This event explores verse craft in English literary history. It includes a lecture by Dr Sawyer, a Q&A session, and an interactive workshop where participants reflect on their work in relation to verse history and literary craft. Drawing on Middle English poetry, the session highlights both lasting innovations—like rhyme and Chaucer’s meter—and forgotten experiments. Open to anyone interested in literary craft across periods.
In English.
This public lecture by historian Laurence Badel examines how women entered the field of official diplomacy and gained access to state responsibilities. It traces a long and complex process, from the informal influence of aristocratic women in diplomatic circles to the gradual professionalisation of women diplomats from the 1920s to the 1970s. The talk highlights the first appointments of women as heads of mission in the interwar period, often shaped by political and discretionary choices, as well as the broader role of international organisations in fostering the feminisation of diplomacy. It also considers the growing presence of women from African, Asian, and Latin American contexts in shaping international affairs during the 20th century.
In French.
This international conference at the University of Geneva reflects on thirty years of research into drawing and painting in 15th–16th-century France. It revisits the impact of key earlier scholarship, especially the 1993–94 exhibition Quand la peinture était dans les livres, and considers how the field has evolved since then. The event highlights new methodologies, recent discoveries, and changing perspectives on artistic practices, production contexts, and networks in Renaissance France.
This public lecture by Jacques-David Ebguy explores the idea of the Bildungsroman (the coming-of-age novel) and its limits, questioning whether the genre can exist fully in its “ideal” form. It examines how literary narratives of formation negotiate tensions between individual development, social constraints, and narrative closure. Through a critical approach to modern and contemporary literature, the talk reflects on the structural impossibility or fragility of the classical model of the coming-of-age story.
In French.
This academic meeting is a discussion of the volume The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire, bringing together scholars to examine recent historiographical developments in the late Ottoman period and its legacies. The book offers a wide-ranging synthesis of current research, covering political, social, and cultural transformations from the late Ottoman Empire through its post-imperial aftermath. The event focuses on how recent scholarship has reinterpreted key themes such as nationalism, violence, state formation, and imperial collapse, while also highlighting new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the region.
In French and English.
Alberto Manguel, Argentine-Canadian writer, essayist and former director of the National Library of Argentina, is known for A History of Reading and Reader of Borges; his work examines reading, libraries and literary imagination.
He will discuss Borges’s biographical dimension and its links to his poetics, examining how reading shaped Borges’s creativity—from childhood encounters in his father’s library to his later practice of reading through others. The lecture explores themes of memory, translation, textual transformation and the reader’s role.
In French.
Alejandro Vaccaro, collector and biographer of Jorge Luis Borges, appears with Alejandro Roemmers (poet and entrepreneur) and Roberto Alifano (author, poet and essayist) to present their research and collections.
The roundtable examines how collecting practices shape narratives around Borges, exploring notable objects, metonymic extensions of the writer, and the philosophical stakes of preserving literary heritage. Vaccaro will show selected items from his private collection and speakers reflect on memory, curation and literary legacy.
In Spanish.
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