Like the journal itself, Bodies of Work online is an AHRC funded, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional project that has been organised by postgraduate students at Cambridge and Sussex. The work in both components of the project is exciting, fresh, and intelligent. We are honoured to have been able to include so many stunning pieces of work and I want to publicly thank everybody who submitted their work, and those who gave up their time to review work for us, or to contribute beautiful illustrations. A big thank you to Clémentine Beauvais (Cambridge) and Catie Ash (Cambridge), our excellent assistant editors.

Finally, I really want to personally thank my friend and fellow Art Soccer, Holly Corfield-Carr (Sussex), who is quite simply brilliant. Not only has she been a wonderful editor-in-chief, she is really quite the most talented person I know. Holly not only designed the printed journal, which is beautiful, she also designed and built the website in a matter of weeks having never attempted anything on this scale before. She would never sing her own praises but, without Holly, there would be no Bodies of Work project at all, and I am completely indebted to her. Thank you, Holly, you’re a star!

So, if you haven’t already explored Bodies of Work then click here to visit it. Go on, go! And if you would like to order a copy of the printed journal then contact us here.

Rose Hepworth (President of The Arts Society).

The Arts Society, Newnham College is proud to announce the launch of ‘Bodies of Work’, the second issue of its journal on May 11th. We are thrilled to be joined at the launch by the writer, Ali Smith, who will be treating us to a reading from her work. Ali’s work includes, Like, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, and Girl Meets Boy.

‘Bodies of Work’ is an AHRC funded project and will consist of a printed journal and an online component. This is an interdisciplinary collection of work by graduate students, writers, artists and academics from a range of higher education institutions. Some of the creative writers published in the project will also be joining us to read from their work. We do hope you will join us for this fantastic opportunity to hear Ali Smith read, and to help us celebrate the launch of ‘Bodies of Work’.

N.B. This event is not ticketed but we expect it to be very popular so do turn up a few minutes early if you want to be sure that you will get a seat.

Wine reception. All welcome.

You don’t have to be at Newnham to take part in the journal’s peer-review system or to get involved with the editorial team.

You can register here – go on….be part of this exciting project.

We are also looking for people to fill the following editorial positions:

-       Assistant editor (Sussex)

-       Assistant editor (Cambridge)

-       Peer-reviewer

-       Proof-reader

-       Illustrator

-       Designer

-       Web-designer

Contact the editor, Holly Corfield-Carr, at info.womenandthearts@googlemail.com for further information or to apply for an editorial role.

Bodies of Work will consist of a printed journal, accompanied by its electronic sister, an online archive that will hold articles, illustrations and digital media submitted to both parts of Women and the Arts. Bodies of Work will feature work from academics in the arts and sciences, graduate students, arts practitioners and writers in the wider community.

We are seeking essays not exceeding 4000 words, interviews, reviews, photographs, short films, illustrations, sound recordings, animation, poems, short stories and other creative submissions which may consider, amongst other things:

- artistic representations of the body

- the relationship of writers and artists to their bodies

- women at work, the working body

- body image; scarred and reorganised bodies; plastic surgery

- essays on a specific author’s/artist’s corpus

- bodies marked as being Other etc.

- the medical body

- drawing from the body, on the body; tattoos; life-drawing; anatomical sketches

- the gendered body; sex; pornography; women’s magazines

- technological bodies; digital cartesianism; Second Life and online bodies

- re-membering the adolescent body

We look forward to receiving work, from both men and women, on a broad range of

topics, in any media.

For questions and queries, contact the editor, Holly Corfield-Carr, at info.womenandthearts@googlemail.com

Please email submissions to submissions.womenandthearts@googlemail.com

Deadline for submissions: March 31st 2010

Click here to download the POSTER (pdf)

Professor Susan Sellers, guest speaker from the University of St Andrews, will mark the launch of the journal with a talk, ‘Writing Vanessa and Virginia’ in which she discusses the inspiration behind her novel about sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the problems involved in fictionalising real people. Professor Sellers also considers whether Woolf was right when she argued that only poets and novelists could be trusted to tell the truth.

