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Research events

King's College provides support for conferences, linked seminars and workshops of particular interest to the Fellowship. Applications for support should be directed to the Research Committee.

Forthcoming events

14 February, 5:00-6:30pm
  • History, as It Hasn't Yet Happened
    Prof Caroline Humphrey
    Organiser: Anastasia Piliavsky
    Venue: Alison Richards Building G1 Seminar Room, 7 West Road
March 2012
  • Philosophy/Anthropology Meeting 2
    Organiser: James Laidlaw
June 2012
  • Turing conference (15-16 June)
    Organiser: Mark Sprevak
July 2012
  • Reading the Mother from Antiquity to Shakespeare: Critical Approaches to the Maternal in Premodern Literature (6-7 July)
    Organiser: Mairéad McAuley

Previous events in 2011/12

January 2012

  • Work in Progress Seminar: Michael Herzfeld
    (17-19 January 2012)
    Organiser: Anastasia Piliavsky

October 2011

November 2011

Patronage in South Asia

30 September-1 October 2011
Organiser: Anastasia Piliavsky

Patronage in South Asia

In recent decades patronage has been all but absent from the menu of South Asianists' interests. Recent observations of corrupt 'clientelistic' politics in South Asia, however, remind us of a need for a better understanding of what, if anything, may be meant by 'patronage', and the place of the phenomenon in local political and social life in the region. The Colloquium brings together a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, who will interrogate the history and sociology of patronage in South Asia.

See the conference website.

Previous events in 2010/11

The Cambridge Triennial

June 2011
Organiser: Simon Goldhill

Transmissible Cancers (two-day conference)

June 2011
Organiser: Elizabeth Murchison

Uncertain Knowledge in the Middle Ages

King's College, 9 - 12 April 2011

Uncertain Knowledge logo

What are the forms in which later medieval thinkers articulate epistemological scepticism, relativism and doubt? Is it possible to voice different forms of uncertainty in different institutional contexts and languages? This interdisciplinary conference brings into dialogue historians of philosophy, theology, history and literature.

See the conference website.

Work in Progress Seminar Series

Prof Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago

Wendy Doniger

Noted cultural historian and South Asianist Prof. Wendy Doniger will deliver a series of three seminars in King's College from 4-6pm on 23-25 November 2010.

In addition to being one of the most distinguished scholars in the humanities today, Professor Doniger is an excellent speaker whose wide-ranging interests cover areas as diverse as literature, anthropology, gender studies, psychoanalysis, history, and oriental studies.

Prof. Doniger will base her seminars on chapters of her current book manuscript Faking It: Narratives of Circular Jewelry and Deceptive Women.

  1. The Ring in the Fish, Polycrate and Shakuntala
  2. All’s Well that Ends Well. (This story goes back, via Boccaccio, to the story of Muladeva in the Kathasaritsagara.)
  3. Fake Jewelry and Fake Women (19th, 20th, and 21st century stories, de Maupassant, Henry James, Maugham, and several films, including Vertigo and Random Harvest.)

Prof Doniger has honorary doctorates from six universities, including Harvard, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of 26 books including Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was and The Hindus: An Alternative History.

For details of the seminars contact Dr Bert Vaux (bv230 [at] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk).

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