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The creative and the critical are deeply imbricated in one another and yet disciplinary boundaries often encourage us to separate the two.  In this event we seek to explore and celebrate what happens when this artificial division is suspended – when creative imagining leads critical inquiry and works of art are approached through their affective power to make us feel.

In this panel discussion and joint launch event, panellists will read and discuss two recent books that demonstrate the power of the encounter between creative art, literature, film, and criticism.

Timothy Mathews’ THERE AND NOT HERE. CHRONICLES OF ART AND LOSS (Ma Bibliothèque 2022) is a collection of poetic essays written in response to works of art. These range from film, novels and installations, and include Pedro Almodóvar, William Kentridge, and Barbara Hepworth, as well as William Shakespeare and Diego Velásquez. The book explores strength of feeling, especially grief, as a path to communication, to an understanding of what unites and divides, and ultimately offers its own path to a constellation of engagements with life.

Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing (Peter Lang 2021), edited by Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Thea Petrou, is a Festschrift written in honour of Timothy Mathews and includes eighteen essays written by leading scholars in the fields of French, Comparative Literature, Visual Culture and Creative Critical Writing. The essays examine the power of serendipitous encounter between artists, thinkers and artistic media as well as the importance of creative interjection in the arts and humanities. They bring texts and artworks into relation in order to amply demonstrate that relation itself is a form of thinking.

Speakers include: Florian Mussgnug, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Thea Petrou, Sharon Kivland, Timothy Mathews, Jenny Chamarette, Emily Orley, Delphine Grass, Clare Finburgh Delijani, John Schad and Clare Lees.


This event is co-convened by the Institute of English Studies (IES) and Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS), in collaboration with the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS) 

All are welcome to attend this free event, which will be held online via Zoom at 17:00 GMT. You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button at the top of the page to register.

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