HASS Inaugural Lecture - Professor John Wedgwood-Clarke
Wednesday, 27 May 2026 at 16:00
Professor John Wedgwood-Clarke presents his inaugural lecture talking on the topic 'Bright Containers: On bottles, Jars and Poetry’
Event details
You are warmly invited to attend the Inaugural Lecture for Professor John Wedgwood-Clarke who is based in the English and Creative Writing department.
Professor John Wedgwood Clarke is a poet and prose nonfiction writer. He trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before going on to study literature and complete a D.Phil. in Modernist poetry at the University of York. He has published three collections of poetry, Boy Thing (2023), Landfill (2017), Ghost Pot (2013). He has also published many pamphlets associated with interdisciplinary public-arts projects he has led, and seen his work transform an old Burger King in Rotherham and on billboards at Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank. TV credits as researcher-presenter include the documentaries Cornwall's Red River (2022), Through the Lens of Larkin (2017), The Books that Made Britain (2016) for BBC4, and a series of short films about landscape recovery for Natural England’s Protected Sites Strategy. He has been a Leverhulme Artist in Residence, AHRC Leadership Fellow and is currently a Co-I on the NERC-funded RENEW project. He serves as Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact in the faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
Details
- Date: Wednesday 27 May
- Time: 16:00-17:00, followed by a drinks reception
- Location: Streatham Court LT C, option to join remotely via MS Teams
- The Teams link will be circulated to online attendees following the closure of registration. Registration closes on the 21 May, 1pm.
Overview
'Bright Containers: On bottles, Jars and Poetry’
In this lecture John will explore the mind-altering properties of glass containers and poems through a personal tour of jars on hilltops, milk bottles, seltzer bottles, demijohns, fly bottles, bell jars, shell jars, marmalade jars and those enormous glass flasks of coloured liquid that used to make local chemists so mysterious.
We will be hosting a drinks reception from 5pm with a range of delicious snacks, including vegetarian, vegan and gluten free! We hope to see you there!
Please email EnglishCreativeWriting@exeter.ac.uk if you would like to attend this event and we will send you the Eventbrite link. Registration closes on Thursday 21 May at 1pm.
Organiser
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Location
Streatham Court LT C, Streatham Campus