Here you can find details of all previous Forum events, from our inauguration in January 2012 up until our last term’s programme. Events are listed chronologically, with the newest events first. Please click through the page links below for older listings. Recordings and event reports, where available, are published here along with abstracts: simply click on the event titles to display information.
What were the opportunities and limitations in late nineteenth-century Paris for artists (broadly defined) who were not white and male?
The first of two linked events exploring these questions brings together research presentations and roundtable discussion in response to passages from art historian Emily C. Burns’s book-in-progress, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Burns analyzes how the encounters in the French capital reshaped American culture, fuelled by the idea that the US had no culture, no history, and no tradition. The sections were pre-circulated to participants and will be briefly summarized at the start of the Feb 26 event.
Speakers
Peter Gibian (Associate Professor of English, McGill University).
Title: ‘”Elle s’affiche”: Women Performers Pushing the Limits—Daisy Miller, Virginie Gautreau [Mme. X], Isadora Duncan’.
Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Art History, American University).
Title: ‘Rodin and Hanako: Behind the Mask’.
Renée Ater (Provost Visiting Professor, Africana Studies, Brown University).
Title: ‘Meta Vaux Warrick in Paris, 1899-1902’.
What were the opportunities and limitations in late nineteenth-century Paris for artists (broadly defined) who were not white and male?
The first of two linked events exploring these questions brings together research presentations and roundtable discussion in response to passages from art historian Emily C. Burns’s book-in-progress, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Burns analyzes how the encounters in the French capital reshaped American culture, fuelled by the idea that the US had no culture, no history, and no tradition. The sections were pre-circulated to participants and will be briefly summarized at the start of the Feb 26 event.
Speakers
Emily C. Burns (Associate Professor of Art History, Auburn University / Terra Foundation Visiting Professor, University of Oxford).
Title: ‘Introduction: Race, Gender and Intermedia Art Practice in Transnational Paris, c. 1900’
Adrienne L. Childs (Associate, The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University).
Title: ‘Cordier’s Caryatids: Laboring Black Bodies and the Sumptuous Second Empire Interior’.
Susan Waller (Professor Emerita, Department of Art & Design, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Adjunct Professor of Art History, Maine College of Art).
Title: ‘Muslim Models in Nineteenth-century Paris’.
Kirsten Pai Buick (Professor of Art History, University of New Mexico).
Title: ‘Don’t Look Back: African and African Diasporic Entanglements with France’.
This event brings together academic researchers and museum professionals in a shared exploration of major Victorian cultural figures, the houses they inhabited, and the objects that survive them.
This paper uses research from the ‘Piston, Pen & Press’ project to discuss the enormous popularity of inspirational, motivating verse, a genre usually critically disregarded. It examines the role such poetry played in the cultures of working-class self-improvement and mutual improvement, for both working-class writers and readers.
Prof Kirstie Blair is the author of numerous articles/chapters and three books on Victorian poetry and its wider impacts on Victorian culture: her latest study, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press and Community, has just been published by OUP. She is the PI on a 2-year AHRC project, ‘Piston, Pen & Press: Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace’, on which she works closely with a number of industrial heritage museums and creative partners. She is currently running a series of MOOCs on ‘Working Lives’, exploring the history of Victorian workers on the railways, in coal-mining, and in textile factories and mills.
Keynote speaker: Professor Hilary Marland (Warwick). This interdisciplinary symposium will examine the myriad ways that women gained, exchanged, and recorded medical knowledge during the period 1750-1850 including through correspondence, manuscript circulation, domestic cookery books, publication, and apprenticeship. Speakers include:
Dr Erin Spinney (Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford)
‘Seniority, Experience, and On-the-job Training at British Naval Hospitals 1775-1815’
Janette Bright (Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
‘Women Advisers to the Foundling Hospital Governors’
Dr Alexis Wolf (Birkbeck, University of London)
‘Self-Education and Mentoring in the Domestic Medical Texts of Margaret Mason, Lady Mount Cashell’
Abstract: This event marks the launch of the History of British Women’s Writing, 1830-1880, issue 6 of Palgrave’s The History of British Women’s Writing series. It features a Panel discussion with Professor Lucy Hartley, Dr Flore Janssen, Professor Cora Kaplan and Dr Jenny Kohn.
