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Oxford Centre for Life-Writing<br />
This was another successful year for OCLW, the internationally-renowned hub for<br />
life-writers and researchers of life-writing based at Wolfson.<br />
The Centre’s first triennial, three-day residential conference in September 2013<br />
was attended by over 120 delegeates. Its theme was ‘The Lives of Objects’, with<br />
sixty papers, five plenary sessions (Neil MacGregor, Edmund De Waal, Jenny<br />
Uglow, Hugh Haughton, Michael Burden) and trips to Oxford museums.<br />
The Weinrebe Lectures in Life-Writing, OCLW’s annual series of lectures, were<br />
given on the theme of ‘Voicing the Self ’ by leading practitioners of the genre: Blake<br />
Morrison, ‘“The Worst Thing I Ever Did”: Confession and the Contemporary<br />
Memoir’; Edward St Aubyn, in conversation with Hermione Lee; Richard Holmes,<br />
‘The Biographer’s Other I’; and Marina Warner, ‘Hearing Voices, Travelling Back.’<br />
At the heart of OCLW is its busy programme of events that include regular lectures,<br />
seminars and research workshops. This year’s themes varied from obituaries<br />
and war veterans to the lives of letters, life-writing and Alzheimer’s. OCLW has<br />
continued to organise practical writing workshops for professional, amateur and<br />
postgraduate life-writers, and has also organized or hosted short conferences,<br />
symposia and colloquia; subjects have included the poet and critic T E Hulme,<br />
photography and life-writing, artistic production and economics in the nineteenth<br />
century, Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, and the ‘lives’ of the South African<br />
Nobel laureate J M Coetzee.<br />
In Michaelmas Term, Hannah Sikstrom convened a one-day conference on<br />
‘Navigating Networks: Women, Travel, and Female Communities’. Kathryn<br />
Hughes spoke on ‘George Eliot’s Milk Churn’, and Ray Monk discussed his latest<br />
work Robert Oppenheimer: Inside the Centre, in conversation with Hermione Lee.<br />
Professor David Zeitlyn convened a workshop on obituaries, ‘From Life-Writing<br />
to Death Notices: Obituary, Portraiture and Commemoration’, which featured<br />
Neil George (Producer of BBC Radio 4’s Last Word), Martin Rowson (cartoonist<br />
and writer), Laurence Goldman (editor of DNB), Shearer West (Professor of the<br />
History of Art, Oxford), and Harry de Quetteville (obituary editor, Daily Telegraph).<br />
Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck) and Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham) convened a<br />
seminar on ‘War Veterans: Memory and Storytelling’. David Amigoni (Keele) gave<br />
a lecture on ‘Writing lives, inscribing familial distinction: inheritance, science and<br />
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