Humanities in Public Festival returns

Paul Koudounaris and Sue Fox appeared at the last festival

THE hugely successful Humanities in Public festival will return for a second year, it has been announced.

Animal rights, disability and youth culture will all be put under the microscope at MMU as part of the year-long festival.

The programme features talks, debates, fairs, tours and other events and activities, all of which are open to the public.

There will also be music, food, film screenings, poetry and art exhibitions to tempt visitors.

Opening event

The first event will be an inaugural professorial lecture by Prof Andrew Biswell, of the Department of English.

This event will also feature a wine reception and will mark the official opening of the festival.

Prof Biswell, who is the Director of the International Anthony Burgess Centre, will be lecturing on “WH Auden Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets”.

The lecture will be introduced by Prof Jean-Noel Ezingeard, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at MMU.

Gothic Manchester returns

Following the massive popularity of last year’s Gothic Manchester strand, the mini-festival will return once more, just before Halloween.

Included in this festival of the macabre and fantastical are readings from authors working on the gothic dimensions of austerity politics, tours of the John Rylands Library and of the gothic splendours of the city and author Rosie Garland reading from both of her novels and discussing her alternative life as Goth icon Rosie Lugosi.

There will also be a vampire-themed pub quiz, a phantasmagoric lantern display and film screening, and the local Steampunk community will join in for a day of retro-tech delights, including a costumed tour of the Museum of Science and Industry’s Steam Hall.

Full details of Gothic Manchester events can be found at http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/gothicmmu/gothic-manchester-festival-2014/

Challenging conceptions

In addition to Gothic Manchester, the other strands of the festival will be Animal Worlds, Contesting Youth, Human Trouble: Dis/ability, Multi-lingual Life and Future Histories.

Animal Worlds will present a range of perspectives on animal rights, concerning our uses and abuses of billions of animals each year, for food, scientific research, warfare, labour, and sport.

More information about the Animal Worlds events, which start on October 6, can be found by clicking here: http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/hip/october-2014-animal-worlds/

There will also be a number of high profile speakers for the Contesting Youth strand of the festival, which will take place in November, including Camilla Batmanghelidjh, Dave Haslam and Sylvia Lancaster. Details about those events can be found at http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/hip/contesting-youth/

Going further

Next year’s events will include a performance by the comedian Laurence Clark, a multi-lingual film festival and exhibitions on local history.

Festival project manager Helen Malarky said: “This year’s festival is going further than ever before in showing how humanities and social sciences subjects connect with wider society. All of our themes this year challenge or contest in different ways - from looking at the issue of meat-eating and animal rights, to popular conceptions of young people and disability, to ideas about what it means to make history - these are hugely significant discussions that powerfully influence and inform people’s day to day lives.

“We believe we have now gone beyond the point of proving the values of humanities and social science subjects per se. Instead, we are focussed on our primary objective: ensuring that the public can plug into academic research as a source of both intellectual sustenance and genuine social empowerment.

“We are very proud that MMU takes this responsibility seriously and that we can offer a Festival that is far more than just a box ticking exercise, but is rather something that is sincerely informed by a shared joy in knowledge, discovery and debate.”