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Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group events: Autumn 2019

Lecture: Thursday 17th October, 6-8pm

Professor Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London

‘The Duchesse d’Elbeuf and the Arts of Resistance in Paris under the Terror’

The Cinema, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

The recent discovery of a series of private letters to a friend (1788-94) from the wealthy dowager duchess of Elbeuf in the course of the French Revolution is the starting point for a broader discussion of how, in the period of censorship and surveillance under the Terror, individuals strove to maintain freedom of expression and develop a critique of government. The lecture will be followed by questions, and a glass of wine.

Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on French cultural history, particularly on the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and the history of medicine. His many books include The Medical World of Early Modern France (with Lawrence Brockliss, 1997), The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (2002), Paris: Biography of a City (2004: winner of the Enid MacLeod Prize) and The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2014).

All welcome! For more information, please contact Ann Lewis: a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

Reading Group: Wednesday 13th November, 12-2pm

Hannah Lyons, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Victoria & Albert Museum

‘Some trifling performances’: Women Printmakers in the Long Eighteenth Century. Artists or Amateurs?

Room 106, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Hannah Lyons is a Collaborative Doctoral Student, working on the role, status and output of amateur and professional women printmakers in Britain during the long eighteenth century. In this reading group, she will consider the problematic categories of the ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ in the context of her research.

For more information, please contact Kate Retford: k.retford@bbk.ac.uk

Thursday 12th December, 3-5pm

English Country House symposium

co-organised with the Birkbeck Architecture, Space and Society Research Centre 

Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

  • Professor Jon Stobart, Manchester Metropolitan University: ‘Home Comforts: Objects and Memories in the English country house, c.1750-1820’
  • Professor Abby van Slyck, Connecticut College, US: ‘Raising Royals: The Architecture of Childhood at Victoria and Albert’s Osborne House’
  • Professor Kate Retford, Birkbeck: ‘”A Family Home…not a Museum”: Marketing the English country house’

For more information, please contact Kate Retford: k.retford@bbk.ac.uk

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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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Writing Art: Women Writers as Art Critics in the Long Eighteenth Century – 25 February 2017

Writing Art: Women Writers as Art Critics in the Long Eighteenth Century
Saturday 25 February 2017
10am-4pm

This one-day conference focuses on women writers as art critics in the late Georgian and early Victorian period.

Tickets: £35; Students/Friends £30 (includes lunch and refreshments)

Writing Art: Women Writers as Art Critics in the Long Eighteenth Century

Chawton House Library, 25th February 2017

Long thought to be the domain of wealthy men, art criticism and connoisseurship underwent a transformation in the late Georgian period. This one-day conference focuses on women writers as art critics in the late Georgian and early Victorian period. Bringing together leading art historians and literary scholars on women’s writing and art criticism, speakers will draw on travel writing and private letters, on diaries and on novels by major English and French authors. We will explore the role of women writers in the emerging field of art history, their contribution to an evolving language of taste, and the problems of trespassing on once-male territory. Can we find in women’s writing a distinctly female voice that engages with the making and the experience of art?

This conference is held in conjunction with the National Gallery, London—which hosts, on the 10th November 2017, a conference on women as critics of Old Master paintings in the Victorian period—and the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

10.00 – 10:30: Registration and tea/coffee

10:30: Stephen Lloyd (Knowsley Hall)

Walking tour of portraits in the Chawton House Library collection.

11:30: Susanna Avery-Quash (National Gallery, London)

‘”I shall be truly proud if we succeed both in rescuing some examples, and in introducing them into England, where already there are a chosen few who adore them”: the contribution of Lady Eastlake and her women friends to a new taste for early Italian art in Britain’.