Abstract: This event focuses on the rise of autobiography as a commercial genre during the first half of the nineteenth century which was, in its way, one of the decisive developments of the Victorian period in England.
Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies marks the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth with two papers that examine his reception in Victorian Britain. Prof. Michael Robertson (The College of New Jersey) will be giving a paper on “A Male World of Love and Ritual: Walt Whitman’s Bolton Disciples” and Linda Freeman (UCL) will be giving a paper on “Prophets of Democracy? Blake and Whitman.”
Abstract: The first ‘scratch’ showing of a collaborative performance project that originates in the work of the late nineteenth-century ghost story writer, aesthetic theoretician and queer thinker, Vernon Lee. This project’s guide is an extraordinary Victorian woman who, over one hundred years ago asked ‘[w]hat is a work of art? What does it do for us, or rather do with us?’ This performance piece used Lee’s experimental practices as recorded in Gallery Diaries in which she meticulously charts her experiences of looking at art. With Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson as guides, you were invited to explore the body’s unknown territories to re-think, re-feel, and re-imagine art, beauty and ugliness. There performance offered gallery and museum visitors a blueprint for an experience of art – what our bodies do to art, and what art does to and with our bodies.
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Abstract: Supported by the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund and the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. In In Darkest London (1891), Margaret Harkness’s popular novel about activism to alleviate poverty conditions in late nineteenth-century London, a doctor practising in a slum neighbourhood speaks of the ‘disease of caring’ that prompts him to give medical care to people in need of much wider social change. Both her own career and the fictional doctor in her novel reflect how, as medical care became increasingly professionalised over the course of the nineteenth century, discourses of medicine, social influence, and activism also grew interlinked. From the radical revisions of care provision developed by nurses such as Mary Seattle and Florence Nightingale during and after the Crimean War, to the widening of access to safe and effective birth control by activists from Annie Besant to Marie Stopes, to the founding of the NHS, to protests of junior doctors in the present day, the giving of medical care has often been a radical act, and givers of medical care have often allied themselves with a wide range of activist causes. This one-day symposium aimed to create a dialogue between examples and intentions of medical activists historically and in the present day.
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Abstract: In 1994 Laurel Brake published Subjugated Knowledges, a groundbreaking collection of essays on aspects of the Victorian periodical press that, as she combatively claimed in the introduction, highlighted the struggle between literature and a subjugated form of knowledge, journalism. Her enterprise is characterised by a concern to “desubjugate” knowledge, to critique what we think we know and how we know it, and how, in particular, assumptions about media form colour perceptions of what truth might be. With the coming of the digital age, print culture has taken on a new visibility as a field and Laurel’s interests in print have been informed by her work on the re-mediation of the historical press into digital forms, and on new tools for reading. This study day, organised by Birkbeck and the University of Greewich was dedicated to the effects of Laurel’s work on desubjugation of knowledge, to the politics of truth, and to the art of critique as voluntary insubordination.
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Abstract: The collision of the sublime and the ethical is as unavoidable as the political crises that make us attend to antique ruins with sudden and renewed urgency. This presentation addresses the difficulty of reaching a perspective on damaged objects—a challenge that is both methodological and conceptual. The Comte de Volney’s memorable evocation of Palmyra in his widely influential Reflections on the Revolutions of Empires (1791) and John Ruskin’s searching reflections on the power of ruins and the creative drives of modernity in Modern Painters (1843-1861) offer an opportunity to explore the implications of a question that has never been more pressing: is the surveying of damage always only synonymous with overlooking it? Responding to the acute pressures of a not too-distant past, Volney and Ruskin enjoin us to consider how looking over ruins might become a new mode of seeing. The much publicized situation of antiquities at risk in zones of conflict, and the challenges posed by the movements of displaced peoples in (and out of) those same regions make it all the more vital for us to understand the ethics of over-looking.
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Abstract: Trooper George’s shooting gallery turned refuge in Dickens’s Bleak House encourages us to think about the interleaving of military and domestic cultures in mid-Victorian Britain. I take George and his shooting gallery community as representative of the Victorian investment in domesticating the military man. At the same time soldiers themselves made strenuous efforts to forge connections between their military and home identities, often using art and craft to keep in touch with family and friends and to emphasise shared skills and experiences. After a Dickens prologue, this paper focuses on my research for the current exhibition ‘Created in Conflict: British Soldier Art from the Crimean War to Today’, exploring continuities in the emotional work of soldier art and considering the ways in which soldiers’ creativity can be deployed to make us feel both better and worse about war.
