See Program and Timetable here

Mapping the Artist’s Mind: The Grail Mass, Modernism and Inscription, 29 & 30 July 2021 (via Zoom)

The David Jones Research Center 2020 Seminar has been rescheduled as a virtual two-day event. See the poster and revised schedule below. Register here (or by clicking on “2021 Seminar Registration” at left) by Friday 2 July. Email us with any questions at: djresearch@wau.edu

Live Q&A on the David Jones Digital Archive, 9 July (via Zoom)

The project leaders of the David Jones Digital Archive were on site at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, for an overview of their current work and an opportunity to ask questions about the project.

Virtual Keynote by Prof. Paul Hills, 14 March 2021

A recording of Prof. Hills’ keynote is available to view here (https://vimeo.com/527501457)

Virtual Keynote by Dr. Rowan Williams, 1 November 2020

Dr. Williams’ address is available to view here: https://vimeo.com/479031322.

DJRC Seminar 2019: “David Jones: Theory of Art; Theory of Culture”

7-8 March, 2019, Booth Special Collections, Georgetown University Library (3700 O St NW, Washington, DC 20057, USA)

The work and thought of the British artist and WWI veteran David Jones (1895-1974) commands a unique perspective on the deeply intertwined questions of the theory of art and the theory of culture in the 20th century. Jones not only had extensive first-hand experience of total war, both as a private in the trenches of WWI and as a Londoner during the Blitz, but also communicated his experience in an interpenetrated corpus of visual art, prose, and poetic writing. Jones’s sense of artistic form crosses the boundaries of the visual and the verbal in order to respond to the crisis of what he described as “unmaking” in his 1937 poem of WWI, In Parenthesis.As Mark Greif’s (2015) and Alan Jacobs’s (2018) recent studies indicate, the postwar period presented a unique “crisis” for artists and intellectuals in the West who found themselves confronted with challenges to traditional narratives about human identity and the nature of human flourishing. The work of David Jones places the theory of art at the very center of this crisis, drawing on the thinking of neo-Artistotelian-Thomist philosophers such as Jacques Maritain to regard the fine arts in light of the gamut of human making and so broaden the discussion to show how art encompasses more fundamental questions of human work, technology, religion, leisure, and politics.

            This seminar situates the contribution of Jones’s cultural and aesthetic theory and multimedia corpus in the immediate context of 20th-century artistic practice and theories of art and culture. It will particularly seek to show the unique light that Jones sheds on the understanding of war in the 20th century, narratives of modern secularization, and experiments in visual and poetic form that respond to the ruptures and new continuities that these cultural shifts incur. 

See the original Conference Program here and Panel Details here:

Inaugural Seminar, 2018:

New Directions in David Jones Research, 7-8 June 2018, Washington Adventist University, Takoma Park, MD

See the original Conference Program here