About us

ContemPo runs an annual videoconference programme of papers, seminars, and performances by academics, poets and postgraduate students of the five institutions and their guest speakers from across the world. These have included:

Ian Davidson (Bangor) ‘Poetry and New Technologies’; Tiffany Atkinson (Aberystwyth) ‘Writing Kink and Particle’; Ian Gregson (Bangor) ‘Making Call Centre Love Songs’; Tabish Khair (India) ‘Indian Poetry in English’; Erin Mouré (Montreal) ‘Poetry and Translation’; Matt Jarvis (Lampeter) ‘The Journal London Welshman’; Matthew Francis (Aberystwyth) ‘The Making of Mandeville’; Andrew Miller (Copenhagen) ‘Poetry and Photography’; Richard Marggraf Turley & Damian Walford Davies (Aberystwyth) ‘One Book, Two Poets’; Jeff Hilson (Roehampton) ‘Editing The Reality Street Book of Sonnets’; Andrea Brady (QML) ‘Animate Work’; Robert Hampson (Royal Holloway) ‘Marvellous Appearances’; Clare Best (Brighton), ‘Heartlands and Hinterlands’; Robert Sheppard (Edge Hill) ‘Twentieth Century Blues’; Steven Hitchins (Aberystwyth) ‘Collage and Place in the Making of an Urban Sequence’; Peter Barry (Aberystwyth) ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay – Bob Cobbing Letters in the British Library’; Zoë Skoulding (Bangor) ’”Unknown Cities”: Lisa Samuels’ Tomorrowland’; Sean Bonney (London) ‘Happiness (Poems After Rimbaud)’; Fred Wah (Calgary), Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen (both Toronto) ‘Poetry’s Public’; Pierre Joris (New York) and Allen Fisher (Manchester); ‘In dialogue: Locating movement & moving location’; Ken Edwards (Hastings) ‘On Reality Street’; Olga Pek (Prague) and Zuzana Husárová (Bratislava) ‘Multimedia Performance Poets’; Stephen Voyce (Iowa): ‘Poetic Community’; Samira Negrouche (Algiers) ‘In translation’; Julia Fiedorczuk (Warsaw) ‘Ecopoetics’; Peter Hughes (Bangor) ‘Live in Europe’; Katherine E. Bash, ‘Owl Call Radio’; Sandeep Parmar (Liverpool) ‘Race and UK Poetry’... and more.

As well as regular videoconference events, ContemPo has organised round tables at international conferences, including the 15th Modernist Studies Association conference at University of Sussex (2014), for Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years at State University of New York Buffalo (2016) and English: Shared Futures in Newcastle University (2017).