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Abstract: Literary theories of the anthropocene contend that textual representations of effects that exceed the temporal and spatial scale of human perception necessitate genres other than realism—Wai Chee Dimock and Mark McGurl turn to epic, science fiction, and horror. These genres, for McGurl, “set themselves the task of scaling our vision dramatically up or down or both, blasting through ordinary perception to the most surprising vistas we can imagine.” Realism, here, is the outmoded genre aligned with ordinary perception—and, following Lukàcs, with the scale of the individual human life. However, this paper argues that the resources of realism and especially of omniscient narrative for documenting the expansive timescales of environmental crisis have been underestimated. If we take realism not as the deceptive production of the world that affirms a conservative, anthropocentric empiricism, but as a genre that constantly reflects upon its own procedures for securing concrete knowledge and questions the limitations of situated knowledge, its capacity to make crisis perceptible becomes clearer. In Harry Shaw’s words, realism “involves a movement between positions in and above a given historical moment” in order to “[i]nsist that certain mental procedures are needed to make sense of those substantial aspects of the world it selects as significant.” Temporal dislocation, Cohn argues, enables reflection on how perspective authorizes perception, and especially on the kinds of insight available from a non-individual point of view. Omniscient narrative involves several distinct modalities: probing the situated knowledge of characters; inhabiting the historicizing, distanced ken of an extra-diegetic, supra-human narrator; and voicing a collective point of view. By moving among these divergent modalities that do not take situatedness or individual perspective for granted, realist narrative becomes provocatively untimely.
Cohn examines temporal dislocations in realist depictions of environmental crisis, emphasizing that novelists expand what narratologists call “narrating time” by shifting among these modalities in parallel and embedded clauses, suggesting that dilation and expansion are the “mental procedures” that substantialize seemingly inaccessible scales of experience. With this narratological method, she considers two realist accounts of flood, where conditions much exacerbated by human intervention render long-term crises as immediate emergencies in which the “narrating” moment becomes especially protracted: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004). Though written at very different moments in the history of climate crisis, these novels similarly showcase realism’s capacity to make diffuse crisis perceptible in the expanded present by inhabiting, dislocating, and reflecting upon multiple points of view—without disavowing a shared sense of history, or giving up on the hope of a shared world.
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About the publication:
The power of flash photography to shine a light upon life’s dark corners.
Flash! presents a fascinating cultural history of flash photography, from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. All photography requires light, but the light of flash photography is quite distinctive: artificial, sudden, shocking, intrusive, and extraordinarily bright. Associated with revelation and wonder, it has been linked to the sublimity of lightning. Yet it has also been reviled: it’s inseparable from anxieties about intrusion and violence, it creates a visual disturbance, and its effects are often harsh and create exaggerated contrasts.
Examining the work of professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, photographers of crime and of wildlife, the volume builds a picture of flash’s place in popular culture, and its role in literature and film. It looks at flash’s distinct aesthetics, examines how paparazzi chase celebrities, how flash is intimately linked to crime, how flash has been used to light up – and interrupt – countless family gatherings, how flash can ‘stop time’ allowing one to photograph rapidly moving objects or freeze in a strobe, and it considers the biggest flash of all, the atomic bomb.
Generously illustrated throughout, Flash! brings out the central role of this medium to the history of photography and challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.
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Abstract: In the winter of 2019-20 Tate Britain will be staging a major survey exhibition of the art of William Blake (1757-1827). It will be the latest in a succession of exhibitions which have presented Blake to the general public, including the Tate’s own shows in 2001 and 1978, and seminal earlier projects in 1876, 1927 and 1947. Blake himself was an exhibitor, most importantly with his one-man show of 1809, but also contributing to mixed exhibitions at a number of points in his career, lastly in 1812. Tate curator Martin Myrone will reflect on this history of exhibition, as a way of thinking about Blake’s shifting status and reputation among the public, as an engine of change in curatorial and scholarly thinking, and as a decisive influence on the artist’s place in the cultural canon. He will also set out the thinking behind the forthcoming show, which will seek engage with this history of exhibition as well as presenting a comprehensive view of this much-loved and much-scrutinized artist.
