Join us for the inaugural Festival of Postgraduate Research held by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London!

We are delighted to announce that the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London will hold its inaugural Festival of Postgraduate Research on campus on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 May 2022.

Day 1 will host an interdisciplinary workshop for pre-upgrade PhD students and give them an opportunity to present their projects to a crossdepartmental academic panel.

Day 2 will bring together PhD and MPhil students from across the Arts and Humanities at King’s to share their perspectives and research excellence on the theme of ‘Confronting Crisis’. With conflicts, crises, and injustices ravaging the world in this post-truth era, this multidisciplinary symposium is a great platform for Arts and Humanities postgraduate researchers at King’s to present on and discuss how to confront, approach, and understand the many intersecting aspects of the contemporary crisis age.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Joanna Zylinska

Professor Joanna Zylinska (Digital Humanities) will deliver a keynote: “How to Manage the End of the World: A Counter-Apocalypse in Multiple Modes and Media”. This talk sets out to “consider possible responses to a situation when our very existence is being challenged by the uncertainty about what comes next. A climate collapse? Cross-species extinction? Another pandemic? A third world war? Death by AI? Or maybe a sunnier tomorrow, for all of us?”

Call for Papers

If your research falls under the broad theme of ‘Confronting Crisis’, from any point of view within the Arts and Humanities, please send a brief abstract (c.100-300 words) for a 15-minute presentation to AH-PGRevents@kcl.ac.uk by Tuesday 3 May. This can be part of a PhD chapter you are working on or another work-inprogress of yours which you think will fit the theme of this Festival of Postgraduate Research symposium. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to: Philosophical, Historical, Feminist, Postcolonial, Cultural, or any other Theoretical Approaches for Our Changing World; Memory, Narrative, and Crisis; Language and Terminology of Crises; Crisis and Ecocriticism; History of War and Other Territorial Conflicts; Crisis, Culture Wars, and the Anthropocene in the Performing Arts, Literature, Film, Media, and Beyond.

Pre-Upgrade Workshop

To present at the pre-upgrade workshop on 19 May - ‘PhD to the Max’ - please email karl.doyle@kcl.ac.uk with a 750-word summary of your project by 12 May, detailing its driving research questions, main primary sources, and most important methodologies and frames of scholarly reference, with a view to explaining exactly where its intellectual value added is going to lie. If you are a PGR student in the Arts and Humanities preparing for your upgrade examination, this workshop is a fantastic opportunity for you to receive feedback on your research from an expert panel of academics across King’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Panel Discussions

The symposium will also feature multidisciplinary PGR panel discussions, such as a forum on ‘How to Take Action in the Arts and Humanities’. If you have suggestions for exciting discussion panels, or if you wish to present your thoughts and research findings on a relevant aspect of the theme in a less formal manner than by presenting a paper, we are certainly more than happy to include these and to facilitate many constructive discussions throughout the symposium. The intent and focus of this in-person Festival of Postgraduate Research is to create a welcoming and collegial space, so there will also be various opportunities for socialising, networking, and community-building to look forward to.

All PGR students in King’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities are welcome to participate in this symposium, but everyone is welcome to attend.