Symposium – Liberty, Irreverence and the Place of Women in Early Modern Culture – Friday 11th May 2018

Liberty, Irreverence and the Place of Women in Early Modern Culture

One Day Symposium in Honour of Dr Letizia Panizza

 

Bloomsbury Room, G35, Senate House

Friday 11th May 2018

9.30am – 7pm

For more information please contact: Stefano.Jossa@rhul.ac.uk

Registration free at: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/15855

This one-day conference considers ideas of liberty, irreverence and womanhood in early modern literature and culture, with 17 speakers from British and European Universities.

Programme

 

9.30 Registration / Coffee
10.00 Giuliana Pieri (RHUL): Introduction
10.15 Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck College): Letizia Panizza’s Contribution to Scholarship
10.45 Coffee
11.15 The Contribution of Women to Early Modern Italian Culture
Chair: Sarah Hutton (University of York)

Abigail Brundin (University of Cambridge): Domestic Devotion in Renaissance Italy

Helena Sanson (University of Cambridge): The Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese and Panegirico (1628) by Isabella Sori ‘alessandrina’: A Lost Voice from Seventeenth-Century Italy

Francesca Medioli (Independent scholar): Arcangela Tarabotti and the 1620-1640 Gap Period

Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway, London): Gender, Privacy and Space in the Roman Baroque Palace

12.45 Lunch
 

13.45

Poetics and Poetry
Chair: Jane Everson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Alison Brown (Royal Holloway, London): The Poems of Piero de’ Medici

Amelia Papworth (Cambridge): ‘Do not blame me, but Ariosto’: Laura Terracina’s Discorsi and the Orlando Furioso

Ambra Anelotti (Royal Holloway, London): The Afterlives of Ariosto’s Characters

Poetry – Chair: Jane Everson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

15.15 Tea
15.45 Philosophy – Chair: Martin McLaughlin (University of Oxford)

Unn Irene Aasdalen (Norwegian Humanistic Academy, Norway):  Diotima’s Role in Marsilio Ficino’s De amore

John Sellars (Royal Holloway, London): Philosophical Lives in the Renaissance

Michael J. B. Allen (UCLA): title to be confirmed

17.15 History, Art, Libertinism and Satire – Chair: Dilwyn Knox (University College London)

 

Marta Fattori (Sapienza Università di Roma): ‘1735 Machiavelli all’Indice: Processo contro il marchese Bernardo del Grillo e la sua biblioteca’

Angelo Romano (Università del Salento): Religious Reformed Satire of the Sixteenth Century

Chrysa Damianaki (Università del Salento): Reconsidering the Form and Character of Gian Cristoforo Romano’s Bust of Beatrice d’Este

18.45 Conclusion
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Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19 deadline 18 June 2018

Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is currently planning its programme of events for 2018-19.

We welcome proposals from researchers and students working in any discipline or field across the Schools of Arts, Law, SSHP, and Science.

We are very happy to work in collaboration with research centres and institutes at Birkbeck or at other institutions.

All our events take place in the Birkbeck Cinema, typically on Friday evenings 6-9pm and Saturdays 10-5pm.

We can show films in 16mm and 35mm, as well as a variety of digital formats.

We are especially keen to foreground film and other moving image material that is rarely screened in public.

If you would like to propose an idea for an event, please use the attached form and send it to bimi@bbk.ac.uk – the deadline for submission is Friday 18 June.

Looking forward to hearing about your ideas.

Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Essay Film Festival

Matthew Barrington, interim BIMI Manager

Sign up to our newsletter: bimi@bbk.ac.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Birkbeck_BIMI

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Birkbeck-Institute-for-the-Moving-Image-542278625939273/

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Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group – Artisanal Knowledge and Practical Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century 9 May 2018

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group

Artisanal Knowledge and Practical Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century

Postgraduate Workshop and Lecture by Ruth Mack (SUNY, Buffalo)

Wednesday 9 May, 4.30-8pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square

  1. 4.30-6.00: Postgraduate Workshop, organized by Robert Stearn

In her chapter ‘Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics’, Ruth Mack asks: ‘what does it mean, exactly, to make a theory of beauty artisanally?’

In the first part of this workshop, postgraduate students and early career researchers will give short presentations on objects and problems drawn from their research. Responding to Ruth’s chapter, these will explore how diverse instances of image-making, cataloguing, classifying, reproducing, and theorising engage with artisanal knowledge, and the potentially troubled relation of such knowledge to theory and to the everyday.

