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The TORCH Humour Network is hosting its official launch event!
Join us at our interdisciplinary roundtable to discuss the research and study of humour. Our speakers all research humour across three different academic disciplines. They ask different questions, approach their work from different angles, and look for humour in different places. But they all share a commitment to understanding how humour works, why it matters, and what it can tell us about culture, society, and the human experience.
Professor Matthew Bevis is a Professor of English Literature at Keble College in Oxford. His book Comedy: A Very Short Introduction explores comedy as a literary genre and as a range of non-literary impulses and events. His most recent book, Wordsworth’s Fun, argues that the poet owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. It delves into William Wordsworth’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition, his engagement with forms of English poetic humour, and his love of comic prose.
Dr Zoe Walker is an Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, working on various philosophical issues surrounding humour, comedy, and joking. She is interested, for example, in the ethics of the sense of humour, in how engaging with comedy shapes attention, and in the concept of joking as a way of achieving plausible deniability on the cheap. Her work has been recognised with the 2022 British Society of Aesthetics Essay Prize and the 2024 American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Research Prize.
Nicolas Garraud is a DPhil student in History at Exeter College in Oxford, a former Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies, and a former Fellow of the Fondations pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. His research explores the meaning and significance of humour and laughter in the everyday life of Jews living under Nazi occupation in the Warsaw Ghetto. His work questions idealised conceptions of humour as a weapon of cultural and spiritual resistance to instead consider humour as a language through which to understand a plural Jewish community.
There will be tea and cake!