And this just in: We will have a few copies of Vanessa and Virginia on sale at the event and Susan has very kindly agreed to sign copies for people – v good of her – thank you, Susan.

‘Women and the Arts’ is a journal inspired by the 80th anniversary of ‘Women and Fiction’, the lecture given by Virginia Woolf to The Arts Society in 1928 and the basis for the 1929 publication, A Room Of One’s Own.

This interdisciplinary and collaborative project features articles and artwork from students, academics and arts practitioners, including Helaine Blumenfeld, Uta Frith, Daina Taimina and Rosemary Anne Sisson. From sculpture to mathematics, ballet to autism, cinema to crochet, considerations of ‘women and the arts’ since Woolf are threaded together in this beautiful collection.

A wine reception with refreshments will (of course) follow the talk.

Copies of the journal will be available for £2 (£1 students and unwaged)

Contents Page from 'Women and the Arts'

If you would like to order a copy of the journal, but cannot make it to the launch, please email info.womenandthearts@googlemail.com Pretty soon we should have an order form and paypal option up here but for now, just email us.

It promises to be a really fantastic evening and we’re very excited about it – I hope as many of you as possible can join us and help us welcome our speaker and celebrate the launch of this special journal.

When: November 26th – 7pm

Where: Newnham College MCR

Wine will be served!

The Arts Society, Newnham College is delighted to announce its next speaker: Prof. Gill Plain, director of the MLitt in Women, Writing and Gender at the University of St Andrew’s. Gill has research interests in crime fiction and popular British Cinema. Her work emerges from an interest in gender and sexuality, and includes Twentieth-Century Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh University Press, 2001), Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2002) and John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

A note on the talk:

British cinema of the post-war period abounds with images of the demobbed soldier, a figure frequently depicted as distressed, disorientated and displaced, alienated from the changed world in which he finds himself. The constructions of wartime masculinity could not easily be adapted to the conditions of peace, and cinema was one of the cultural spaces that functioned as a testing ground for ‘modern’ reworkings of gender paradigms. Technology, in both civil and military contexts, was integral to the narrativization of this process, as film makers sought stories that would facilitate man-making out with the parameters of war. This talk will examine a number of these narratives, focusing in particular on David Lean’s ‘The Sound Barrier’ (1952) – a film which not only struggles with the reconstruction of the hero, but also, resoundingly, puts women back in their place.

Please feel free to circulate this notice to anybody you feel might be interested….hope to see lots of you there!

Don't miss Jenn Ashworth...

Where: Newnham College MCR room

We are very excited to announce that our second speaker will be novelist and former Newnhamite, Jenn Ashworth. Jenn has very kindly agreed to come and speak to us about her writing and will be reading from her brilliant novel ‘A Kind of Intimacy’.

Wine will be served!

‘A Kind of Intimacy’ – buy it here!

Annie moves into her new home bringing little else but her cat and a collection of cow-shaped milk jugs. She’s hoping for a clean slate, but there’s something familiar about her next door neighbour – she’s convinced she’s seen him somewhere before. Undeterred by her target’s hostile girlfriend, she searches for guidance, obsessively studying self-help literature and romance novels. Though Annie struggles to repress a murky history of violence, secrets and sexual mishaps her past is never too far behind her, finally shattering her denial in a compelling and bloody climax.

“An intense and intriguing novel that never quite lets the reader get comfortable. It understands about the fuzzy boundary between the normal and the strange, and weaves them together in a gripping, ever-darkening narrative” Jenny Diski

We have had lots of emails from people who would like to submit work for inclusion in our journal but are concerned that the date for submissions is fast approaching.

We have decided to give everybody a little more time so please make a note of the new submissions deadline. We have had some great submissions so far, and lots of people contacting us with ideas for submissions – keep them coming!

Just a reminder of our email addresses:

submissions.womenandthearts@googlemail.com

or for more information:

info.womenandthearts@googlemail.com