In the administrative jungle, ideas struggle for light

I'm spending most of the day trying to work out how our new courses will work (teaching starts next week), but I'm having a lunchtime break to go to a staff research seminar. 5 of us are gathered to listen to a Bulgarian visiting scholar talk about

‘Writing across the Native/Foreign Divide: Krystyn Lach-Szyrma’s Letters, Literary and Political on Poland (1823) and Kapka Kassabova’s Street without a Name (2008)’

Lach-Szyrma was a 19th-century Polish philosopher (read more here or buy his British travel memoir here), while Kassabova is a cosmopolitan Bulgarian poet, novelist, journalist and travel writer (b. 1973), educated in New Zealand and resident in Scotland. 


The intellectual link seems to be cross-cultural links and the complications of the terms 'native' and 'foreign', especially when it comes to intellectual endeavour - both authors wrote in English for Anglophone readers.