Tuesday 19th February

5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Jonas Kurscheidt (École nationale des chartes, PSL) - 'The Parisian editions (1498-1530) of the Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant'

Madeleine Chalmers (Trinity) - 'Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysique: A Science for the Humanities?'

In his Rabelaisian odyssey, Les Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911), Jarry offers us a certain brand of conceptual gymnastics: pataphysics – a 'science des solutions imaginaires', poised in a playful space between the abstract and the concrete. I want to unpack Jarry's new science, sketch out its avant-garde afterlives, and ask how these notions might usefully inflect our own practice as postgraduate researchers in the humanities, in a political climate which poses crucial questions about the contributions we make to knowledge.