8 November 2024, 2:00pm–5:00pm

Online via Zoom

Free book via Eventbrite (link tbc)

This afternoon online session is the first of the 2025-2026 series of Spineless Wonders events and exhibitions looking at small press publications, textual objects and artists books in the context of the diverse range of languages spoken across the UK. In particular we will be addressing post-Brythonic languages, dialects, and linguistic hybridity within the framework of a contemporary multilingual Britain.

The ‘European and minority languages’ event will look at multilingual and minority language publications in the Special Collections holdings at University College Library and Senate House library, raising questions as to the extent of language diversity in the collection.

This will be followed by presentations and discussions on the themes of translation, hybrid languages, the status of minority languages, and multilingual immigrant writing.

2:00–2:05 pm: Introduction and Welcome

Clare Lees, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study; Sharon Morris, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL; Tim Brennan.

2:05–3:15 pm: Special Collections: chaired by Clare Lees

Presentations of little-known material from Special Collections holdings by:
Liz Lawes: Subject Liaison Librarian: Fine Art, History of Art, Film Studies Collection Manager: Small Press Collections, UCL; 
Dr. Tabitha Tuckett, Lecturer in Library and Archive Studies, Institute for Cultural Practices, John Rylands Institute and Library, and Rare Books librarian, UCL; 
Leila Kassir: Academic Librarian, British, US, Commonwealth & Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Senate House Library;
Tansy Barton: Academic Librarian: Manuscript and Book Studies, Senate House Library.

3:15–3:30pm: Break

3:30–4:50pm : Presentations and discussion: chaired by Tim Brennan

Mererid Puw Davies: Professor of German Studies at UCL, based in the School of European Languages, Cultures and Society-Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry.

Mererid researches and publishes on many aspects of modern German literature, film and culture. She is also deeply interested in Welsh literatures and cultures, which is an increasing, often comparative focus in her work.

Mererid’s book on ‘Writing and the West German Protest Movements: The Textual Revolution’ won the annual 'imlr books competition', and in 2019 she was honoured to be elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Mererid is a poet interested in the translation of poetry, especially between lesser-used languages; she has worked with poets and translators in lesser-used languages across Europe.

Christine Kirubi: Slade School, UCL, FAM tutor and BFA Critical Studies lead.
‘Readings from WILDPLASSEN and Joueurs de Flute’: Readings and thoughts from two projects which work through translation as resonance, annotation, emanation, elaboration and correspondence between texts.

dove / Christine Kirubi is an artist-poet-collaborator based in London. Their debut poetry collection WILDPLASSEN was published by the87press this year. Recent projects and performances include The Archive is a Gathering Place at Tate Britain in collaboration with Rhoda Boateng, The Blue House co-founded with Daniel Baker-Wells, and a collaborative improvisation at Décalé with petals Kalulé. Recent commissioned texts include Fabulous Musics published in response to Shenece Oretha's UAL 20/20 commission with Hepworth Wakefield and a note on audrey mbugua's dog published in the Jerwood Survey III catalogue in response to Ebun Sodipo's work.

Svetlana De Sequeira Costa: is director and founder of arts organisation and research platform ‘Arts Cabinet’.
Svetlana is currently undertaking doctoral research at the Slade School, UCL, using concepts of translation and the ‘translative’ to develop new forms of curating and to reflect on practices of curating.

Svetlana’s presentation will include her experimental translations of Leibniz.

Ilektra Maipa: ‘The Lament of River Fishes: Poetic Allegories and the Aromanian Language.’ 
Ilektra (b. 1989, Greece) studied Painting (Hons) at the Department of Visual & Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia, and later earned an MA (Hons) in Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art, Metropolitan University of Manchester, UK. She works across various media, including drawings, digital collages, installations, performances for the camera, and text. Her practice examines relationships between body and landscape, language and memory, and presence and absence.

Ilektra's work has been shown at Stereoma Audiovisual Arts Festival at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, Thessaloniki (2024), Glocalities at the Primarolia Festival, Patra (2023), Gonzo Unit (duo exhibition), Thessaloniki (2022), and the MATAROA Awards at Art Thessaloniki International Contemporary Art Fair (2021). Earlier exhibitions include Brave New World at K-Gold Gallery, Lesvos (2016) and Physis at the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Berlin (2013). In 2020, she received the ARTWORKS Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship.

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Godela Weiss-Sussex: Professor in Modern German Literature, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies School of Advanced Study, UoL. Godela Weiss-Sussex's main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the following areas: women’s writing, the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile; multi- and translingualism; concepts of 'Heimat' and belonging. Her main current research projects focus on: German-Jewish women’s writing in the 20th and 21st centuries; translingual writing; post-migrant imaginaries of belonging.

Her recent projects include the edited collection Contested Communities. Small, Minority and Minor Literatures in Europe.