In the second, Ruth will respond to these presentations, opening a discussion in which we will use her chapter and the materials presented to shape a conversation about the place of practical knowledge in eighteenth-century natural philosophy, aesthetic theory, artistic practice, and commercial production. What does it mean to call such knowledge maker’s knowledge, or to say that it is corporeal or embodied knowledge? How might such a framework account for desire and pleasure, or for the division of labour? We hope you can join us to think about these questions and more.

Presentations

  • Marianne Brooker (Birkbeck): ‘This Laborious, Expensive, and Arduous Undertaking’: Thomas Martyn’s Universal Conchologist (1784-7) and his ‘Principles of a Private Establishment’
  • Felicity Roberts (King’s College London): Sir Hans Sloane, Classification, Cataloguing, Detail and Delight
  • Rees Arnott-Davies (Independent): Jan van Rymsdyk’s Theory of Image Making
  • Robert Stearn (Birkbeck): George Bickham the younger’s Rococo Knowledge of Everyday Life
  • Miriam Al Jamil (Birkbeck): Dancer, Mistress, Venus, Queen: The Multiple Identities of a Statue

Attendees are encouraged to read Ruth’s chapter, ‘Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics’, in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter, ed. M. H.McMurran and A.Conway (Toronto, 2016), which is available here: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=604622.

  1. 6.00-8.00, ‘Equiano and Craft’, Lecture by Ruth Mack

This paper examines the concept of embodied knowledge as it is worked out through Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Many of the questions brought to Equiano’s text over the past decade concern issues of authenticity and identity (asked in especially provocative form in Vincent Carretta’s biography of Equiano). I aim to examine the root of these debates over the location of identity in Equiano’s own thought. I will contextualize Equiano’s thinking about society in terms of related Scottish Enlightenment theories he would have known well. But the center of the paper will concern craft or maker’s knowledge and its strange fate in the formation of Equiano’s social theory. Here, I will look at the way craft is both embraced and distanced from the form of subjectivity Equiano wishes to claim, tainted as craft must be by its association with the slave’s merely bodily identity, as the slave trade conceived of it. Working through this tension in his relation to craft ultimately gives Equiano the terms for an ethnography of his African homeland that is both aesthetic and, ultimately, political.

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CFP: Visualising Asia: Deciphering ‘Otherness’ in Visual and Material Cultures – deadline 3 June 2018

Visualising Asia: Deciphering ‘Otherness’ in Visual and Material Cultures

SOAS, University of London

21st September 2018

Confirmed Keynote: Dr Anne Witchard

Historically, Asia has been a contended space of exploration and domination, where both Asian and non-Asian agents sought to define themselves against others. Within this broad historical and geographical context, this international and interdisciplinary conference brings together various forms of visuals, such as films, cartoons, and objects, in their interaction with discourses of ‘other’.  The platforms of visualising Asia were assimilated into daily life and practices, feeding into narratives that transcend any single medium. Due to their visual impact, they became lasting repositories of imagined identities and thus have critical implications for those representing and those being represented. This conference invites discussions on the differing ways ‘otherness’ has been used in both Asian and non-Asian societies through visuals. We encourage the participation from postgraduates, career researchers, scholars, curators, practitioners, and archivists.  The aim is to bring together an array of visualities from across various disciplines in order to reflect on the importance of visuals in knowledge production and circulation within and across cultures and societies.

Wider themes include: empire, multiculturalism, identity, nation, ethnic and cultural minorities, integration, ‘othering’, inclusion, exclusion, power dynamics, representation.

Papers or panels are invited on any topic related to the themes and questions explored in the conference that include but are limited to the following:

  • Representations of Asia by non-Asian cultures across different historical eras.
  • Representations of Asian societies by their neighbouring Asian countries.
  • Representations of minorities within hegemonic discourses in Asia.
  • Gender, ethnicity and class in visual othering of Asia.
  • How and why did representation occur, and the significance and impact for those being represented and those representing.
  • The development of concepts of identity through the use of visual and/or material culture.
  • The politics involved in visual knowledge production.
  • Long-term effects and consequences of visual representations of Asia.
  • The relationship between power and representation. The limits of ‘othering’ and representation.
  • Images of Asia and the development of visual and material industries.
  • Approaches and/or practices in cataloguing images of Asia in archives..