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About the publication: Novel Politics aims to change the current consensus of thinking about the nineteenth-century novel. This assumes that the novel is structured by bourgeois ideology and morality, so that its default position is conservative and hegemonic. Such critique comes alike from Marxists, readers of nineteenth-century liberalism, and critics making claims for the working-class novel, and systematically under-reads democratic imaginations and social questioning in novels of the period.
Among texts discussed, six novels of illegitimacy, from Jane Austen to Scott to George Eliot and George Moore, stand out because illegitimacy, with its challenge to social norms, is a test case for the novelist, and a growing point of the democratic imagination.
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Abstract: ‘Queer British Art 1861–1967’ is the first exhibition dedicated to British LGBTQ art, and marks the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England. Clare Barlow, the exhibition’s curator, introduces nineteenth-century art and artists featured in the exhibition.
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Abstract: Thomas Martin Wheeler’s fine picaresque novel Sunshine and Shadow was published in the Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star between March 1849 and January 1850. This paper explores how the novel seeks to occupy a space of radicalism at a transitional moment in the history of Chartism. I suggest that its innovation derives from its profoundly ambivalent relationship to place: if the novel – as a genre – conventionally works to provide its readers with an imagined place to live in, the dilemma for Wheeler is that there is no satisfactory place in which to live in the class-ridden, impoverished, and ‘artificial’ conditions of industrial Britain. In understanding this, I suggest, we understand both the novel’s political and its aesthetic principles. And to do this, we need to consider the novel embedded in the pages of the Northern Star. Reading the novel in this context shows that it entered into a discursive arena preoccupied with two issues. The first is emigration: there is talk of it everywhere, and plenty of evidence of the sheer number of people moving to the colonies at this time. And second, Land Nationalisation, and specifically the Chartist Land Plan. I develop the novel’s response to each of these topics. Locating the novel thus enables us to see how Wheeler’s writing about place provides him with an idiom in which to imagine a democratic future.
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Abstract: This paper focuses on the chromatic anachronism of William Burges’s Great Bookcase (1859-62, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) which was first exhibited in the Medieval Court of the 1862 International Exhibition. Modelled on a surviving piece of polychrome French Gothic furniture, and painted by no fewer than 14 promising artists (including Edward Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon), it represents the Pagan and Christian origins of art and yet some of the colours used were modern pigments devised by an expanding chemical industry. A fellow exhibitor of painted furniture at the Medieval Court, William Morris shared a similar passion for medieval France, which his early poetry construed as a golden age, contrasting with the bleakness of the industrial present. However some of his poems also introduce effects of chromatic disjunction and anachronism, notably in ‘Golden Wings’, which H.H. Statham analysed in 1897 as ‘characteristic of a decorator poet’, quoting the expression ‘red brick lip’ as ‘a sign of the times’ rather than of the architecture of the age of Chrétien de Troyes. Drawing on the complex description and inscription of these shifting chromatic materialities, I wish to show how the convergence of Victorian debates on ancient forms of polychromy and the colours of industrial modernity shaped Morris’s and Burges’s early poetic and artistic practice.
Respondent: Matthew Winterbottom (Ashmolean Museum)
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Speaker: Steve Edwards is Professor of History and Theory of Photography in the Department of Art History at Birkbeck. His publications include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006) and Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012). His work has been translated into 11 languages and he is an editor of Oxford Art Journal and the Historical Materialism book series.
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Abstract: This talk explores some of the many links between sculpture, writing and dance in fin-de-siècle Paris through a study of Arthur Symons’s involvement with the works of Auguste Rodin and avant-garde dance as represented by Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan. As spatial arts, engaging in and exploring three-dimensional space, sculpture and dance impinge on the physical space of the spectator. Although one art is solid and static, the other evanescent and ephemeral, the approximations between the two arts were many at the turn of the century. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 became the epicentre for the display of the moving body, whether as modern machine with sophisticated stage effects or as erotic bodies captured in drawing, photography, and sculpture.
Respondent: Alexandra Gerstein (Courtauld Gallery)
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Abstract: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA) is currently working on a reconstruction of the two criminal trials that resulted in Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment. This talk is part of this work and explores three interrelated scandals involving homosexual blackmail, male prostitution, and music-hall and drag culture from 1894 to 1897.
