How do we recover lost voices from the fragments of the past? In this closing TIDEfest event, Fred D’Aguiar and Sarah Howe will respond to the creative works written and shared by participants of the festival’s opening event, and read their own poetic responses to the museum objects shared by curators. The event will also include a discussion between both poets and TIDE’s director Nandini Das, chaired by Sandeep Parmar. The panel will reflect on the creative projects that have spanned the course of the TIDE project, and on the role of the imagination in speaking back to history.

Speakers:

Born in London of Guyanese parents and brought up in Guyana and London, Fred D’Aguiar is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His most recent collection of essays, Translations from Memory, was published by Carcanet in 2018.

Sarah Howe (@luckyflowerhowe) is a Hong Kong-born British poet and editor, and a Lecturer in Poetry at King’s College London. Her first book, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize. With Sandeep Parmar, she is a founder of the Ledbury Poetry Critics scheme, aimed at increasing the visibility of poets and critics of colour. Sarah’s TIDE-commissioned object poems now form part of the World Museum’s immersive, permanent redisplay of their Chinese ceramics in Liverpool.

Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool and co-director of the Centre for New and International Writing. She has written two books of poetry, The Marble Orchard and Eidolon. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Financial Times, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Nandini Das is a literary and cultural historian, and Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford as well as the director of the TIDE project. As one of BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Thinkers, Nandini has written and presented programmes on television and radio on Renaissance cabinets of curiosity, Shakespeare, Renaissance travel, histories of immigration, and the literature and popular culture of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

Following our ‘On Belonging’ conference (27-30 July), the TIDE project (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, 1550–1700) is delighted to announce TIDEfest, a free online literary festival to be held the weekend of 31 July & 1 August. Over these two days, TIDEfest will bring together all five of the project’s visiting writers, as well as a number of scholars, teachers, and artists.

TIDEfest is a celebration of the project’s 5-year engagement with creative practitioners since its inception in 2016, and will bring together people invested and interested in teaching, migration, curation, and collaboration. The festival is completely free and welcome to all. For any queries, please contact the TIDE project on Twitter (@ERC_TIDE), or by email (tide@ell.ox.ac.uk), and follow the festival on Twitter with #OnBelonging and #TideFest!

TIDEfest is free to attend, although attendees are warmly encouraged to donate to the Society of Renaissance Studies. The SRS supports scholarly activity at all stages by providing annual postdoctoral fellowships, conference support, public engagement awards, doctoral scholarships and support for students at MA level. For more information and to donate, please visit https://www.rensoc.org.uk/donate-to-the-srs/.

For more information on TIDE, visit http://www.tideproject.uk/ . TIDE is based at the University of Oxford, and has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 681884).