Monday, December 13, 2010

Keywords At Pittsburgh - Upcoming Events

Events Will Take Place In The Humanities Center, 602 Cl University Of Pittsburgh

Wednesday, 05 January, 2:00-3:00PM

Website Launch Celebration

Welcome:      Jonathan Arac:  Director, The Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh
Remarks:      Stephen Heath: Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge
Alan Durant:  Professor of Communication, Business & Management, Business School, Middlesex U, London

Monday, 10 January, 2:00-4:00PM

Digital Techniques for Studying Words

Kathryn Allan: Lecturer, History of English, University College, London
An/academic/question? Exploring the meaning of a contemporary keyword through historical text resources

Philip Durkin: Principal Etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary
Exploring the histories of words and word groups: tools and methodologies

The Keywords Project is a research initiative of the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh and Jesus College, Cambridge to update the 1976 (rev 1983) work by Raymond Williams entitled Keywords, which carried the subtitle “a vocabulary of culture and society”. Keywords was an extended wordlist that took ‘key words’ in contemporary social and political debate and used their philological history as a means of engaging with their contradictory contemporary uses and meanings. The research group has been meeting annually since 2005. It has identified some 50 new words to be added to Williams original list. (e.g. network, globalization, customer) and dropping some 50 others that had either settled in their contemporary meanings or lost their topicality (e.g. alienation, existential, bourgeois). Over the past two years it has produced entries for over 20 new words including civil, enterprise, faith, freedom, identity, relativism, secular, sustainable, terror, academic global identity, value, corporate, marriage and celebrity.