The walk will start at UCL, home to the oldest Department of Dutch in the Anglophone world (founded in 1919) and host of one of the largest Dutch libraries in the country. We will walk past Gerard Reve’s former living place, when he unsuccessfully tried to establish himself on the English market in the 1950s, the Elizabeth Anderson Gallery with its connections to Dutch and British feminism, the Eurostar terminal, London’s gateway to the Low Countries, and the many beautiful Dutch and Flemish exhibits of the British Library, before ending the walk in the Dutch East India Company pub in King’s Cross, reflecting on the nature of colonialism and its afterlife. This walk is just one of a set of curated Dutch and Flemish walks through London, generously supported by a UCL Beacon for Public Engagement Award and the Dutch and Flemish diplomatic representations in London.

Podcast by Christine Sas (UCL), Marja Kingma (British Library) and Ulrich Tiedau (UCL).

Take a look at the Inspiring Minds website, for new and returning arts and humanities students, and find the Google Map of this walk: https://bit.ly/306yNBL.

In this podcast Ruth Austin takes us on a ramble around Soho taking Jean Cocteau’s visit in November 1959 as the starting point. Cocteau was in London to paint the chapel of Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place and to oversee a performance of Oedipus Rex with his long-time collaborator, Stravinsky.

Ruth Austin is a senior teaching fellow in SELCS, Department of French. She is also co-founder of Cities After Hours which brings together researchers considering the city “after hours” from a variety of disciplinary perspectives @UCLAfterHours.

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

The series closes by visiting a shopping centre which is an important and vibrant meeting place for the Latin American community in London. Nonetheless, the surrounding architecture leads to discussion of how the city is changing, and whether we should think of it as regeneration or gentrification.

Further reading:

* Elephant and Castle Partnership:

https://www.elephantandcastle.org.uk/

* Latin Elephant:

https://latinelephant.org/#home

* Seven Sisters Regeneration Plan:

https://www.haringey.gov.uk/planning-and-building-control/planning/major-projects-and-regeneration/seven-sisters-regeneration

* Save Latin Village:

https://savelatinvillage.org.uk/

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

Visiting St. Patrick’s Church and the shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe provide the stimulus for reflection on the legacy of colonialism and Catholicism in Latin America. Drawing on a range of examples, the relationship between the two is shown to be rather more complicated than it may at first appear.

Further reading:

* On the history of St. Patrick’s Church: https://stpatricksoho.org/about/history/

* On Yolanda López:

http://almalopez.com/projects/ChicanasLatinas/lopezyolanda3.html

* On the St. Patrick’s Batallion:

https://time.com/5201896/st-patricks-day-history-mexico/

* Octavio Paz (2004), El laberinto de la soledad; Postdata; Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad (3rd edn.; México: México: Fondo de Cultura Económica)

* Joan Bristol (2016), ‘The Church, Africans, and Slave Religion in Latin America’, in Paul Freston, Stephen C. Dove, and Virginia Garrard-Burnett (eds.), The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.198-206

* Derek Krueger (2011), ‘The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’, in Martina Bagnoli, et al. (eds.), Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London: British Museum Press), pp.5-17

* Timothy Matovina (2016), ‘Marianism in Latin America’, in Paul Freston, Stephen C. Dove, and Virginia Garrard-Burnett (eds.), The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.319-30

* Jennifer Scheper Hughes (2016), ‘Contemporary Popular Catholicism in Latin America’, in Paul Freston, Stephen C. Dove, and Virginia Garrard-Burnett (eds.), The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.480-90

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

Following a brief introduction to the Senate House library, this episode discusses the British Museum. Reflecting first on the ethics of collecting artefacts which belong to other cultures, the discussion then turns to some of the ways in which the Museum has left an indelible mark on Latin America.

Further reading:

* Senate House Latin American Collections:

https://london.ac.uk/senate-house-library/our-collections/research-strengths-of-our-collections/latin-american-studies#finding-articles-21669

* The British Museum Americas Collection:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/our-work/departments/africa-oceania-and-americas/americas

* César Aira (1991), La liebre (Buenos Aires: Emecé)

* Michael Löwy (ed.), (1992), Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present: An Anthology, trans. Michael Pearlman (London: Humanities Press)

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

Gradually moving South, the next stop is 23 Park Road, the one time residence of General José de San Martín, The Liberator. The presence of numerous heroes of South American independence in London is discussed, as is the temporal nature of the contemporary city.

Further reading:

* David Bushnell (1985), ‘The Independence of Spanish South America’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America: Volume 3: From Independence to c.1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.95-156

* D. A. G. Waddell (1985), ‘International Politics and Latin American Independence’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America: Volume 3: From Independence to c.1870 (The Cambridge History of Latin America, 3; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.197-228

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

The podcasts open by viewing the expanse of London from the vantage point on Parliament Hill in Hamsptead Heath. The commanding perspective leads to reflections on the power dynamics at play in our representations of space, as illustrated by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García.

Further reading:

* Michel de Certeau (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press)

* On Joaquín Torres García, América invertida and the Amereida and Travesías projects in which he participated:

https://www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/12.136/4000?fb_comment_id=10150822625820301_31029387

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

This podcast outlines the London experiences of Italian writer and director Lorenza Mazzetti (1928-2020). After a traumatic childhood marked by loss and tragedy, Mazzetti arrived in England in the early 1950s and became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. During her time at UCL, she made two films - K (1954) and Together (1956) - that contributed to the birth of the Free Cinema movement and to the renovation of British cinema.

Cristina Massaccesi is a Senior Teaching Fellow in SELCS' Department of Italian. Her volume on F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror (Liverpool University Press, Devil's Advocates) has been published in 2015. Her new book on hybrid sci-fi and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) will be published in 2021 as part of Liverpool University Press' series on science fiction classics Constellations.

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

John Hyman is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic. You can find out more about him here (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/people/professor-john-hyman).

The great English landscape painter John Constable lived in Hampstead for the last ten years of his life, and painted a series of beautiful skyscapes—pure studies of clouds—on Hampstead Heath. In this podcast, I talk about his paintings and the way he thought about his art, especially it’s relationship with science, and I visit the main places in Hampstead he is associated with—the Heath, his home in Well Walk, and his tomb in the parish cemetery.

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.

Matthew Beaumont is a Professor of English at UCL and the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015) and The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020). This podcast leads listeners into the streets of Bloomsbury and nearby St. Giles, where it reveals that, in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Dickens, feeling lost and lonely, roamed the city at night, confronting his personal demons and recording the presence, still of course all too visible in the early twenty-first century, of the poor and the homeless.

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.