Panels and individual submissions are welcomed.  Please send queries and abstracts of 250-350 words, along with a brief bio of no more than 100 words, to visualisingasia@gmail.com by 3 June 2018.

The conference convenors are Amy Matthewson (SOAS, University of London), and Dr Irene González-López (Kingston University).

 

 

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Murray Seminars at Birkbeck, Summer Term

THE MURRAY SEMINAR ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ART

All seminars are held at 5pm in The Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43, Gordon Sq., London, WC1H OPD. A break at 5.50pm is followed by discussion and refreshments. 

1 May, Cristina Guarnieri, University of Padua

The Stories of St. Lucy by Jacobello del Fiore, and Venetian folding reliquary altarpieces

The Stories of St. Lucy by Jacobello del Fiore are one of the masterpieces of Italian Late Gothic painting, but their function has been little understood. Re-evaluating prevailing theories about the panels’ purpose and display, this paper proposes that they formed a folding reliquary altarpiece, and considers other examples of this type which was once common in the Veneto.

5 June, Michelle O’Malley, the Warburg Institute

Botticelli: A conundrum of production

Two versions of Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with an Adoring Angel suggest raise fundamental questions about the specifics of authorship in the workshop and how we, as art historians, understand Renaissance artistic practice and construct attribution. This paper looks again at the technical evidence and the value of connoisseurship in tracking the development of the use of reproductive technique in late fifteenth-century Florence.

27 June, Alison Wright, UCL

Gold against the Body:  gold surfaces and their limits, medieval to early modern

The myth, famously invoked in Goldfinger, of the human body suffocated by being coated in gold exemplifies the fascination and danger attached to the idea of an ‘excess’ of gold, especially in respect to human skin. This paper explores the slippery boundaries of when, where and for whom gold surfaces might be deemed excessive in relation to European art, especially Italian, of the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries.

All this term’s seminars take place in the History of Art Department at Birkbeck (43, Gordon Sq., London WC1H 0PD) in Room 114 (The Keynes Library) at 5pm.  Talks finish by 5.50pm (allowing those with other commitments to leave) and are then followed by discussion and refreshments.  We hope to see you there.

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CFP – Sound and Silence – GLITS – 4 May 2018

GLITS Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference 2018:

Sound and Silence

Date: June 8th 2018

Venue: Goldsmiths, University of London

Website: https://glits4.wixsite.com/mysite 

 

Plenary speaker: Dr Holly Pester, University of Essex

Holly Pester is a poet and lecturer at the University of Essex, working in sound, song and speech-based poetics.

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You

“I came to think that silence may be the only ‘place’ in which the boundaries of the autonomous self can dissolve, can be penetrated without breaking.”

Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence

Sound and silence occupy an inherently complex and paradoxical relation to meaning, as both its antithesis and its very essence. Sound figures as both Pope’s “echo to the sense” and the irrefutable noise of the Real. Silence designates absence and the impossibility thereof, as Cage famously proclaimed, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” How these sonic signals are interpreted and contested determines who can speak, who makes noise, who is silenced – which subjects are permitted and legitimised and which are discredited and repressed.

Anne Carson sees the dichotomy of sound as irrevocably gendered due to the patriarchal insistence toward logos, whereby male speech is valorised as the standard-bearer for rationality and female “noise” is perceived as dangerous and disruptive. For Friedrich Kittler, the advent of mechanical storage signals not just a shift in technics but the arrival of a new episteme. Since mechanical ears do not differentiate acoustic events like human ones are trained to, the meaningless and the accidental become as relevant as the deliberate and the symbolic. Psychoanalysis, then, finds its epistemology a matter of phonography, redoubling the policing of human sounds as either normative or pathological.

Harold Pinter once said, ‘I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempt to keep ourselves to ourselves.’ Culturally and politically, silence represents the interstices between thought and language, where that which is refused expression is captured in a state of iteration. Phonic expression, then, is threatening both for its capacities and its limitations.

Sound and Silence is an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference held on 8 June 2018, hosted by the Goldsmiths Literature Seminar (GLITS) at Goldsmiths, University of London, bringing together scholars across multiple fields to ask: how do we recognise, break and rebuild boundaries through phonic utterance and expression? What part does silence play in psycho- and socio-logical development and how do we attune ourselves to its cacophony of meanings?

