Author: Research Scene

LETS Lab is a newly formed research group in Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences in School of Law and Criminology

Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Director’s note

To many October is the month of pumpkin-spiced lattes, cosy jumpers and warm autumn colours. To the few geeks among you (we salute you, friends!) October will always be the month that the first message was sent over -what later became known as – “the internet”. 

To us though, this will be the month that we published our first Newsletter, and we are damn proud of this! At LETS Lab, we are fascinated by the ways in which the advancements in technology and science intersect with the law and challenge conventional legal thinking. We would like to share this passion with you through this Newsletter. 

This is a new adventure for us and no doubt the road will be bumpy! Our editor-in-chief, Isabelle de Oliveira has worked hard to make sure that this newsletter together with a cuppa and a biscuit will be something to look forward to on the third Monday of the month. Enjoy our first Newsletter – this first edition is packed with news, exciting readings and job opportunities.

Dr Argyro Karanasiou Founding Director, LETS Lab

Dr Justine Baillie, a member of the Literature and Language Research Group – under the auspices of CREL (Centre for Research and Enterprise in Language) – has edited, and contributed an essay to, Global Morrison, a special issue of Oxford University Press’s journal Contemporary Women’s Writing. The issue is dedicated to the global significance of the Nobel prize-winning African-American novelist, Toni Morrison. Having been commissioned by the general editors of Contemporary Women’s Writing to lead the Global Morrison research group, Justine organised a very successful two-day international conference at the University of Greenwich in June 2017 and has now edited the proceedings for the OUP publication. Contributors examine Morrison’s literary articulations with the works of writers such as Italian novelist Umberto Eco, British novelist Zadie Smith, French writer Gisèle Pineau, Afro-Brazilian author Conceição Evaristo, and American poet Robin Coste Lewis.  

The publication is timely, as recent Black Lives Matters activism has focussed attention on global histories of colonialism, slavery and racism. In her Introduction to the issue Justine writes that Morrison’s 1987 neo-slave narrative Beloved ‘was the catalyst for new interrogations of race, slavery, trauma and of colonialism’s displacements, which connect the local, specific experience with world history’. Justine’s contribution to Global Morrison, ‘Morrison and the Transnation: Toni
Morrison, God Help the Child and Zadie
Smith, Swing Time‘, brings together contemporary debates about the postracial and the post-black with conceptualizations of the transnation that destabilize the alignment of race and gender with nationalism. Morrison’s considerations of globalization, nationhood, and race in her essay The Origin of Others (2017) are used to illuminate the central concerns of her last work of fiction, God Help the Child (2015) and British writer Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2017). 

Future projects, coordinated within CREL by Literature and Research Seminar Series leaders Justine Baillie, Emily Critchley and Katarina Stenke, include the organisation of a conference on neo-slave narratives that will continue the work initiated at the Global Morrison conference at Greenwich. Ade Solanke’s script in hand performance of Phillis in London, her play about the first female African-American poet Phillis Wheatley’s visit to London in the eighteenth century, was a highlight of the Global Morrison conference of 2017 and Ade’s continued research on the eighteenth-century black presence in London will feature in the proposed neo-slave narratives conference. 

Congratulations to Justine Baillie and all contributing authors for the well deserved spotlight!

Out now: Contemporary Women’s Writing