Past events
Julie-Marie Strange (History)
'Finding Love'
30 November 2007
With reference to recent work on death and grief in late Victorian working-class culture, this seminar introduces the problem of 'finding' love in the past. For historians, analyses of love have overwhelmingly focused on a literate and 'much-biographied' class on the assumption that the rich sources left by such articulate narrators permit similarly rich experiential histories to be written about them. Yet not only are there problems with the conception of 'experiential' history – the idea that historians can access the inner feelings of those in the past – such approaches neglect the emotive dynamics of the less articulate. This seminar addresses how those interested in love in the past might access and write about representations of love amongst poorer, less well-documented groups.
Carol Smart
'The Problem with Love - from a Sociological Perspective'
12 October 2007
'A Heart in Winter', 26 April 2007
Peter Goldie (Philosophy)
'What is that thing called love?'
10 May 2007
Alan Williams (Religions and Theology)
'Open Heart Surgery: the Operation of Love in Rumi's Masnavi'
9 March 2007
Rumi (1207-1273) is the greatest Sufi poet of the Persian tradition who composed the most celebrated mystical poem perhaps of all Islamic culture -- perhaps of any religious tradition. It is vast in scale (6 books totalling over 52,000 lines). It was written in the 1260s at the end of Rumi's life and is a teaching about the power of Love -- which Rumi equates with God -- to transform the heart of the individual and the world at large. Rumi presents a teaching which goes far beyond what is commonly understood as Islam. In this paper Williams outlines how Rumi diagnoses the sickness of the human heart and how his poetry works to heal it. He will also read from the opening story of the first book, which is a strangely wrought, apparently tragic, love story.
'Love in the Humanities', Inaugural Workshop, 16 February 2007