10.00 Refreshments and introductions

10.15 - 11.15

Demystifying Writing

Dr Mariangela Palladino, Senior Lecturer, Postcolonial and Cultural studies (English), Keele University

This session explores the ways writing is experienced and lived. We will discuss strategies to demystify and normalise writing as part of our routine. How to make time for writing in the ‘culture of speed’ of contemporary academia?

11.15 - 12.15

Estates and Networks

Oliver Harris, Professor of American Literature, Keele University

Working for and with the estate of a particular writer brings unusual advantages but also problems, especially of dependency. Creating your own network offers interesting freedoms, but also problems, especially of workload. I want to reflect on these experiences in comparison to the “standard” pathway of writing journal articles and critical monographs.

12.15 – 1 Lunch and networking

1 - 2

Writing alone, Writing Together

Dr Shalini Sharma, Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History, Keele University

My talk offers a series of reflections of working in a writing group. Composing, creating and editing in the company of others had transformed a lonely pursuit into a truly collective creative endeavour. I will explain why it works for me and how others may benefit from it as well.

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Dr Mariangela Palladino

is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele. Her research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial literatures and cultural studies; she writes on African literatures, migration and diaspora. Her current research centres on a study of representations of contemporary migration between Africa and Europe. She is Principal investigator of AHRC funded project Responding to Crisis : Forced Migration and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century’ ; and is Co-Investigator of ESRC-AHRC project 'Arts for Advocacy: Creative Engagement with Forced Displacement in Morocco'. Palladino’s work is concerned with forced displacement and the role of the arts, participatory, creative and arts-based methods.

Professor Oliver Harris

I've focused my scholarship over the past 25 years on a single author (William Burroughs), which is relatively unusual. Besides writing/editing ten books about Burroughs so far (with four more in the pipeline), I've published articles on closely connected authors (Ginsberg and Kerouac), Hemingway, and film. My other major activity since 2010 has been promoting the work of other scholars in my field through running an organisation (the European Beat Studies Network; https://ebsn.eu) that organises annual international conferences that brings together critical and creative work.

Dr Shalini Sharma

I am a lecturer in colonial and post colonial history. My initial work was on left wing politics in Punjab in the decades before Indian independence in 1947. Since then, I have moved more into transnational and global history. I am currently writing a book, entitled India in the American Century, which is about cultural, economic and diplomatic relations between India and the United States, and I am completing journal articles on the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils and his neglected study of Indian intellectuals published in 1961. I am also putting together an AHRC grant bid on British and Indian intellectual cooperation during the era of decolonisation.

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