12:15 Lunch

1:15:  Emma Barker (Open University)
‘Statues and Pictures: Germaine de Staël on art’

2:00:  Isabelle Baudino (Ecole Normale Superieure, Lyon)
‘Women travellers as art critics in Continental Europe’

2:45 Tea

3:15:  Carl Thompson (St Mary’s, Twickenham)
‘Maria Graham as art critic and connoisseur’

4:00:  Departure

To buy tickets, please visit our website or call us on
01420 541010
www.chawtonhouselibrary.org

Funding for this conference is provided by Chawton House Library, the Women’s History Network, and the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

www.womenshistorynetwork.org

Registered UK Charity: 1118201

 

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Birkbeck 18th Century Group – Autumn Term 2016 Events

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group, Autumn 2016

Tuesday 29 November,

6.00-9.00,

Keynes Library

Dr Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, Oxford) ‘Magots and Pagodes: The Politics and Aesthetics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France’

Chaired by Dr Ann Lewis

[link to illustration:]

Abstract: In this paper, which is part of a larger project on Diderot’s materialisms, I focus on Diderot’s various writings on luxury and, in particular, on the numerous and rather remarkable references he makes to magots and pagodes, objects of chinoiserie, one of which can be seen, for instance, in Boucher’s Woman on a daybed (Frick, 1743).

Bio: Kate Tunstall is University Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College. She is the author of Blindness and Enlightenment (2011); she edited Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (2012); she and Caroline Warman translated Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau together for the open access multimedia edition, which won the 2014 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Prize for Best Digital Resource. Most recently, her and Katie Scott’s new edition and translation of Diderot’s Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre appeared in the Oxford Art Journal.

Birkbeck 18C Reading Group:

Wednesday 7 December

12.00-2.00, Keynes Library

Dr Katharina Boehme (Regensburg) will introduce Vetusta Monumenta (1747) and selections from Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum (1724).

http://dl.mospace.umsystem.edu/mu/islandora/object/mu%3A478

The session will consider three plates reproduced in Vetusta Monumenta, published by the Society of Antiquaries in 1747 in the first of seven volumes of large-scale, highly-finished copper-plate engravings of many different kinds of antiquities, printed between 1747 and 1906. The reading will consist of excerpts and illustrations from two works by William Stukeley (1687-1765). Stukeley was a leading figure in antiquarian debates in the first half of the eighteenth century and the Society of Antiquary’s first secretary. The publication of Itinerarium Curiosum (1724) marked the rise of the ‘domestic tour’ – a compound of travelogue, chorography and guidebook. Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the Druids (1740) presents the results of Stukeley’s fieldwork at Stonehenge and suggests that Stonehenge had been erected as a place of worship by ancient British druids.

Katharina Boehm is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Regensburg. Her main research interests are in British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the history of science. Her first monograph, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 2013. Her current project explores antiquarian cultures of the long eighteenth century and their impact on the novel and other contemporary prose genres such as the domestic tour and the historical romance. She is currently co-editing an annotated digital edition of the antiquarian plate book Vetusta Monumenta and a special issue of Word & Image entitled “Mediating the Materiality of the Past, 1700-1930”.

Contact Luisa Calè for the readings (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk)

 

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C18 and Dr Jacqueline Riding – Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion 23 June 2016

Jacobites

Please find below details of another event organised by the Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group. On Thursday 23rd June, 7-9pm, Dr. Jacqueline Riding will be talking about her new book, Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion, recently published by Bloomsbury. Dr. Riding is an alumna of the History of Art department at Birkbeck, and an Associate Research Fellow in the School of Arts. She will be joined in conversation by Dr. Sarah Fraser, whose biography of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, won the Saltire First Book Prize in 2012.

Please do join us to hear more about the Jacobites, have a glass of wine – and for a chance to pick up a copy of Jacqueline’s book at a discounted rate! (cash only)

best wishes,

Kate Retford, Luisa Cale, Ann Lewis and Emily Senior

Dr. Jacqueline Riding, Associate Research Fellow, School of Arts, Birkbeck College

Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion

in conversation with Dr. Sarah Fraser, chaired by Dr. Kate Retford

Thursday 23rd June, 7.00-9.00pm

Room G02, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD

Dr Jacqueline Riding, BA in History (Leicester), MA in History of Art (Birkbeck), PhD (York). Her thesis subject was the British painter Joseph Highmore (1692-1780).

