This is a guest post by Anny Gaul, graduate student in Arabic literature at Georgetown University Five years ago, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak resigned after facing 18 days of mass popular protest. In following years, a succession of regime changes, … Continue reading
Is weeping more Christ-like than laughing? Dr Lucy Allen is a medievalist working on the literature and culture of late-medieval England, and as a teaching associate of the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge. In this post, re-published with kind permission from … Continue reading
This page provides the conference programme. To read more about the conference, including how to register, and the ideas and themes behind the event, you can visit the main conference page. Wednesday 7th October, The Court Room, Senate House, UoL … Continue reading
We are delighted to announce that registration for the one-day conference, ‘Tears and Smiles: Medieval to Early Modern’ is now open. From this page you can register for the conference and find out more about its themes and speakers. You … Continue reading
Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions and the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. She is one of the BBC Radio 3 and AHRC … Continue reading
Philosophy and comedy share certain characteristics. At the most basic level, both philosophers and comedians ask the question, why? Why do we do things this way and not a different way? Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example, is a … Continue reading
I recently attended a seminar about laughter given by the intellectual historian Professor Quentin Skinner. I was looking forward to a light-hearted ninety minutes – a few jokes, some entertaining examples, and since thinking about laughing invariably makes me smile, … Continue reading