College Record 2014

culture in life writings by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Batesons.’ Lee-Von
Kim and Christine Fouirnaies organized a very successful conference on ‘Intimate
Archives: Photography and Life-Writing’. The life-writing lunch talk was given by
Marcus Ferrar.
In Hilary Term, as well as the Weinrebe lectures, OCLW organized a workshop on
literary letters, convened by Professor Pamela Clemit. This focused on letters in
their own right, papers including discussion of genre, reciprocity, self-presentation
and the material culture of letters, as well as some explorations of the work of
individual letter-writers. Speakers included John Barnard, Pamela Clemit, Grace
Egan, Daniel Hitchens, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Mark Pottle, Henriette van der
Blom and Maria Rita Drumond Viana. OCLW’s Visiting Scholar, Dr Tracey Potts
(Nottingham), and Visiting Doctoral Students, Jeffrey Gutierrez (Brown), Sophie
Scott-Brown (ANU) and Maria Rita Drummond Viana (Sao Paolo), discussed their
research whilst in residence here. Tom Couser (Hofstra) gave a lecture on ‘The
Work of Memoir; or, Why Memoir Matters’, and Paul Strohm (Columbia) asked
the question: ‘Was there Life-Writing in the Middle Ages?’ The life-writing lunch
seminar hosted James Hamilton.
In Trinity Term, activities included a seminar on ‘Writing Family Memoir’ with
Lyndall Gordon (biographer of Emily Dickinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry
James, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf), who discussed family memoir, building on
this year’s Wolfson Public Lecture Series which was themed around South Asian
writing and articulated a clear interest in family memoir. The Director, Hermione
Lee, presented her work Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. The deputy-Director, Elleke
Boehmer, convened a workshop on ‘Coetzee’s Lives’, which featured a keynote
address by David Attwell, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of
York. Mark Thompson gave this term’s life-writing lunch talk, in which he spoke
about his biography of the Serbian and Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kis, Birth
Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis. The winners of the OCLW-TORCH Postgraduate
Conference Award, Danielle Yardy and Elizabeth Chatterjee, organized a hugely
successful conference on ‘Procrastination – Cultural Explorations’, which explored
the phenomenon of procrastination, and the fraught moral and political claims
it provokes. Hosted events included ‘Genius for Sale! Artistic Production and
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