ICCEMS is proud to present the first in a new online workshop series, Tacit Knowledge for HDRs and ECRs. This session is titled “More of a Comment than a Question: Q&As and How to Handle Them,” and will be hosted by Associate Professor Kathryn Murphy and Professor Joe Moshenska on behalf of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford.
More of a Comment than a Question: Q&As and How to Handle Them
Giving a paper at a seminar or conference can be a nerve-wracking experience – but at least the text is under your control. The question period afterwards presents a different set of challenges: responding to difficult or combative questions, or those that seem to miss the point; if you’re in the audience, formulating a pertinent and productive question; if you’re chairing the session, managing the speakers and audience, and handling things when discussion goes off-piste. This session will ask questions about questions: how to ask them; how to answer them; how to make them work well for you.
When: 23rd of April, 2025, 9.30-10.30 am BST (10.30-11.30 am CEST; 6.30-7.30 pm AEST; click here for other timezones)
Where: online. Register here to receive the meeting link.
About the hosts
Kathryn Murphy is Fellow in English Literature at Oriel College, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Her academic work focuses on seventeenth-century poetry, prose, and philosophy, and on the literary essay of all periods. She also writes essays in less formal venues on topics including still-life painting, sculpture, and Czech literature. A co-edited volume, On Essays: From Montaigne to the Present, with Thomas Karshan, was published in 2020. Her book Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy is forthcoming in 2025, and she is currently writing a book about the style of early modern English philosophy, entitled The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century.
Joe Moshenska is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Beaverbrook and Bouverie tutorial fellow of University College. His work focuses on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on the work of Edmund Spenser and John Milton. He is the author of four books, most recently Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton (Basic Books, 2021), an experimental biography aimed at a general readership. He is currently working on overlaps between creative and critical forms of writing, on connections between literature and anthropology, and on the literary afterlives of the philosopher Benedict Spinoza, as well as co-editing The Merchant of Venice, with David Hillman, for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions.
The ICCEMS Tacit Knowledge of HDRs and ECRs workshop series is part of the ICCEMS Higher Degree Research/Early Career Research Program, which draws on the collective strength and scale of ICCEMS’ member organisations to benefit our HDR and ECR members, taking advantage of the cross-institutional and transnational aspects of ICCEMS to offer training, networking and mentorship opportunities.