Catholicism, Literature, and the Arts III: The Poetics of Liturgy and Place

Overview

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the Catholic tradition’s contribution to ‘place-making’ through the arts, including architecture, graphic arts, sculpture, drama, literature, and music. How do the arts create, shape, or contest Catholic global, regional, and local identities? How might the liturgy shape our understanding of ‘place’ and, in turn, how might our perception and creation of ‘place’ inform or reform the liturgy? What difference do the material surroundings in which we encounter religious artworks make to our reception of them? And how has art in the Catholic tradition attended to the ‘displaced’, the homeless, refugees, and to the ‘more-than-human’ world?

Confirmed Speakers

• Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury)
• Timothy Schmalz (sculptor)
• Robin Jensen (University of Notre Dame)
• Romana Huk (University of Notre Dame)
• Paul Hills (Courtauld Institute of Art)
• Valentin Gerlier (University of Chester) 

With a poetry reading by Hilary Davies, live sculpting by Timothy Schmalz, and a musical performance of Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’

Call for Papers

The Call for Papers is now closed. 

Registration

Standard package: £150. Reduced rate package (for students/those on low income): £120.

Prices include conference fee, refreshments and the two lunches. Delegates are asked to book their own accommodation.

Please register for this conference online on our booking site. Early registration is advised as space is limited. The extended registration deadline is Thursday 30 June 2022. 

Bursaries

The deadline for bursary applications has now passed.

About Us

This conference is being organised by the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University and the University of Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway, in association with The Tablet and Farm Street Church.

Venue

The conference will be held at the University of Notre Dame's London Global Gateway. The address is 1-4 Suffolk Street, London, SW1Y 4HG, United Kingdom. Venue details.

Queries

If you have any queries please don't hesitate to contact us by emailing ccs.admin@durham.ac.uk or leaving a message at +44 (0) 191 334 1656.

Draft Programme

Tuesday 12 July

* Events at Farm Street are for conference delegates and are ticketed events for a wider audience. Conference registration includes a place at each of these events.

Wednesday 13 July 

Thursday 14 July

**Parallel papers sessions on Days 2 and 3 to include:

Nicholas Babich: “We have only known the back of the world:” Victorian Realism, Fantasy, and the Supernatural in The Man Who Was Thursday

Calder Claydon: Dominican Prefaces, Dominican Images: A Prelude to Preaching

Julia Courtney: ‘among the old stones’ (Waugh): the Catholic country house in fiction

Joaquín Cruz Lamas: Indigenous Cosmology and Roman Catholicism in the Convent of San Gabriel Cholula

Tom Duggan: The Insufficiency of Secular-Minded Aesthetics in Understanding the Music of Sir James MacMillan

Owen Earnshaw: Welcoming the Lord: The Nativity as an archetype for the poetics of places of worship

Lexi Eikelboom: Art-Making as Spiritual Place-Making: A Search for Parallels between Art and Liturgy

Daniel Frampton: Objectifying the Unknown: The Catholic Art of Graham Sutherland

Fernando Gomez Herrero: International Law, Empire and Literature in The Catholic Atlantic: Patrick Moynihan, Evelyn Waugh and Francisco Vitoria.

Ryan Haecker: The Stars an Altar: Angelic Worlds in Origen of Alexandria

Charles Howell: Spatial Absence in Gordon Matta-Clark: The Dialectic of Presence and Absence and the Aesthetics of Revelation

Colette Hughes/Nic Aodha: Of Wasteness and Desolation,[..]a Day of Trumpet and Alarm against the Fenced Cities and the High Towers (Zephaniah 1:6): David Jones's Christian Voyage in" The Anathemata, fragments of an attempted writing

Jasmine Hunter Evans: The Place of Rome in David Jones’s Imagination: A contemplation of The Paschal Lamb (c.1951)

Ann Marie Jakubowski: The Believer as Aesthete: Conversion and Convention in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis

Hina Khalid: Participating in the Divine Playfulness: The Theological Aesthetics of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Nora Kirkham: "Witnessing Presence: Pilgrimage and Ecstatic Dwelling in Denise Levertov's Mountain Poetry"

Mitchell Kooh: Rhythm and Rupture: Eliot’s Four Quartets and the Analogy of Being

Bonnie Lander Johnson: Liturgy as Structuring Device in Houselander's The Dry Wood

Ayla Lepine: A Passion for the Possible: Sister Corita Kent and the Eucharist

Abby Marchesseault: The Mass: My Most Site-Specific Work of Art

Evyn McGraw: Theological Aesthetics Is Christology by another Name

Hannah McKnight: Towards a Theology of PreEnactment Theater: place-making and neighborhood revitalization

Paul Murray: “Irish Protestant Literary Perspectives on Catholic Liturgy: Ethel Voynich's 'The Gadfly' (1897) and Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897)”

Paul Norris: Rome as negative space in early modern preaching

Javier Ortiz-Echagüe: A spiritual place of retreat and protection. Liturgy and place in the monument to Father Donostia by Jorge Oteiza in Aguiña (San Sebastian).

Elizabeth Rainsford-McMahon: The Crafting of ‘Still-Points’ in Thomas Merton’s Journalistic Writing

Elizabeth Rainsford-McMahon: From Dwelling to Indwelling: Thomas Merton’s Experience of St Antonin Noble Val

Gary Wade: Prayer, Poetry and Place: Seamus Heaney’s sacramental sense of place

Jordan Welsh: Poetic Oxford: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Preservation of Faith and the City

Rosemary Williams: The Boat of Salvation, the Office of Lauds, and Resurrection: Liturgy on the Shores of Ante-Purgatory in Dante's Commedia

Kathryn Wills: Yves Bonnefoy, W.B. Yeats and the transubstantiation of the Protestant word into Catholic présence

Adam Young: From Bloomsbury to Toledo: Tracing The Evolution of Roy Campbell's Thought and Experiences to Catholicism

Sarah Zentner: "What could be more heavenly?" Hannah Coulter's Liturgical Imagination