Doctoral Workshop in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies in English (10/12)

28 October 2026

Dr Patrick Jones, UNIGE

Dr Lara Choksey, UCL.

The Modern and Contemporary fortnightly workshop (Mod Con) is a well-attended workshop for PhD students and staff from all CUSO universities. The workshop is popular among doctoral students and early career scholars from the CUSO network. The workshop is a valuable space for the exchange of ideas between doctoral students working on modern and contemporary literatures of the English-speaking world. The 2026 programme will include talks, workshops and professionalisation seminars and it will remain an important space for work-in-progress papers from doctoral students.

 “Lines of Error”.

Dr Lara Choksey, UCL.

Hilary Mantel described the writer of history as “a walking anachronism, a displaced person”. This workshop asks what these wanderings and displacements might do to and for novelistic form. It takes its title from a mistranslation of Fernand Deligny’s lignes d’erres, “wander lines”, which he used to describe the paths traced by autistic children as they move through a landscape. To explore these possibilities, Lara Choksey will discuss an ongoing writing project set in and around Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital during Frantz Fanon’s time there as an intern in the early 1950s, before his departure for Algeria and his involvement in the Algerian War of Independence.

UNIGE

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