UPCOMING EVENTS

15 September 2012

"Transporting Bodies and Minds: 18th-19th Century Travel" Conference

Keynote Speaker: Kate Flint, Provost Professor of English and Art History (University of Southern California)

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travelers of all kinds documented their experiences in private letters and diaries, official correspondence, life writing, spiritual and religious narratives, and ethnographic accounts. Furthermore, these experiences were often transformed into works of art, with real and imagined moments of contact serving as the inspiration for painting, music, poetry, prose fiction, photography, and other creative ventures. These aesthetic productions transformed the foreign into the national, the known into the unknown, appearing to expand access to other cultures--a model of cultural transportation that recent criticism is troubling.

Scholarship drawing on theories of post-colonialism, gender, material and visual culture, cognitive studies, posthumanism, and other critical paradigms has challenged our understanding of the impact--not just aesthetic, but also commercial, martial, and religious--of travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This work has made strides in elucidating a more dynamic picture of the way travel and cultural encounter could transform (or fail to transform) prior understandings of both time and space. Moreover, it has allowed for a more capacious appreciation of how influence happens, extending beyond more uni-directional, Eurocentric approaches.

2 October 2012

"'William Morris Carpets: Action in Design"

Lecture by Caroline Arscott, Head of Research at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has been lecturing at The Courtauld Institute since 1988: extending her study of the Victorian art world from an initial focus on the 1840s and 1850s into work on the pre-Victorian period in relation to urban topography and the late Victorian period in relation to the Aesthetic Movement. This talk considers the knot in the substance of the pile and the knot in the interlace of the design.