The Night Shift

Writing and Research on London's Dark Half: A Seminar Series based at Birkbeck College

'Autopia (Untitled)' by Dan Holdsworth. Used with permission

‘The hour should be the evening and the season winter...How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness' – Virginia Woolf

Birkbeck's School of Arts in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury hosts this writing and research network on the theme of London at night. ‘The Night Shift', in part celebrating Birkbeck's night-school contribution to London after dark, will bring together work by fiction writers, poets, cultural historians, literary critics, photographers, artists and film-makers. We hope to look at the night side of London in literal but also lateral ways, thinking about night work, night walking, dreams, psychogeographies, artificial illumination, underworlds, erotic spaces, counter-cultures, radicals and subversives, Gothic and apocalyptic fantasies, noir adventures, and other dark moods of the city.

We will aim to connect together research on London at Birkbeck College with other cultural institutions.

The Night Network will be initially co-ordinated by Professor Roger Luckhurst. Night owls wishing to keep in touch with developments should contact R.Luckhurst@bbk.ac.uk