Binder2

MICHAELMAS, 2016
TOIA MAGAZINE # 77
THE OXFORD
ITALIAN
ASSOCIATION
SEA-CROSSINGS,
SURVIVAL, STORIES
THE CLARA FLORIO COOPER MEMORIAL LECTURE
BY PROFESSOR DAME MARINA WARNER
Italians have long experience of diaspora,
and Italy has also been the point of
arrival for many thousands of refugees in
the recent and current tragic dislocations
of peoples. Marina Warner will reflect
on the present situation in Sicily, where
she has been working with the University
of Palermo on a project for encouraging
story telling in refugee communities.
Can deep memory of migrations help
build new bonds? Is literature strong
enough to help? What can traditions of
narrative performance - puppetry, mime,
cantastorie - contribute to societies in
extremes of need?
Marina Warner
Novelist, critic and renowned cultural
historian Marina Warner was born in
London. Her mother was Italian, from
Puglia; her father was a bookseller.
Educated in Cairo, Brussels and
England, she read French and Italian
at Lady Margaret Hall, where she is an
Honorary Fellow. Currently Professor of
English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck,
University of London, Marina Warner is
also a Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS,
and has been Quondam Fellow at All Souls,
University of Oxford, since 2015.
Author of both fiction and non-fiction,
she is concerned with an analysis of the
mythology, folklore and archetypes
surrounding the feminine throughout
history, as expressed in art, literary texts
and fables. Among her non-fiction is Alone
of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the
Virgin Mary (1976) and Monuments and
Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
(1985). In 1994 she became only the second
woman to deliver the BBC’s Reith Lectures.
Her novels include The Leto Bundle (2000)
and The Lost Father (1988), an ironised
romance about the dream of America in
Southern Italy during the Fascist era, seen
through the eyes of a young Englishwoman.
It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and
won the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Visiting Fellow of All Souls’ College,
Oxford, in 2001 Marina Warner gave the
prestigious Clarendon Lectures on the
subject of ‘Fantastic Metamorphoses and
other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self’.
Her recent publications include
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the
Arabian Nights (2011), awarded a Sheykh
Zayed Prize in 2012, and Once Upon
a Time - A Short History of Fairy Tale
(Oxford University Press, 2014).
She is currently working on the
theme of sanctuary and culture in times
of dislocation and diaspora, as well as
on a memoir-novel about her childhood
in Cairo.
i The Clara Florio Cooper Memorial
Lecture, Main Hall, Taylor Institution,
St. Giles, Oxford 5.00 p.m.
on Tuesday, 22nd November, 2016.
Admission is free. All welcome.
For further information go to www.toia.co.uk
www.fcagroup.com
www.cnhindustrial.com