Following a keenly contested process, incoming Samuel Beckett Society President Patrick Bixby has announced the results of the election of new members to the executive committee. In a message to members, Professor Bixby decalared: ‘the next Vice President of the Society (to succeed to the Presidency in two years) will be Elizabeth Barry of the…
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The latest title in Cambridge University Press Elements in Beckett Studies series has just been released. Carnivals of Ruin: Beckett, Ireland, and the Festival Form examines and contextualizes the long history of mounting festivals of Beckett’s work in the country of his birth. The summary suggests that the phenomenon of ‘festivalising’ Beckett in Ireland ‘might…
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The School of English at Trinity College Dublin has announced that it will be hosting Niamh Campbell and Nathan O’Donnell as the inaugural Beckett Creative Fellows this coming academic year, 2022-23. This scheme is a collaboration with the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading, which has pioneered a series of Creative Fellowships since 2017. Through…
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The Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading is delighted to invite applications for the Katharine Worth travel bursary, in honour of the renowned Beckett scholar, Professor Katharine Worth, who donated her Beckett archive to the University of Reading. The archive includes a beautifully detailed maquette by Peter Snow of a version of his stage design…
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Applications are invited for a part-time (0.8FTE) Postdoctoral Research Assistant to work with Professor Dirk Van Hulle and his Co-Investigator on the project ‘Editing Beckett: Towards a Bilingual Digital Genetic Edition of Samuel Beckett’s Works’. This post will be fixed-term until 28 February 2025, and it is anticipated that the appointee will start on 1…
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The Samuel Beckett Society is committed to strengthening the field of Beckett Studies by supporting new scholarship from early career researchers. We would like to invite postgraduate researchers and those within eight years of submitting their PhDs to apply for a Ruby Cohn Travel Bursary to support their attendance at the Beckett and Poetry/Beckett &…
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The Chinese translation of the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been published in two volumes in Dec. 2021 by Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House (HLAPH), Changsha City, the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese translation is the first version rendered outside of Western Europe. The translator Bo Cao, a professor…
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In the true Beckett spirit of ‘going on’ despite everything, ‘Samuel Beckett and Nature’, originally planned to take place in 2020 by James Martell and his crew at Lyon College, will finally see the light of day on October 7-9 of this year. The event will feature both original keynote speakers, Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of…
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The latest publciation in the Cambridge Elements in Beckett series is titled Absorption and Theatricality: On Ghost Trio and comes from the University of Reading’s Conor Carville. It is a welcome intervention on such a lightly studied work and promises to encourage further research in the area. As the publisher’s note asserts: ‘Samuel Beckett’s 1976…
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A call for papers has been issued by ibidem-verlag’s ‘Samuel Beckett in Company’ series editor, Paul Stewart, Professor of Literature, University of Nicosia, for a proposed edited volume with the title Samuel Beckett and the 21st Century Novel. Professor Stewart writes: ‘Beckett’s influence on an older generation of novelists, such as Coetzee, Banville, Auster and…
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The 7th International Annual conference of the Samuel Beckett Society will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 26-28 October, 2022 with ‘Beckett and Poety/Beckett y La Poesía’ as its theme. Under the title “Beckett & poetry”, we seek to investigate and debate the role played in Beckett studies by different critical approaches to his…
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The latest issue of the Spanish language Beckett Studies journal Beckettiana is now available to download for free here. Volume 18 is edited by Lucas Margarit from his base in Buenos Aires, Argentina and contains articles by Gabriela García Hubard, Graciela Mayet, Lucia Battista Lo Bianco, Francisco Diez, Lucian Belén Jares and Arthur Broomfield as…
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A colloquium in honour of the Beckett pioneer Rosemary Pountney is to be held at Jesus College, Oxford on 28 January 2022. Launching the Cambridge University Press series ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’, the event will include contributions from authors whose work has already been published in the series over the past year. The series is…
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Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon have been awarded funding from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council for a 3-year project: ‘Editing Beckett: Towards a Bilingual Digital Genetic Edition of Samuel Beckett’s Works’ which forms part of the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscript Project [BDMP]. The purpose of the BDMP, as stated by its…
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While we struggle with the seemingly-unending pandemic, the Beckett community has been continuing to perform, come together (occasionally) and write as best it can. In this issue, we review productions of Waiting for Godot in the claustrophobic confines of Zoom, to Happy Days in a limestone field on a remote island. Lisa Dwan talks about…
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Beckett in Foxrock has been running annually since 2016 from the writer’s home parish church of Tullow on the southside of Dublin. The highlight of each year’s celebrations is a performance by Mouth on Fire theatre company in the unique atmosphere of the church itself. In 2019, an unforgettable presentation of All That Fall led…
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A new Spanish translation of Lessness/Sans has been announced by Árdora Ediciones in Madrid. The volume is novel in that it contains four versions of the same text: Beckett’s original Sans (1969), followed by its translation into Spanish by Loreto Casado, and Beckett’s original Lessness (1970), followed by its translation into Spanish by José Francisco Fernández. Fernández explained the…
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Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma & Nationhood is a two-day inter-disciplinary conference hosted by the University of Reading which aims to explore questions of spectrality, trauma, hauntings and landscape in connection to national and social identity in Beckett’s works. The two-day event, which forms part of Reading’s annual Beckett Week and runs on 4-5 November, 2021,…
