English PGR Conference 2025

We are delighted to welcome you to the 2025 English Department PGR Conference, titled 'IR/RELEVANT'.

As academics and practitioners in the Arts and Humanities, we are often required to evidence the relevance of our work, attempting to bridge an implicit separation with ‘the real world’. These efforts have become increasingly precarious, in the face of funding challenges, rising anti-intellectualism in the political sphere, and with social media amplifying scrutiny. The visibility of scholarship becomes both a necessity and a personal liability. Simultaneously, artists and academics continue to challenge exclusionary structures that have long shaped institutions and practices. Standards of relevance or relatability can be wielded as tools of exclusion.

At this critical moment, we invite reflections on relevance. How does art shape how we relate to each other? To what extent do these demands promote homogeneity in art and culture? Who is excluded by these standards?

Keynote announcement

We are delighted to announce that we will hear a keynote from Dr Ally Louks, whose recent experience at the centre of a “social media storm” (BBC News) has demonstrated both the possibilities and pitfalls of highly visible humanities research. Read more about Dr Louks’ research here.

Provisional Agenda

9:00: Registration and Coffee

9:30-10:45: Session 1

Panel 1: Illuminating the Domestic

Nelita Xaïðá Estewale (Surrey): The intersection of Byzantine social history with the theory of coercive control as a research field for writing granularity into disrupted matrilineal domestic narratives in historical fiction.

Yumeng "Carol" Song (UCL): Returning to a Domestic Memory: The Affect and Labor in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma

Irene Praga Guerro (Birkbeck): Who and what is (ir)relevant (in MAGA)? Thinking Value with Hernán Díaz’s Trust (2022)

Panel 2: Sites of Embodiment

Beth Campbell (KCL): ‘We learn through feeling’: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Wildflower Picking

Lizzy Orton (KCL): “’Leave my body senseless as the earth’: Immaterial women in Jocasta and Tamburlaine’

William Crosby (UAL): muddy listening: making a mess in the academy

10:45-11:00: Break

11:00-12:15: Session 2

Panel 3: Genres of Relevance

Gayle Kennedy (KCL): Simone de Beauvoir's America Day by Day: Gender, Genre and Conformity in Intellectual History

Anni Domingo (KCL): Exploring the Complex Interest of Race, History and Personal Narratives in Archives

Yiqi Zhang (UAL): How Transculturality Relates to Comics Studies: An ‘Irrelevance’ in the World of Comics

Panel 4: Experimental Academics

Sarah Bell (KCL): Hyper-exorbitance as method: autosomatography and the extreme marginal case of the unwell dancing body

Ilenia Cipollari Ganucci (UAL): The beauty of monstrosity

Pablo Alvez Artinprocess (Surrey): Sharing (and daring) is caring

12:15-13:00: Lunch Break

13:00-14:15: Keynote Address

Dr Ally Louks (Cambridge)

14:15-14:30: Break

14:30-15:45: Session 3

Panel 5: Performance Cultures

David O’Hara (KCL): The Labour and Aesthetic Practice of TV/Film Casting

Emily McDermott (KCL): Inside the Rehearsal Room: Exploring the Relevance and Practical Applications of David Garrick's Rehearsal Methods to Contemporary Theatrical Practice

Don Lickley (KCL): Bill Butler's Strip Poetry: Aspects of Visual and Performance Culture in the British Poetry Revival

Panel 6: Crossing Boundaries

Rosie Ngure (Surrey): Insidious Trauma and An African Woman Narrative: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Melanie Hyo-In Han (Surrey): Translingual Poetry as a Site of Resistance within Korean History and its Diaspora

Chigozirim Nwaosu (Surrey): Intersectional Feminism ‘in Five Categories: Black, Muslim, Female, Poor, Hijabbed’

15:45-16:00: Break

16:00-17:30: Session 4

Panel 7: Remembering and Forgetting

Ziyang Li (KCL): Cohesion, Exile, Return: Non-Human Narratives and the Shape of Diaspora Community in Never Let Me Go

Vera Zurbrügg (Independent Scholar): Discriminated Memories: Challenging Dominant Histories Through Refused Objects

Mireia Ludevid i Llop (UAL): A Walk Through Irrelevance: Critiquing the Politics of Memory of the Francoist Past through Autoethnographic Archive Practices

Ross Lowton (KCL): Omai to Mai Tai: Tiki Bars, Empire and Subcultural Narratives

Creative Workshop: Mossibilities

Led by Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes (UAL)

Mossibilities: Come and explore the ancient, embodied knowledge of moss. This often overlooked species is crucial to global flows of water, nutrients and carbon, they are a “model of how we might live” - Robin Wall Kimmerer. Together we will dive into the microcosm of local mosses, learning with moss knowledge through sensory activities and co-creating collaborative speculative fiction.

Spaces are limited. Please sign up on arrival. 

17:30 Closing Remarks

Please contact englishpgrconf@kcl.ac.uk for further questions or to flag accessibility needs. We look forward to hearing from you!