Former curator at the Theatre Museum, Guards Museum and Palace of Westminster, and founding Director of the Handel House Museum, since 2005 she has worked as a consultant for Museum/Galleries and Historic Buildings, including Tate Britain, Historic Royal Palaces, Wilton’s Music Hall and Turner’s House Trust, and for feature films, including Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014), Colette (Wash Westmorland, pre-production) and Peterloo (Mike Leigh, 2018).

She publishes and lectures widely on early-Georgian art and history. Her current projects are the imagery of Charles Edward Stuart, and London’s Foundling Hospital. Her book Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion has just been published by Bloomsbury (2016).

Dr Sarah Fraser, BA in English (Bristol), PhD (Edinburgh). Her thesis subject was obscene Gaelic poetry by the foremost Jacobite poet, Alexander Macdonald (Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair).

Her first book, a biography of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat (c.1667-1747) entitled The Last Highlander: Scotland’s most notorious clan chief, rebel and double agent (HarperCollins 2012) won the Saltire First Book Prize in 2012. In April 2016, The Last Highlander shot to No.12 in the New York Times ebook Bestseller List, due to the appearance of Lord Lovat in Season 2 of the Starz hit series Outlander.

She has appeared on Radio and TV, including Highland Clans (BBC, 2013). Her second book, a biography of Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales (1594-1612), will be published by HarperCollins at the end of this year.

For further details, please contact Kate Retford: k.retford@bbk.ac.uk

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Birkbeck 18th Century Group – Summer 2016 Events

Public lecture:

Professor Melissa Percival, Artful Monkeys: The ‘Singeries’ of Marivaux
Tuesday 10 May, 6pm (30 Russell Square, Room 101)

Unashamedly ‘moderne’, Marivaux’s writing displays a heightened awareness of the practices of imitation. A complex yet coherent thematics of ‘singe’ and ‘singerie’ can be found in his theatre, journalism and fiction. In Marivaux’s universe Arlequin, that most simian of creatures, paradoxically embodies a powerful humanity. Singerie can be an exaggerated physical display of contorsion and grimace; but it is also a social practice, a frequently pernicious form of ingratiation. Equally it pertains to the author’s own vanities and machinations. In addition to Marivaux’s writings, this paper will make reference to Alfredo Arias’s controversial ‘monkey’ production of Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1986) and to the painted singeries of Marivaux’s contemporaries Watteau, Audran and Huet

Melissa Percival is Associate Professor in French, Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter.

All are very welcome!

For further information, please contact: Ann Lewis, a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

Reading Group:

Through the Microscope: Literature, Science, and Pornography

Tuesday 7 June 6.00-9.00 (30 Russell Sq, room 101)

Core Reading: ‘The Microscope’, Female Inconstancy Display’d in three Diverting Histories (1732), pp. 41-43. Text available on request.

Introduced by Tita Chico (University of Maryland), with responses From Katy Barrett (Royal Museums Greenwich), and Richard Dunn (Royal Museums Greenwich)

Tita Chico is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. She is currently working on Experimentalism: Literary Knowledge and Science in Eighteenth-Century Britain, a study of literary celebrations of and alternatives to the epistemology of experimental philosophy. She is the author of Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (2005), co-editor of Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment (2012), and editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, a University of Pennsylvania Press quarterly.

Katy Barrett is Curator o f pre-1800 Art, at Royal Museums Greenwich, a founder of the Things seminar at CRASSH in Cambridge, where she was part of the Board of Longitude Project, working on its cultural history through the lens of William Hogarth, on which she has published a Look First feature entitled ‘Looking for the Longitude’.

Richard Dunn is Senior Curator for the History of Science at Royal Museums Greenwich. He was co-curator of ‘Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude’, a major international touring exhibition shown at the National Maritime Museum in 2014 and now at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Between 2010 and 2015 he worked on the history of the Board of Longitude in collaboration with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge (www.rmg.co.uk/longitude). His publications include The Telescope: A Short History (2009) and Finding Longitude (2014, with Rebekah Higgitt).

For further information, please contact: Luisa Calè, l.cale@bbk.ac.uk

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18th Century Reading Group: Criminal Conversations 17th May 2016

Criminal Conversations

The third session of the London 18th-century postgraduate reading group on the theme ‘Resentment and Regard’ will be at 12.30 on Tuesday 17 May in Room 112, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H OPD.

