E.M. Forster, The Buckinghams and Bloomsbury

Please join us for the launch of the E. M. Forster: The Unseen Legacy exhibition on the 29th September at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre of Holborn Library on Theobalds Road.

The talk will take place at 6pm. Our speakers are Professor Claire Monk and Professor Daniel Monk. They will each give a 15 minute presentation, contributing distinct and specialised elements about the exhibition. Professor Claire Monk looks at the contemporary reception of EM Forster and how his attitude to equality and egalitarianism were personified with the Buckinghams. Professor Daniel Monk explores how EM Forster used his will to defy convention and re-define friendship and family in relation to his support of the Buckingham family.

Following there will be a Q&A session.

Speakers:

Professor Claire Monk is a writer, researcher, Forsterian and Professor Emerita of Film & Film Culture at De Montfort University, where she was a founding member of DMU’s Cinema &; Television History Institute and Centre for Adaptations. A specialist in British cinema and the debates around ‘heritage’ literary adaptations, her publications explore class, sexuality, gender, the politics of reception, audiences and fan practices, particularly in relation to the Forster films and Merchant Ivory Productions. The BFI’s 2019 Blu-ray UK premiere release of James Ivory’s 1987 film of Forster’s Maurice features her audio commentary, acclaimed by The Arts Desk as ‘revelatory’. More recently, she has published on Forster and adaptation; on the life-through-time of ‘Maurice without ending: from Forster’s palimpsest to fan-text’; and (in press) on the vexed question of happy endings.

Professor Daniel Monk is a Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London one of the founders and former chair of the Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His research has explored a wide range of questions about families, sexuality, inheritance and education and he published the first study of E M Forster’s Last Will and Testament.