Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media

Long Exposure: A Pinhole Photography Exhibition

From the students of ENGL2140: Literature of the Victorian Period

Friday, April 5, 2024
9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Haney Reading Room, 627 Fletcher Argue

Students enrolled in ENGL 2140: Literature of the Victorian Period used recycled beverage cans and electrical tape to create forty-six pinhole cameras. These cameras, distributed across our campus, city and province, helped us create a series of long-exposure solargraphs. Solargraphs document not only landscapes and architectural features but also the movement of the sun across the sky. A way to map the passing of days, these rudimentary cameras prompted members of this class to think differently about the duration of a day, a season, and an academic year. By trying their hands at a nineteenth-century photographic process, they deepened their knowledge not only of the history of photography but also of the enmeshment, in both our era and in the Victorian era, of image making, storytelling, and timekeeping. A collection of images and some written reflections will be shared. 

What did these cameras capture in the four months of their installation? Visit the pop-up exhibition to find out! 

Read more on UM Today

The Comedy of Errors

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Dr. Katrina Dunn.

MARCH 27 – 31, 2024

Thank you to the over 650 ticket buyers who supported the student cast and crew of The Comedy of Errors. Audiences were seen clapping, dancing, laughing and cheering. A good time was had by all!

Photo credit: L. Norman

Read more about the show on UM Today
 

The Dumb Waiter

By Harold Pinter
Directed by Dr. Margaret Groome and Dr. Bill Kerr

February 27 - 12:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
February 28 - 7:30 p.m.
John. J. Conklin Theatre, Gail Asper Performing Arts Hall, 3rd floor Taché Arts Centre

FREE admission

The Dumb Waiter is one of Pinter’s great early Comedies of Menace. It takes place in a single room. Two men engage in edgy, playful banter which fully embodies Pinter’s belief that “speech is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” They await for orders for their next assignment but keep getting orders for food instead through a deus ex machina of a dumbwaiter which descends and ascends as it has a will of its own. The dumbwaiter brings a rather pedestrian voice of god into their space, dispersing the existential dread of the fearful outside world into their perhaps not very nice but only safe space, their basement limbo.

This is a student production. 

Rhinoceros

By Eugène Ionesco. Translated by Martin Crimp. Directed by Dr. Bill Kerr.

NOVEMBER 29-DECEMBER 2, 2023

Thank you to the over 400 ticket buyers who supported the student cast and crew of Rhinoceros. 
 

Read more about the show on UMToday

Watch Director Bill Kerr and Actor Katelyn Mestito-Dao on Global TV

Everything In Its Place: Useful and beautiful objects from the collection of Dalnavert Museum

Virtual exhibition available on the Dalnavert Museum website

"Everything In Its Place" is an exhibition co-curated by students from Dr. Vanessa Warne’s ENGL 4630/7930 Literature and the Museum course. This exhibition explores the place of useful and beautiful objects in nineteenth-century middle-class homes. Highlighting the role of material culture in the daily lives of servants as well as their employers, “Everything In Its Place” is an invitation to look closely at objects that are both everyday and extravagant, familiar and peculiar.

Explore the digital exhibit on Dalnavert’s website. 

Cancel culture: YouTube videos on ‘getting cancelled’ are now their own genre and have links to the past

Dr. Erin Keating and Master's student Jessie Krahn
April 24, 2023
The Conversation Canada

What do YouTuber influencer videos about being 'cancelled' share with 17th-century texts? Both were crafted directly in response to audiences in new social spaces.

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