Spring 2011 - Birkbeck College

TEACHING & RESEARCH
Partisan Coffee House
Where the New Left met
Mike Berlin from the Department of
History, Classics and Archaeology
has been awarded £10,000 from the
Amiel and Melburn Trust to stage
an exhibition on the history of the
Partisan Coffee House, a short-lived
but influential left-wing meeting
place in 1950s Soho.
Set up by socialist historian
Raphael Samuel in 1958, the
Partisan became the spiritual home
of the early New Left, with a vibrant
dissenting culture that embraced all
of the most salient political, social
and cultural issues of the day. The
discussions, debates, art exhibitions,
film screenings and music nights it
staged drew in leading intellectuals
and artists including Raymond
Williams, Doris Lessing, John Berger,
Lindsey Anderson, Karel Reisz and
current College President, Eric
Hobsbawm.
Discussing the project, Berlin said:
4
“Today the Partisan is a barely
remembered footnote to the history
of the New Left in Britain. This
major retrospective exhibition and
series of public events will bring the
excitement and sense of political
and cultural experimentation
associated with the Partisan to
a new generation.”
The exhibition, to be held in 2012,
will consist of photographs, graphic
and visual art documents, alongside
a series of public talks, oral history
interviews, film screenings and
musical and poetic performances.
The project will create a permanent
record in the form of an oral history
archive hosted by the Raphael
Samuel History Centre, as well
as a short written history.
To find out about studying London
History go to
www.bbk.ac.uk/prospective
Above: At the Partisan
Coffee House (Raphael
Samuel Archive,
Bishopsgate Library)
Claustrophobic fear –
new findings
People with a larger sense of
personal space report heightened
claustrophobic fear, according to
new research carried out by Dr
Matthew Longo from the
Department of Psychological
Sciences, with colleagues from
Emory University, Atlanta.
Previous studies have shown that
the brain represents our immediate
personal space differently to the
space further away. Building on this
existing knowledge, the researchers
tested people’s near space perception
by measuring their ability to pinpoint
the middle of a horizontal line with a
laser pointer, while standing various
distances away from the wall on
which it was marked. The quicker
that participants’ natural leftward
bias moved to the right, the smaller
their near space.
Participants in the experiment were
then asked to complete the
claustrophobia questionnaire, which
is used in the diagnosis of clinical
claustrophobia. A comparison of the
results showed, for the first time, that
people who record greater anxiety of
enclosed spaces also represent their
near space as being larger than
people who are less anxious.
The results suggest that changes
to near space could alleviate
claustrophobic fear, raising the
possibility of investigation into
potential new treatment strategies
for clinical claustrophobia.
Near Space and its Relation to
Claustrophobic Fear is published in
Cognition, the international journal
for cognitive science. The research
was led by Dr Stella Lourenco
(Emory) and co-authored by Dr
Matthew Longo (Birkbeck) and Ms
Thanujeni Pathman (Emory).
To find out about studying Psychology
visit www.bbk.ac.uk/prospective