Rhythm and the Body

This symposium explores understandings of ‘rhythm’ across disciplines to reflect on how we theorise, analyse and represent the significance of our internally felt experiences of embodiment.  

The event brings together scholars and practitioners from psychology, dance, movement therapy, sport science, art history, music, literary studies, and theology to chart how metaphors of the rhythmic become tools for attuning us to a range of social, aesthetic and scientific practices.  

The panels will be as follows:

Panel 1

• 'Ictus and Eternity: On Douglas Oliver on St Augustine on "The Life of This Action of Mind"' – Dr Laura McCormick Kilbride (English Studies)
• 'Ritual-Symbolism, Established and Disrupted' – Professor Douglas Davies (Theology and Religion)
• 'John Ruskin’s Rhythms' – Dr Thomas Hughes (Art History)

Panel 2

• 'Rhythmic Patterns in North Indian Classical Music: The Impact of Cultural Familiarity, Musical Expertise, and Short-Term Learning' – Nashra Ahmad (Music)
• 'Still Lives? Fidgety Affects in the Modernist Years' – Professor Abbie Garrington (English Studies)
• ‘Interoception, Internal Body Signals and Dissociation’ – Dr Jamie Moffat (Psychology)  

Panel 3

• 'The Obscured Rhythms of Movement through Menopause' – Professor Cassandra Phoenix (Sport and Exercise Sciences)
• 'Rhythm and Social Cognition: Thinking with León and Lightfoot’s Dance Adaptation of Gertrude' Stein’s “If I told Him…”' – Dr Meindert Peters (German)

The event is also an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of Laura Marcus’s Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern, which was posthumously published in November 2023. Until her untimely death in September 2021, Professor Laura Marcus FBA was Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She was a leading scholar of twentieth-century literature, film, and life-writing, and an influential theorist of feminist thought, psychoanalysis and the autobiographical. Her collegial generosity and intellectual lucidity are remembered by all who worked with her. Her final project engages with a dazzling array of sources from across the arts, philosophy, psychology, health, education and sport to trace the development of modernity’s fascination with rhythm in its manifold forms. The discussion will be led by Professor David Fuller, Dr Megan Girdwood and Dr Mary Coaten.

The symposium is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab, which is led by Dr Fraser Riddell and Professor Corinne Saunders in the Discovery Research Platform, as part of a larger investigation into the emotional and sensory dynamics of health and wellbeing.

This event is free to attend.