Cambridge Conference on Global Food Security 2016

23-24 June 2016 – David Attenborough Building

Harnessing the natural and social sciences for future food supply, sustainability and equality

The Conference organized by the University of Cambridge Global Food Security Initiative in association with the Cambridge conservation community (CCI, UCCRI and CCF) and the Centre of Development Studies will explore how to translate knowledge into action to secure future food supply, sustainability and equality.

The most exciting developments along with the most pressing knowledge gaps, across a wide range of different fields will be discussed as well issues related to  small-holder farming versus agri-business, natural versus social science perspectives, grassroots versus top-down solutions and food security versus sovereignty.

More information can be found here.

Rediscovered! The French-book ‘almirahs’ of Chandernagore College, West Bengal

Books from the almirahs. Credits: Sayantani Chakraborti & Antara Mukherjee

In January 2016, following a keynote lecture given by Dr Ian Magedera at an international conference organized by the Chandernagore College’s English Department, Assistant Professor Antara Mukherjee  began a hunt for references in Bengali sources to the French and French culture during the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. During that time, despite several interruptions by the Royal Navy and British Army, ‘Chandernagor’, as it was known in French, was a trading post governed from France. Today’s Chandannagar is a busy town situated 35km upriver from Kolkata, a megacity of fourteen million people.

Though Chandannagar has an Indo-French Institute and its French language learners are served by the Alliance française du Bengale, French influences there are not as obvious as in Pondicherry (Puducherry) in South India. Dr Mukherjee has found traces in domestic architecture, but another thread led her right back to her own college library and to books that had been donated by the French-speaking Bengali philanthropist and historian Hari Har Sett in the 1930s. As well as containing several unique items, these hitherto neglected ‘almirahs’ are a time capsule of books its donor considered important to hand down to Bengali students of French.

‘Almirah’ is a word that has come into Indian English from the Portuguese armário and from Latin armarium (while still also used in Hindi अलमारी ‎(almārī) and Urdu الماری ‎(almārī)).

More information can be found here

Call for Papers – “Games of Empires”: An International Interdisciplinary Conference on the Historio-Cultural Features of Imperial and Transcultural Board Games

At Saarland University, 21^st to 23^rd April 2016

Organizers:

The Dept. of Ancient History, and Transcultural Anglophone Studies

Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany

Game playing can be numbered among the most fundamental social activities that human beings engage in. This fact has to do with the dual nature of games. As reflections of the real world in which the players live, games allow players to enter a simulacra in which certain rules apply and where a set goal is to be reached; as virtual worlds in their own right they invite players to sojourn in unique spaces for certain lengths of time in order to succeed at a certain task before returning to the drabness of quotidian reality. Role-playing in conjunction with the aim of achieving a consensual goal has thus formed part of the magnetism of game playing that has, moreover, lost none of its attractiveness from the earliest of times to the present day. The “Games of Empire” form a sub-set of games in general in that the simulacra that they offer derives from the specific form of colonial/imperial domination currently being practiced, while their virtual worlds aspects allow for, or even encourage, alternative models of domination. Of the games belonging to this group, Board Games are especially complex in that they seek to represent both worlds in a tightly-regimented form, the board, understood to be a marked area in which the game is played using figures, stones or other materials, in order to allow the imagination of the players as much freedom as possible to move – within the board’s boundaries. As is to be expected, the rules for Board Games change with the passage of time as also with the particular political culture in which they are played. It is on account of these factors that Games of Empire present an especially fruitful field of historical, cultural, and transcultural research. This field of inquiry opens itself up to dialectical investigation of the intersections that obtain not only between the changing parameters of virtual models of domination and subjugation, but also between the positions of domination and power as explorable in the playing of the game. It is these variations in the types of games and the ways in which they have been played over historical time and geographical space that is of concern for research in the typology of Board Games of Empire as envisaged by our conference. Some of the topics that are worth exploring further are:

– The Function of Empire Games: What have the aims of these games been?

– Matters of Representation: The manner in which an Empire / different Empires have sought to represent itself / themselves in Board Games – Comparative Approaches: Comparisons of one or more Board Games characteristically of two or more Empires

– Historical Perspectives: The historically determined variants of an Imperial / transcultural Board Game

– Geographical Dissemination: The regional differences that can be found within an Imperial / transcultural Board Game

– Global Dimensions of Empire Games: Which game/s have been transposed, to which cultural areas, and why?

– Global Dimensions of Empire Games: Which game/s have been re-contextualized, in which non-Empire settings, and why?

We welcome contributions in German and English from anyone working in the Humanities who might be interested in the general theme of our interdisciplinary conference.

Conference – Orientality: Beyond Foreign Affairs National Portrait Gallery, London, 2–3 June 2015

Orientality is a biennial conference series developed by the Orientalist Museum, Doha.

The inaugural conference Orientality: Cultural Orientalism and Mentality took place at Cambridge University in 2013 and showcased the restoration work of the museum staff as well as that of an international delegation of museum professionals.

The second upcoming conference will offer to international art and museum professionals an opportunity to come together and discuss the art, history, politics and future of the Orientalist art movement. 

The Orientalist Museum holds one of the most significant collections of Orientalist art in the world, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper and decorative objects. Collectively these artworks trace the history of Orientalism from the early sixteenth century to the present day.

Orientality: Beyond Foreign Affairs
National Portrait Gallery, London, 2–3 June 2015