April 21st 2016,
Anglia Ruskin University,
LAB 109
Broad Street
Cambridge CB1 1PT

 

The evening’s speakers:

Matthew Feldman is Professor in the Modern History of Ideas at Teesside University, where also co-directs the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies. With Professor Erik Tonning, he edits the Bloomsbury Academic series Historicizing Modernism and Modernist Archives, in addition to co-editing the online Wiley-Blackwell’s journal, Religion Compass: Modern Ideologies and Faith. He has held research fellowships at the universities of Oxford. Northampton, Birmingham, Richmond and Bergen, Norway, and has written widely on modernism, including the recent study Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945 (Palgrave, 2013). His essays on Pound and fascism are due to be published in 2017, as is his annotated transcription of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ (Oxford University Press, 2017, co-edited with David Addyman and Steven Matthews). His most recent book is his essay collection on Beckett and ‘archival criticism’ Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy and Methodology in Beckett Studies (Ibidem/Columbia University Press, 2015).

Ian Hunter

Dr Ian Hunter is the Director of the Littoral Trust where he has over 35 years experience, including bringing a valuable background and high level of skills and experience to the current management and forward planning for the Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn project. This involved over 10 years of curatorial and museum education work with the New Zealand National Art Gallery, including a two year joint NZ Government/Case Western Reserve University funded Humanities research fellowship and internship with the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA (1975 – 77). Later, as acting Director with the New Zealand National Gallery 1980 – 82, at the request of the New Zealand Government (Department of Internal Affairs), Ian oversaw a major structural re-organisation of the gallery’s governance, curatorial, financial, capital works, & educational programmes. This project laid the foundations for the later radical Te Papa – Museum of New Zealand development. Between1982 – 84 Ian also worked as a freelance artist and art museum development consultant in Australia and New Zealand, and established the ANZART Trans-Tasman cultural exchange programmes (1981 – 92), before returning to Britain to take up a PhD Fellowship at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1987. The Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn and the Art and Agriculture/rural cultural strategy projects are also the direct outcomes from two of the main case studies developed as part of his PhD; He has been involved in proposing new critical art practices and curatorial strategies in the context of Government sponsored urban/rural regeneration programmes since 1992.