‘Conjugal infidelity is become so general that is hardly considered as criminal; especially in the fashionable world […] this publication may perhaps effect what the law cannot: the transactions of the adulterer and the adulteress will, by being thus publickally circulated, preserve others from the like crimes, from the fear of shame, when the fear of punishment may have but little force’

Trials for Adultery, or, the History of Divorces (1779)

‘Definite rules can never apply to indefinite circumstances’

The Wrongs of Woman (1798)

‘Criminal conversation’ – a writ of trespass enabling a husband to sue his former wife’s lover for compensation – generated a body of literature which explored and exploited a conflicted relationship between sex and discourse, fact and fiction, right and freedom. This week’s reading, selected by Marianne Brooker (English & Humanities, Birkbeck),  presents two divergent responses to this aspect of tort law in the 1790s.

We will be discussing:

  • ‘Crim. Con. A Narrative of a Late Trial […] To which is Subjoined a Poetical Descant on Modern Incontinency; or, The Mysteries of Coaching Developed’ (1796), available from ECCO here https://goo.gl/hINh98 (pdf available on request).
  • Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, A Fragment (1798), available from the LSE Digital Library http://goo.gl/xkfnhb (vol. I) and http://goo.gl/Qr9fj6 (vol. II). We’ll focus the editor’s and author’s prefaces in volume one, and then on volume two, particularly passages at pp. 1, 28-69, 76-79, 81, 91, 112-128, 143-167.
  • Tilottama Rajan’s ‘Whose Text? Godwin’s Editing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman’, in her Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 174-214. Please get in touch with the organisers for a pdf of this chapter.

Participants are also welcome (but not required) to browse contemporary trial reports and bring along extracts to read and consider.

Topics for discussion might include: the civil and criminal, public and private; crime and punishment; speculation, observation and voyeurism; representation, advocacy, ventriloquism; uses and abuses of silence and eloquence; omission and excess; suffering and reparation; alienation and affection; participation and exclusion; textuality, typography and embodiment; sexuality, seduction and repulsion; epistolarity and the vehicular; influence and authority; curiosity and gratification.

For a pdf of Rajan’s chapter  – and of ‘Crim. Con.’, if you cannot access the pamphlet online through an institution – please contact the organisers, Robert Stearn (rstear01@mail.bbk.ac.uk) and James Morland (james.morland@kcl.ac.uk).

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Artful Monkeys: The ‘Singeries’ of Marivaux – Tuesday 10th May 2016

Professor Melissa Percival

Artful Monkeys: The ‘Singeries’ of Marivaux

6pm, Tuesday 10th May

Room 101, 30 Russell Square

Unashamedly ‘moderne’, Marivaux’s writing displays a heightened awareness of the practices of imitation. A complex yet coherent thematics of ‘singe’ and ‘singerie’ can be found in his theatre, journalism and fiction. In Marivaux’s universe Arlequin, that most simian of creatures, paradoxically embodies a powerful humanity. Singerie can be an exaggerated physical display of contorsion and grimace; but it is also a social practice, a frequently pernicious form of ingratiation. Equally it pertains to the author’s own vanities and machinations.

In addition to Marivaux’s writings, this paper will make reference to Alfredo Arias’s controversial ‘monkey’ production of Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1986) and to the painted singeries of Marivaux’s contemporaries Watteau, Audran and Huet.

All are very welcome! Do please pass this information onto anyone else who might be interested.

For further information, please contact Ann Lewis: a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

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Professor Tita Chico: ‘Aesthetics, Mediation, and Difference: British Literature and Science’ – 10th November

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group:

Lecture by Prof. Tita Chico, ‘Aesthetics, Mediation, and Difference: British Literature and Science’

6pm, Tuesday 10th November, Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square

The Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group is delighted to announce a forthcoming lecture by Tita Chico, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland.

Professor Chico is the author of Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (2005), and co-editor of Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment (2012), with Toni Bowers. She is also editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. This talk relates to her current book project, Experimentalism: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment.

For further information, please contact Ann Lewis: a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

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