way to provide support and share research within the department as well as within the wider postgraduate community. 

As ever, everyone is welcome!

The Salon Summer Trip: Sunday 10th July from 11.30am

Oh, Salonblog readers, I could tell you such a grievous tale of woe, of deadlines and conference papers and weddings, of far too much coffee and far too little exercise (except for ridiculous dancing at weddings): all of which is a prelude to casting myself upon your mercy and confessing that this is a VERY LATE POST INDEED. I cannot apologise enough. I solemnly swear that updates for next year's schedule will be made in a much more timely manner. 

At our last meeting, we discussed a potential Salon Summer Trip; it was subsequently decided that The Salon would go upon a short walking tour of the historic landmarks of Leicester, and we all felt appropriately Victorian and virtuous.  Our final destination will be historic Belgrave Hall and Gardens (http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council-services/lc/leicester-city-museums/museums/belgrave-hall/) where a Scarecrow Festival is being held from 1.00pm-4.00pm. It was further agreed that it would be most unwise to set off on any educational venture without a full stomach.

This Sunday 10th July will therefore mark the first Salon Summer Trip, and we propose to meet at that local landmark, Mrs Bridges' Tea Rooms (http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=mrs+bridges+tea+rooms&fb=1&gl=uk&hq=mrs+bridges+tea+rooms&hnear=0x487742ab49b76c73:0x9a151d2a6fb49cb8,Leicester&cid=14833911788967266395), at 11.30am for breakfast. Then, weather permitting, we will walk up to Belgrave Hall Museum and Gardens via the Abbey Pumping Station and Abbey Park.  

The Abbey Pumping Station (http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council-services/lc/leicester-city-museums/museums/abbey-pumping-station/) and Abbey Park (http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council-services/lc/parks-green-spaces/main-parks/abbey-park/), which contains the ruins of the twelfth-century Leicester Abbey and also of Cavendish House, a seventeenth-century mansion, are within easy walking distance.

As you can see below, the Scarecrow Festival promises refreshments, so there could be cake at the end of our walk! And, of course, scarecrows.

Scarecrow Festival Fun Day
Sunday 10th July
1.00pm – 4.00pm
Belgrave Hall Museum & GardensCome along and scare the crows away at this event organised by Girl Guiding Birstall. Includes scarecrows, stalls, refreshments, children's crafts and activities plus a campfire sing song. £2.00 for activities.

We will be walking around Leicester so comfortable footwear may be a good idea, and, of course, you are more than welcome to join us for a short time rather than the whole trip, for whatever part of the day may suit you best.  

Apologies once more for the lateness of this news, but I look forward to seeing those who can make it. I might even be guilt-tripped into buying you cake. But not a scarecrow. Sorry.

The Salon: 1st June 2011

The summer holidays, Salonblog readers! Is there a more glorious time of year? Who could possibly feel ambiguous about those hazy days of idleness and sunshine? The amorphous and unstable nature of holiday time?

Well, postgraduate students, obviously. Because while the descending quiet in the university library after the exam period ends is a wonderful thing, how do you maintain your impetus and measure your progress when the campus becomes as quiet? How do you structure your research without regular term times and lesson plans and meetings? How, when you get right down to it, do you survive without the Starbucks in the Student Union Square being open? It's a dilemma.

The Salon on Wednesday 01st June will be therefore be an open discussion focusing on the issues of 'Staying motivated over the summer'. We'll be looking at the issues of research progress and structure during the 'long vacation', and exploring the possible resolutions and support structures available to postgraduate students. We also hope to follow up this directed discussion with a more general talk about prospective Salon meetings and activities. The Salon Summer Trip is still on the table (and you thought I was using the Cliff Richard picture for my own amusement!), and we've had already had some interesting suggestions and submissions for next academic year's Salon schedule. We will be meeting this Wednesday from 1pm to 3pm in ATT 202 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 202), and, as ever, all are welcome.

Welcome back, O, best beloved readers, to The Salon blog! As I'm sure many of you will already know from Julie Ives' e-mail updates, tomorrow (May 4th) is our monthly meeting of The Salon, the postgraduate research group for the Department of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester, at which we discuss ongoing research, share resources, and eat an unfeasible amount of biscuits. Tomorrow's meeting will be held in ATT 203 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 203) from 1pm to 3pm, and everyone is welcome to attend. We would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions for future presentations, speakers, or trips, and if you'd like to share your own research, then you can either turn up at The Salon (first Wednesday of every month, 1-3pm) or contact us at The Salon e-mail address, tothebourgeois@gmail.com. We are also still looking for people who would like to get involved with the committee, so please get in touch if you're interested.    

