Urban Microcosms: Conference Programme
Monday, 14 September
14.00 Registration
14.30 Welcome
15.00 Keynote Lecture - Chair: Susan Harrow
Robert Lethbridge (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge): Jardins publics and Jardins privés: Fictions of Urbanity in 19th-century Paris
16.00 Tea & Coffee
16.30 Panel 1 - Chair: Christophe Fricker
David Darby (Western Ontario): “The place was teeming with people of every kind”: The Social Life of Berlin’s Tiergarten
Samuel Hamen (Heidelberg): “Who can behold this clutter with different wits”: Stefan George, “Stadtufer”
17.30 Panel 2 - Chair: Stephan Ehrig
Charles Jones (Wolfson, Cambridge): Spanish Seaside Paintings: from Danger to Safety, 1880-1920
Oliver Brett (Leicester): Queer Documentary Cinema and the ‘lieu factice’
18.30 Roundtable
19.00 Dinner
Tuesday, 15 September
9.00 Keynote Lecture - Chair: Margit Dirscherl
Sven Hanuschek (LMU, Munich): “What does New York City denote anyway? Big city is big city. I have been to Hanover often enough”: Museum and Department Store in Arno Schmidt’s Scenes from the Life of a Faun
10.00 Panel 3 - Chair: Jonas Langner
Cristina Sasse (Gießen): ”For public business or amusement”: Places and Spaces of Urbanity in Town Directories, 1760‐1820”
David Peleman (Ghent): Les Hommes de la Route dans le Boudoir: the Road Conference as Urban Microcosm and the Emergence of an Urban Society (1910-1938)
11.00 Tea & Coffee
11.30 Panel 4 - Chair: Barbara Spadaro
Andrea Penso (Padua): Views of Italian Urban Microcosms in Giacomo Leopardi’s Works
Botakoz Kassymbekova (TU, Berlin): New Temples: Restaurants as Places of Modern Urbanity in Russian Fin de Siècle
Lucy Duggan (Oxford/Prague): ‘Kafka didn’t often come to the café’: the Role of the Café in the Mythologisation of Prague German Literature
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Panel 5 - Chair: Steffan Davies
Marija Djokic (LMU, Munich):”The Happiest Corner of Belgrade”: Brana’s Orpheum (1899-1914)
Carmen Bartl (NYU, New York City): Freud’s Couch: between Public Catharsis and Private Theatre
Markus Schiegg (Bristol): Patient Narratives as Distorted Mirrors to a Heterotopia: 19th-Century Letters from a ‘Lunatic Asylum’
15.30 Tea & Coffee
16.00 Panel 6 - Chair: Sina Stuhlert
Louise Zbiranski (Frankfurt): The Strange Continuity of an Urban Microcosm: the French National Garde under the Second Empire (1852- 1870)
Sine Birkedal Nielsen (Glasgow): Fragmenting Paris: Benjamin’s Urban Aesthetics
17.00 Roundtable
17.30 Time for a Walk in the Park
19.00 Dinner
Wednesday, 16 September
9.00 Keynote Lecture - Chair: Astrid Koehler
Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, London): Waves and Globes in Walter Benjamin’s Microcosmic Cities
10.00 Panel 7 - Chair: Edith Kreutner
Elio Baldi (Warwick): For whom tolls the bell? An Exploration of the Changing Meaning of Church Bells in 19th- and 20th-century Literary Descriptions of Cities
Cristina Spinei (Iasi, Romania): ‘Small’ Czernowitz on the Backdrop of ‘Big’ Vienna: the German-language Press in the Bukovina
11.00 Tea & Coffee
11.30 Panel 8 - Chair: Debbie Pinfold
Godela Weiss-Sussex (IMLR, London): The Department Store as Habitat of the Sophisticated Urbanite: Georg Hermann’s Der kleine Gast (1924)
Johanna Bundschuh-van Duikeren (FU, Berlin): Harbouring Urbanity
12.30 Roundtable
13.00 Lunch & Departure of Delegates