Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts

This term’s events

Wednesday 6 November, 5.15pm, T S Eliot Theatre

Joumana Medlej (VRF in the Creative Arts): Inks & Paints of the Abbasids

This talk will take us through the pigments and dyes that made up the Islamic scribe’s colour palette. Joumana Medlej will describe their preparation and behaviour from a practitioner’s perspective, and share process photos from her re-creation of ink recipes from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, along with insights into inkmaking practices gleaned from these texts. 

Friday 8 November, 5.15pm, T S Eliot Theatre: 

Will Eaves (VRF in the Creative Arts, 2020): THE POINT OF DISTRACTION: A musically illustrated lecture on composition

This event comprises a talk by the novelist Will Eaves  about the inception and creation of his piano suite ‘Four Diptychs’, the score of which is reproduced in the recently published The Point of Distraction (TLS Books), and a piano recital by Richard Uttley, who will play the whole of the suite and short excerpts from other works discussed in the course of the book.

Will Eaves is a novelist, poet, screenwriter and musician. He has been Arts Editor of the TLS (1997–2011) and Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Warwick. In 2019, his novel Murmur won the Wellcome Book Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Fiction. He co-hosts The Neuromantics podcast with Professor Sophie Scott of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Richard Uttley is a pianist and composer. He has given major solo recitals at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and world premieres of work by composers including Francisco Coll and Kate Whitley. Highlights this season include duo recitals at Lucerne Festival and Wigmore Hall with horn player Ben Goldscheider and (in trio with violinist Callum Smart) on tour in Sweden. Richard is a piano professor at the Royal College of Music and a Professor of Academic Studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Friday 29 November. 5.15pm, T S Eliot Theatre

Bevis Bowden (VRF in Creative Arts, 2023-4): Marginalia | song to the river.

This is a film that explores the river and its wildlife in a time of increasing land pressure and climate change. Through poetry, song and statement it asks us who we are and how we fit into the dynamic of our surroundings and nature.

Running time: 44 minutes

Format: Cinemascope

Filmed as part of Merton College's Creative Arts Fellowship between October 2023 and August 2024 along a section of the Thames with additional elements filmed at Merton College, Oxford.

All three events will be followed by a reception in the Eliot foyer.