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Coming imminently from Edinburgh University Publishing is Samuel Beckett and Technology, edited by Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon. Drawn from the conference of the same name which was held in Charles University, Prague in 2018, this new volume aims for ‘a comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics’ by…
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This autumn sees the publication of two books which address the issue of translation in Beckett’s oeuvre. Samuel Beckett and Translation (Palgrave), edited by José Francisco Fernández and Mar Garre García adresses a number of themes including Beckett’s self-translations, translations of other authors and the poetics of translation, in a collection comprising thirteen chapters followed…
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Beckett and Buddhism is a new work from Cambridge University Press by long-time Beckett scholar and Society member Angela Moorjani . Drawing on letters and archives along with recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer’s knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling through Beckett’s visions of the ‘human predicament’. Moorjani offers an…
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Lisa Dwan takes on the role of Winnie in Happy Days at the Riverside Studios in London. She spoke to Mert Dilek about tackling the part as a younger (and pregnant) woman, and about working with director Trevor Nunn on another Beckett piece. [A longer version of this interview will appear in the Autumn issue…
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Call for Papers – Deadline 31st July 2021 Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma and Nationhood 4th-5th November 2021, University of Reading “places belong to our bodies and our bodies belong to these places. We learn how to orientate and re-orientate ourselves in relation to them and form internalized representations of them (cognitive maps) which play a…
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The latest on-line version of Waiting for Godot is the first project of American company The New Group Off Stage, and is described as ‘an experimental exploration of a storied play, bringing together a roster of lauded artists from across the cultural spectrum. A combination of theatrical invention and innovative filmmaking. At once both a…
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This issue once again reflects the COVID restricted nature of our times. Performances are on-line but show signs of adapting to the restrictions of form. We feature reviews of five different approaches to the problem and interview actor Marty Rea about his experience in the live broadcast of Happy Days. New Beckett Society President, Laura…
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The Samuel Beckett Society is delighted to congratulate its long-time member, friend and colleague Martha Dow Fehsenfeld on the award of an honorary Doctorate in Letters from Beckett’s alma mater Trinity College Dublin. The ceremony took place online in accordance with COVID restrictions for the first time in the University’s history. The occasions Public Orator,…
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On 12 February, Cal Revely-Calder began his critique of the current state of Beckett studies by allowing readers of the Times Literary Supplement to drop their jaws at the bad behaviour that can go on at academic conferences. The essay made its revelation broadly in the name of ‘care’ – care for the work of an author…
Read MoreAnnouncement: “In response to the current pandemic, we have postponed our annual conference (Bordeaux) to 2021. Details of future events will be circulated once we have a clearer idea of how things will develop in the next few months.”
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The call for papers has just been announced for the 8th Annual Samuel Beckett Society conference which will be held virtually in December of 2023. Responding to the growing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and the need to reduce the environmental impact of academic travel, the Samuel Beckett Society is proposing its first completely online…
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The University of Gdańsk will host a parallel seminar and conference from May 18-20 this year and are currently accepting submissions in an open call for papers. The seminar,Who Wrote Godot?, takes its title from a suggestion by Professor S.E. Gontarski(Florida State University, USA) who will be in Gdańsk/Sopot to launch his new book Bad…
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Among the clutch of new titles in Beckett Studies comes Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe from Palgrave Macmillan. Edited by Michiko Tsushima, Yoshiki Tajiri, Mariko Hori Tanaka, the volume promises to be ‘a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and…
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Samuel Beckett’s Poetry. Eds James Brophy & William Davies. Cambridge UP. Last month saw the publication of what is described as ‘the first book-length study of Beckett’s complete poetry’. Editors James Brophy and William Davies have gathered together contributions from an impressive list of scholars to provide a book which is designed for students and…
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Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, remediation, appropriation Coming in February from Manchester University Press is a collection of essays dealing with the numerous and various adaptations of Beckett’s works. Edited by Jonathan Bignell, Pim Verhulst and Anna McMullan, the volume is is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. Its pre-publication description promisies a volume…
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A reminder to existing members that they need to renew their membership to continue to help in the work of the society and to access The Beckett Circle and other members’ material. We also hope that all of those interested in the work of the author would consider joining us in broadening the dialogue on…
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Clockwise from top right: Laura Salisbury, Swati Joshi, Molly Crozier and Elizabeth Barry This year’s MLA Convention is being held in San Franciso, California from 5-8 January, and continues the recent trend of combining in-person and on-line panels. The annual Samuel Beckett Society panel will be held virtually and can be accessed world-wide by those…
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Unlike Hamm, the editorial team of the Beckett Circle has forgone putting up the holly to bring you the latest issue of its sterling publication. Alongside the usual clutch of performance and book reviews, this issue features a fascinating review essay by Benn Brown on his immersive experience at the Happy Days festival in Enniskillen,…
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The Samuel Beckett Society 