14 July – 18:15-19:45 – Stratford after the 2012 Olympic Games? Your part in developing social change

Venue: Stratford Library, 3 The Grove, Stratford, London, E15 1EL

Booking: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/stratford-after-the-2012-olympic-games-your-part-in-developing-social-change-tickets-11916862657

Are you interested in understanding more about the relationships, communities, traditions and institutions that make up our social world? Would you like to explore social problems in contemporary society? Do you want to develop skills for working in areas related to the social world?

You can participate in a short interactive exercise exploring a local social issue and find out about what the BSc Social Science course entails. You can also hear about what our students do after graduating and take part in a question and answer session.

Refreshments will be provided.

15 July – 18:30-20:30 Sports Event Spectacle: Cultural Policy-Making and Curating Contemporary Art for Major Sporting Events

Venue: Flat Time House, 210 Bellenden Rd, London, SE15 4BW

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sports-event-spectacle-cultural-policy-making-and-curating-contemporary-art-for-major-sporting-tickets-12163392033

A Roundtable Discussion with Jo Longhurst, Beatriz Garcia and Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, programmed by Tiffany Boyle

This event will assess the presence of the visual arts in the cultural programming of London 2012 and Glasgow 2014, looking at the effects of recent cultural policy-making in this area upon what was, and is being, actualised. Wider questions to be addressed include the power imbalance between mega-sporting events and the arts in the production of accompanying cultural programmes; celebratory tones within such programmes; and which aspects of the cultural programming from London 2012 and Glasgow 2014 are acting as a blueprint for future events. Presentations from each of the guest speakers – Jo Longhurst, Beatriz Garcia and Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt – will be followed by a Q&A discussion.

Organised in collaboration with Birkbeck School of Arts.

18-19 July – 13:30-19:00 & 10:00-18:00 – Blake, The Flaxmans, and Romantic Sociability

Venue: Keynes Library at 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Booking: No booking required – contact blakeflaxman@bbk.ac.uk

Blake’s sociability encompasses the real, the satyrical, and the imaginary. His visionary company includes ‘Companions from Eternity’, corporeal friends, and spiritual enemies. From the salon to the moon, across the geographies of ‘a certain island near by a mighty continent’, a mighty cast of characters intermingle. Enter Steelyard the Lawgiver and Mrs Nannicantipot, Suction the Epicurean, Sipsop the Pythagorean, Quid the Cynic, Inflammable Gas the Wind Finder, Etruscan Column the Antiquarian, Aradobo the Dean of Morocco, Obtuse Angle, Tilly Lally the Siptippidist, Miss Gittipin, Gibble Gabble, and Scopprell. Their imaginary, emergent, and satyrical disciplines include ‘Fissic Follogy, Pistinology, Aridology, Arography, Transmography, Phizography, Hogamy HAtomy,& Hall that’. This wild jamboree is a record of the convivial friendship and patronage of John and Ann Flaxman, Harriet and her husband the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, who provided the young artist with ‘The Bread of sweet Thought and the Wine of Delight’.

Starting from the world of An Island in the Moon, this conference illuminates Blake’s relationship with the ‘Sculptor of Eternity’ and his circle from the early days to the ‘Regions of Reminiscence’, from the 1780s to the 1820s, following the Flaxmans across the channel, into the cosmopolitan networks of the Grand Tour, in order to recover the material cultures, sites, and dynamic forms of their Romantic sociability.