Annual Research Day at Southbank Centre – 15th May 2019

The LAHP Annual Research Day took place at the elegant Southbank Centre on 15th May. We really want to encourage our students and supervisors, from all cohorts, to come along and think about their research collectively.

The theme of this year’s event was ‘Sovereignty and Interdependence’. 

Keynote speaker: Prof Beatrice Heuser, Historian of Warfare and International relations, University of Glasgow

Recent debates about Brexit in the U.K have often been framed around the notions of restoring national sovereignty and respecting the sovereign will of the people. Opponents of Britain’s exit from the EU have countered these ideas by stressing the inter-dependence of modern nation states. There are echoes here of political, legal and philosophical debates that have been taking place for millennia. What is the nature of sovereignty in terms of internal principles of government and external relationships of political and economic power? Disputes about the nature of sovereignty and the right to national independence have parallels in age-old debates about the rights and freedoms of the individual and their relationships and duties to the community and the nation as well as to supposedly universal laws and values. In addressing the related themes of sovereignty and independence, we hope to explore these terms as broadly as possible across the full spectrum of Humanities disciplines.

Programme

12.30 Registration & Lunch
13.20 Welcome- Professor Philip Murphy, LAHP Director
13.30 Student Presentations

• Aysha Strachan (KCL, German Studies) ‘Female Sovereignty, Seduction and the Supernatural;  considering Women as “Sexual Predators” in Middle High German Literature’
• Marcel Knochelmann (UCL, Information Studies) ‘A Social Theory of Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities’
• Alasdair Cameron (KCL, Music) ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? The Dresdner Kreuzchor and sacred music in postwar East Germany’
• Emma Zurcher (UCL, History) ‘Perceptions of the Christian community in twelfth-century accounts of defeat in the Latin East’
• Tom Keeley (UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture) ‘Alternative Arrangements: a walk along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic’

14.45 Tea & Coffee Break
15.15 Three minute thesis competition

• Rioghnach Sachs (KCL, Comparative Literature)
• Stephen Hills (UCL, English)
• Francesca Allfrey (KCL, English)

16.00 Keynote Speaker

Prof Beatrice Heuser, Historian of Warfare and International relations, University of Glasgow ‘Sovereignty and Interdependence: a different take on Brexit’

16.45 Q&A with Prof. Beatrice Heuser
17.00 Drinks Reception in the bar on the ground floor