Presented as part of the Humanities Research Centre Seminar Series

The memory-loss and non-communication of advanced old age challenge literary and visual representation. The 'third ear' (Theodor Reik) offers a non-intrusive means to access experience that necessarily remains obscure. Ishiguro's recent novel about memory loss, ‘The Buried Giant,’ seen through the lens of British Object relations psychoanalysis, will be paired with 'the third eye' of Paddy Summerfield's decade-long photographic essay, ‘Mother and Father.’

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Mary Jacobus was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, from 1971 to 1980, after completing her BA and DPhil. at Oxford. In 1980 she moved to Cornell University, where she held the John Wendell Anderson Chair of English and Women's Studies. In 2000 she returned to the UK as Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Professorial Fellow of Churchill College. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the AHRC, and is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. From 2006 she has been Director of Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), which supports dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. Her past work has focused on Romanticism, feminist criticism and theory, and Continental and British psychoanalysis. She has written widely on literature, feminism, psychoanalysis, as well as visual culture, and is currently working on the artist Cy Twombly. Besides her commitment to feminism and to the Humanities, she is passionately committed to fostering disciplinary change, and to promoting the role of Humanities Centres and Institutes of Advanced Study in the global academy. She is proud to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy, with its national and international support for the continuing importance of Arts and Humanities research today.