Before I announce this month's presenter and presentation topic, I'd like to extend The Salon's thanks to Conny Bailey for her fascinating talk last month on the wood carvings that came out of the Northern German town of Hildesheim, ca. 1500 -1540, and their possible influences and provenance, and also to the speaker the month before that, Marion Martin, for her revealing discussion of J.M.W Turner's later work within a social and critical context, with particular reference to the painting, 'Jessica' (shown below). 

The presenter at The Salon tomorrow will be Victoria Byard, and title of her paper is "Borderlands: audience, aesthetics and adolescence in Granada Television's 'The Owl Service'". There is a short abstract for the paper attached below.

"I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner's The Owl Service," said Penelope Farmer almost a decade after its publication in 1967. Long before that, Garner's book of the appropriation of the individual, adolescent subjectivities of Gwyn, Alison, and Roger by a repeating mythic pattern was awarded the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award, and in 1969 was made into a television series by Granada Television.

This paper will examine how adolescence is represented and related across the two media of text and television, and also how the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood are destabilised by Garner's use of narrative temporalities. It will also investigate how mythopoeia intersects with spaces of nationality, class and gender, and how the approach described by John Ellis as 'textual-historical' can draw out the tensions of the text by relating it to its specific historical context. However through Garner's deliberate trans-historicising of his text through the cyclical and consuming schema of mythology, The Owl Service's standing as a historical text is complicated as are the relationships and concepts of adolescence.

Looking beyond the text, I will argue that Granada used The Owl Service to challenge notions of how programming aimed at younger viewers should be produced and presented. I will also suggest that Granada in developing the series pushed the boundaries of programming for children and young adults both in terms of its aesthetic qualities and broadening the appeal of the channel's new weekend output, particularly amongst a growing teenage audience.

We hope to see you all tomorrow for discussion, biscuits, and a presentation involving a picture of a stuffed black bear wearing a top hat and a monocle. You'll never know whether that last bit was true unless you come along to 

The Salon: Wednesday 4th May 2011 1pm-3pm         ATT 203 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 203)     

The first Wednesday of the month is nearly upon us and it’s almost time for the latest edition of ‘The Salon’.  Our presenter this month is Conny Bailey, who is still deliberating over her topic, but it will either be a reprise of her recent conference paper (although she has promised to deliver it in English for us!) or some more general thoughts on how, and how not, to prepare for conferences.  Whichever it is, I’m sure it will be as interesting and informative as always. 

Moving forwards, we have now booked dates/venues for the Salon for the rest of the calendar year.  This means we can all make a note in our diaries in advance and it will help us to plan future sessions.  The dates (and presenters) so far are as follows.  All sessions are booked for 1pm until 3pm:

Wednesday 6^th April 2011                 ATT 203 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 203)      Conny Bailey  

Wednesday 4th May 2011                 ATT 203 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 203)      Victoria Byard

Wednesday 1^st June 2011                 ATT 202 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 202)      Julie Ives

Wednesday 7^th September 2011       To follow                                                                TBC

Wednesday 5^th October 2011           To follow                                                                TBC

Wednesday 2^nd November 2011       To follow                                                                TBC

Wednesday 7^th December 2011        To follow                                                                TBC

If anyone would like to volunteer for an upcoming session (September onwards) or has a suggestion for a guest speaker or discussion topic, then do get in touch.  We’ve already had a couple of suggestions – a session on post-doctoral careers and a session on how to get published – but I’m sure there are lots of other things people want to hear about.  This is your group, so please let us know what you think is important! 

You may have noticed that there are no regular sessions scheduled for July or August, as so many of us seem to be away over the summer.  There’s been a suggestion that we arrange some kind of trip to one of the local towns in July (as most of us don’t venture too far out of Leicester).  Front runners at the moment are Market Harborough, Loughborough and Northampton, all of which are easily accessible from Leicester by public transport.  The idea would be for each person who is coming along to do some research on a local landmark/point of interest or historical event.  On the day we’ll do a walking tour of the town (nothing too strenuous) and each person can do a short presentation on their topic of choice (about 5 minutes).  It can be as formal or as informal as you like, so don’t be shy!  More information on the three towns can be found at the links below.  Other suggestions are equally welcome. 

http://www.goleicestershire.com/explore-leicestershire/market-harborough/

http://www.goleicestershire.com/explore-leicestershire/loughborough/

http://www.northampton.gov.uk/site/scripts/documents.php?categoryID=100009

The provisional date proposed for the trip is Friday 8^th July 2011, partly because we thought it would be a nice way to start the weekend, but also because I shall still be on my honeymoon on Wednesday 6^th!  We may be able to vary the date slightly, so if you can’t make the Friday, but can make another day that week or the week after, drop me a line.

Also, if people feel it would be helpful to get together some time in August for an informal coffee and chat, then let me know. 

Hope to see as many of you as possible next Wednesday.