Weekly News #1 – 22/12/2016

Welcome to the first edition of the BSU Research Blog weekly news bulletin, a weekly recap of the most important research news and events at Bath Spa University.

If you would like an item to be featured here, please email researcher.development@bathspa.ac.uk (any featured items will also appear in the BSU Research Monthly).

College of Liberal Arts

Michael Finnissy: Dialogues

On 17 November Professor Amanda Bayley was a guest speaker at the symposium at the University of Huddersfield, on the composer Michael Finnissy, celebrating the year of his seventieth birthday and his contribution to British musical life.

Amanda demonstrated her interactive, multimedia tool, ‘Evolution and Collaboration’ (designed with Michael Clarke, Huddersfield), and later presented her research: ‘On composer-performer collaboration: Finnissy’s Second and Third String Quartets’.

Establishing Transcultural New Music – Bridging a Gap or Reinventing Exoticism?

From 24-27 November, Professor Amanda Bayley joined lively debates with international composers, performers and scholars of Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish, Brazilian, Indian, North American and German heritage.

Transcultural processes were discussed and presented in concert at the Plattform für transkulturelle neue musik in Bochum, Germany. Amanda’s presentation was on ‘Ethnographies of intercultural music-making’.

Environmental Humanities research update

Professor Kate Rigby, Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, has presented several keynote lectures following her appointment to BSU in February this year, including at the German Association for Australian Studies conference on Nature and Environment in Australia (Cologne 28/9-1/10), an international symposium on “Texts Animals and Environment: Zoopoetics and Environmental Poetics” (Hanover, 12-14/10) and the biennial conference of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment-East Asia (Seoul, 5-6/11).

Kate has also recently been invited to join the International Advisory Board of the illustrious Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and to become a co-editor of the University of Virginia Press’s ecocritical book series, Under the Sign of Nature

In addition to hosting two public lectures by visiting Professors Libby Robin and Jennifer Ladino in November, the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities received funding from the AHRC/BA to host a series of events in Bath, Aberystwyth and Borth in association with the Being Human Festival of the Humanities.

The launch of the Environmental Humanities Research Centre took place on the 15th and 16th of December 2016.

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