From the Margins: Arts & Humanities Perspectives on Power, Identity, and Culture 2023 A&H PGR Festival of Research), Friday 12^th May, MB4.2, Macadam Building

Following on from the great success of our inaugural Festival of Research in May 2022, the King’s Arts & Humanities PhD Events Committee are delighted to announce that we will hold another free interdisciplinary conference on Friday, 12 May 2023 in MB4.2, Macadam Building to celebrate the wealth and innovation of doctoral research within the broad fields of the humanities and arts.

Last year’s Festival of Research was held under the theme of ‘Confronting Crisis’ and we saw PhD researchers from King’s and beyond present exciting papers on such diverse topics as postcolonial nation-building, ethical fashion autoethnography, and decomposing bacterial art exhibitions.

In its second year our one-day hybrid conference will be under the theme of ‘From the Margins’ and aims to provide a dedicated platform for doctoral researchers from King’s and beyond to read, write, and explore from the margins timely topics around, for example, feminist, queer, digital, racial, or national histories and cultures, power relations and affective politics, representations of undesirable identities and philosophies, decolonising academia, and more.

We are immensely delighted to announce that Dr. Xine Yao (English, UCL) is our keynote speaker and will give an exciting talk titled ‘We're All Imposters: On Not Caring and Other Disaffections.’ Dr. Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 and co-director of the queer studies network qUCL at University College London. Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (2021) won Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award as well as honourable mention for the Arthur Miller First Book Prize from the British Association of American Studies. Other accolades include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas Podcast.

The overall aim of this festival is to create a welcoming and animating scholarly space in which to connect, discuss, and exchange ideas. To register your interest in attending please sign up via Eventbrite.

If you have any questions about the conference, get in touch with the organizing committee by email at AH-PGRevents@kcl.ac.uk, and to keep up to date with news relating to the conference and other community-building Arts & Humanities PhD events at King’s, follow us on Twitter @AH_PGREventsKCL.