L6 Academic Symposium

Lower 6 students had a thoroughly engaging day for their Academic Symposium and were joined by the Oratory School and Reading Boys School.

The varied schedule of presentations was as follows:

Presentation 1

Chair: Sandra Smith

Professor Michael Scott – University of Warwick

Greek Vases in Action – The Ancient Greek Symposium Taking inspiration from this symposium, we will be looking at the original symposium in ancient Greece. In particular, we will be looking at the particular vessels the ancient Greek chose to surround themselves with at these events, how they were used and engaged with. In so doing, we will be confronted with the challenge of understanding why a society made drinking so difficult for itself, why such a society chose the images it did to decorate these vessels and re-frame how these ‘vases’ should in fact be studied and understood.

Before coming to Warwick, Michael completed his training at Cambridge, where he was also the Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in ancient history at Darwin College, as well as an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics. He has taught widely in the UK and Greece, and his research is focused on using inter-disciplinary approaches to the literary, epigraphic and material evidence to investigate ancient Greek and Roman society. Michael believes in making the ancient world as accessible as possible to a wider audience. He regularly talks in schools around the country, writes books intended for the popular market as well as articles for national and international newspapers and magazines, takes part in radio programmes, and has written and presented several TV series about the ancient world for History Channel, National Geographic, BBC and ITV.

Presentation 2

Chair: Steven Jackson

Dr Nicholas Perkins – University of Oxford

‘And when you are young, they assume you know nothing’: rhetoric, tradition and the power of words Rhetoric has always been thought of as powerful but dangerous. It’s one of the most traditional arts that we have – the art of persuasion – but is also something that’s constantly being reinvented and tested. In this talk, I’ll briefly introduce the debate about rhetoric; give some examples of writers exploring its power (from Geoffrey Chaucer to Taylor Swift); and show how we don’t have to be experts, or even English students, to understand, enjoy and use rhetoric now

My research interests are now based in the late-medieval period. They include English poetry and its audiences, for example the circulation and ownership of manuscripts; and the poet, bureaucrat and melancholic Thomas Hoccleve, along with his contemporaries and influences such as John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer. Recently, I have been studying medieval romance, and in particular how objects and people circulate in romance narratives, asking what we might learn from work on gifts and material engagements in other fields. This investigation is the subject of my book The gift of narrative in medieval England (2021), whose research was aided by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, and an edited volume of essays, Medieval Romance and Material Culture (2015). I am planning to curate an exhibition about books and gifts in the Bodleian Library in 2023. Amongst my other interests are biblical allusion in medieval literature; and modern encounters with medieval culture.

Presentation 3

Chair: Katherine Wright

Dr Charlotte Walker – University of York

Algae - They’re Blooming Marvellous. Algae are a diverse group of aquatic organisms, bound together by their ability to photosynthesise. Photosynthesis is the key to life on Earth; providing the oxygen we need to breathe; removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere; and fuelling our global food webs. While many people think of terrestrial plants as key to this life-enabling process, it is not widely known that algae contribute up to half of global photosynthetic activity. Today, research is starting to uncover their global impact and biotechnological potential as we look towards a greener global future. From seaweed farms to bio-batteries, can algae shape our future for the better?

I am a researcher in the Mackinder Lab and I work on the CO2 concentrating mechanism in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Algae are responsible for up to 50% of all global photosynthesis. They form the bottom of the global food web, produce the O2 we breathe and play an important role in capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. Algae have evolved a process to supercharge their photosynthesis, CO2 concentrating mechanism (CCM). The CCM functions by taking up HCO3- from the environment and transporting it through the algal cell to a compartment known as the chloroplast that contains the photosynthetic apparatus. The HCO3- is converted to CO2, which can subsequently be used by the enzyme Rubisco to drive photosynthesis. The data generated by my research also feeds directly into an effort to engineer CCM components into higher plants with our close collaborators in the McCormick Lab at the University of Edinburgh. If successful, this has been modelled to potentially increase crop yields by up to 60%, alleviating food security issues as a result of increasing population and climate change.

Presentation 4

Chair: Mark Richards (Zoom / Teams)

Professor Kenneth Smith – University of Liverpool

Listening to the Unconscious – Adventures in Popular Music and Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud thought that dreams were the road to understand our unconscious minds, but Professor Kenneth Smith believes that Freud would have been better to study pop music. Pop can offer us exciting paths into our unconscious musical minds, and in return, theories of the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of popular music. Through an analysis of one or two pop songs, Kenneth will introduce some of the ideas in his new book, Listening to the Unconscious (Bloomsbury, 2023, co-written with philosopher, Stephen Overy).

Kenneth has worked at Liverpool since 2011 after holding posts at Keele and Durham (where he completed his PhD in 2009). His first book, ‘Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire’ was published early in 2013, and he has published essays in music journals on Alexander Skryabin, Karol Szymanowski, Charles Ives and Alexander von Zemlinsky. In addition to his interest in Western art-music from the turn of the twentieth century, Kenneth specializes in music theory. His next book, ‘Desire in Chromatic Harmony’ (Oxford University Press) is to be a psychological model of twentieth century harmony that examines works by a range of composers, setting these into theoretical and philosophical contexts. Kenneth is also interested in the analysis of popular music with a co-edited book (The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches, 2018) containing a chapter on Arab Strap, and he has published on form and harmony in Modest Mouse (2014) and Suede (2017). As President of the Society of Music Analysis, Kenneth co-organised the popMAC conference at Liverpool in 2014, the RMA2017 conference in Liverpool, and assists with running conferences with the SMA throughout the year.

Presentation 5

Chair: Antoine Rogeon & Michael Bradley

Dr Emma Wagstaff - University of Birmingham

Who is Looking in French Impressionist Art? Studying Modern Foreign Languages at university is about much more than learning to speak the languages fluently. In this lecture I will talk about one topic that students of French at Birmingham University study in their first year: nineteenth-century Impressionist painting. Some Impressionist artists are well known, but we will focus instead on a number of less famous names, including women artists. We will think about the figure of the artist as someone who looks at the people and places around them, asking who is looking in the paintings and, consequently, who and what are seen. The lecture aims to introduce you to the work of some important French artists and to encourage you to think about how paintings can reveal new perspectives on society.

I have taught at the University of Birmingham since 2006, contributing to core courses at all levels and offering specialist teaching on French poetry, experimental writing, the visual arts. I have supervised doctoral research on a range of literary topics. Previously I held temporary teaching posts at Trinity College, Cambridge and at the université Paris XII at Créteil. I was Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge from 2002-2005, having completed my PhD in French and undergraduate degree in French and German at Trinity College. I investigate poetic form from the following perspectives: the effect of form on the writing and reading process, with a particular focus on attention; the relationship between contemporary French poetic practice and other arts and disciplines, including poetry in translation; and the connection between the form of creative works and cultures of protest. My most recent single-authored book is the first in English to investigate major twentieth-century French poet André du Bouchet, and examines attentiveness in his poetic and critical work: André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention (Leiden: Brill, 2020).