We invite proposals from various disciplines and historical periods – papers, creative pieces, readings – covering such possible topics as:

  • Sound and silence in the humanities
  • Architecture
  • Identity
  • Race
  • Soundscapes/silentscapes
  • Phono-semantics
  • Textual methodology
  • Spoken word
  • Speech: dialects/accents
  • Gender
  • Religious
  • Speaking out and speaking back
  • Acts of silencing

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words or examples of creative work along with a brief bio to glits@gold.ac.uk by Friday 4th May.

 

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Symposium – Communalities, urbanities and artistic commonalities – 5 June 2018

Communalities, urbanities and artistic commonalities

Symposium

School of Arts, Birkbeck University of London

5th of June 2018. 1pm to 5pm

Room 124, 43 Gordon Square

 

The symposium Communalities, urbanities and artistic commonalities will interweave ideas of art, activism, politics and urban commons, aiming for a dialogue around how we understand the creation of interdisciplinary platforms of exchange and community action in relation to artistic practices in different locations.

Read more about the event and register on Eventbrite-

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/symposium-communalities-urbanities-and-artistic-commonalities-tickets-45059285536

Presentations 

Evanthia Tselika; Paul Watt; Stephen Pritchard; Lorraine Leeson; Sophie Hope

Dialogue

The dialogue will involve presenters and symposium participants so as to consider ideas around art, activism, politics and urban commons. We will be addressing:

  • New structures of living together – refugee realities and the implication of art.
  • Gentrification and the visual capitalization of marginalization.
  • Cultures of global mobility and digital interactions.

    Initiated by | Evanthia Tselika, Assistant Professor University of Nicosia, Cyprus & Associate Research Fellow, School of the arts,  Birkbeck University of London

    Supported by | Corkscrew Network, Birkbeck

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CASTING CODE: Reflections on 3D Printing half day symposium – 14th May 2018

CASTING CODE: Reflections on 3D Printing half day symposium

Date: Monday 14 May 2018

Time: 1-5pm

Venue: Keynes Library, School of Arts Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

Free to attend, but registration is required. Book here

All welcome

This half-day interdisciplinary symposium will explore how digital 3D technologies are transforming the ways that art and cultural artefacts are produced, stored and shared.

3D printing has been used to reconstruct destroyed ancient monuments, inspire activist communities and help reimagine contemporary art practice. As digital 3D technology finds new applications in an ever-growing number of fields, it has opened up new possibilities for digital reproduction on a global scale, seeming to promise new alternatives to mass-manufacture and unprecedented opportunities for the circulation and exchange of objects.

The increasing role of digital 3D technology in the production and reception of art and cultural heritage raises numerous urgent aesthetic and ethical questions. Although many of these concerns – such as big tech monopolies, uneven accessibility and energy consumption – are shared with other areas of digital culture, their particular manifestations in relation to 3D printing technologies frequently animate these issues in ways that emphasise the interconnection between the digital and the material. As such, critical explorations of digital 3D technology can help to challenge out-dated distinctions between virtual processes and material objects and infrastructures, revealing some of the ways in which our world is being radically, but often silently, reshaped by the power structures that underpin digital technology.

This interdisciplinary symposium brings together artists, curators, conservators and researchers working in art history, law, media studies to explore the significance of 3D printing and associated digital 3D technologies for artistic and cultural practice.

Event schedule

13:00     Welcome: Elizabeth Johnson (Birkbeck)

13:15     Amelia Knowlson (Sheffield Hallam University) will present new research on the curatorial decision-making processes behind 3D digitisation at The British Museum. Her work used design-based methods to examine micro pre-existing and emerging 3D projects across curatorial departments.

13:45     Xavier Aure (University of West England) will discuss the influence of computer graphics techniques in his research on visualisation and texture reproduction of paintings.

14:15     Dukki Hong (Bournemouth University) will introduce some IP issues in relation to emerging 3D printing technologies, considering what IP law is; how it is constructed; and most importantly why 3D printing matters to IP law.

14:45     Break

15:15     Mara-Johanna Kolmel (Leuphana University Lüneburg,) will be speaking about Reforming the Formless. An art historical perspective on 3D technologies.

15:45     Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths) will discuss The 3D Additivist Cookbook, a compendium of 3D .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times, which he devised and edited in collaboration with artist Morehshin Allahyari.

16.15     Discussion chaired by Joel McKim, (Birkbeck)

If you have any additional access requirements please get in touch elizabeth.johnson@bbk.ac.uk

This event is kindly supported by the Lorraine Lim Postgraduate Fund and the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology

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