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Abstract: Writer and academic Vybarr Cregan-Reid (University of Kent) discusses his new book, Footnotes: How Running Makes us Human (Ebury Press, 2016), a literary and philosophical study of running and modern life. He will read from a chapter about why so many people dislike running in a gym, and how the treadmill began its life as the harshest form of punishment short of the death penalty, endured by many, including Oscar Wilde.
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Abstract: This panel discussed the joys and challenges of collecting, curating, preserving and researching the Victorians. Panelists include Jan Marsh, Elizabeth Heath, Katty Pearce, Caroline Smith, and Ruth Macdonald.
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Abstract: Arctic archives, broken lands, and Victorian relics are some of the topics our panelists discussed in this exciting event, which marked the publication of Adriana Craciun’s Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
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Abstract: The Dalziel Brothers were the dominant London wood engraving firm of the Victorian period. They had enormous cultural power at a key moment in history, and their output of around 54,000 prints published from 1839 to 1893 included everything from Dickens and Trollope illustrations to fitness manuals and Cadbury’s adverts. They produced many of the landmark images of the century, engraving all of John Tenniel’s designs for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books of 1865 and 1871, as well as numerous Pre-Raphaelite illustrations to Edward Moxon’s landmark edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857).
In this paper I investigate the role of the Victorian wood engraver and their business of artistically producing someone else’s lines. Is this mechanics, or creation? From drawing to autograph, the line is a powerful element of the way we understand artistic identity. The line is essential to aesthetics; without it there can be no boundary, no form, no artwork. Curling into letters and forms, the line connects writing and the image. An expressive gesture, the line is what links the body of the artist – their hands and eyes in particular – with the artwork as object. Mainstream Victorian wood engravers such as Dalziel had the job of creating another person’s line, and according to common beliefs about artistic identity and work, this is a paradox, which undermines many of our assumptions about what lines mean in art. My aim here is to explore Dalziel’s activity of making the other’s line, and to find a new method for understanding the wood engraver’s supposedly mechanical labour in relation to the imaginative and figurative artwork it produced. I think through the unique kind of authorship this involved, examining the wood engraver as line-maker, self-portraitist, signatory, stylist, and as (disembodied) hand and eye for hire.
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Abstract: This seminar, presented in collaboration with the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck, explored the new material Martha Weiss discovered while researching the current must-see exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, marking the bicentenary of the birth of Julia Margaret Cameron, 150 years after she first exhibited her work there. Colin Ford has worked extensively on this important photographer, most notably in the comprehensive catalogue Julia Margaret Cameron: Complete Photos (Getty, 2002).
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Sandy Welch (Screenwriter, 1998 BBC TV adaptation)
Mike Walker (Writer, 2009 BBC R4 adaptation)
Jeremy Mortimer (Producer, 2009 BBC R4 adaptation)
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More information on the exhibition can be found here.
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Abstract (Victoria Mills): Described by Henry James as an essential piece of ‘intellectual equipment’ for the tourist, The Marble Faun has been used as a guide to Rome ever since the date of its first publication in 1860. This paper will explore how the novel was repackaged for a late-Victorian tourist audience by the Leipzig publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz and Co. Tauchnitz seized an opportunity to profit from the burgeoning British and American tourist market in Italy by producing unbound editions of novels and travel guides set in Italy including The Marble Faun, which was the most popular edition. These books contained blank spaces onto which tourists could paste photographs or postcards relating to scenes in the text. Next to Hawthorne’s description of the Faun of Praxiteles, for example, visitors would paste or, in some cases, tip into the binding, a photograph of the sculpture. In the first half of the paper, I consider this form of extra-illustration as a touristic practice, exploring the relationship between the Tauchnitz volumes as embodied texts and the embodied aspects of Victorian tourism. Secondly, I will consider the links between extra-illustration as a practice involving both hand and eye and the discourse of tactility evident in Hawthorne’s ekphrastic writing, arguing that both are part of a broader nineteenth-century narrative of corporeal aesthetic response. Lastly I will speculate on a particular mode of sepulchral touch that dominates the novel, asking how it might link to the idea of these books as repositories for the dead hand.
Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck), Victoria Mills (Cambridge)
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Part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2014