Enfilade

From the University of Exeter:

Desiring Statues: Statuary, Sexuality, History
University of Exeter, 26–27 April 2012

A Wellcome Trust funded conference, hosted by the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to investigate how statuary intersects with questions of sexuality, and temporality, specifically history. It explores the numerous different ways in which statues – as historical and/or imagined artefacts – allow us to think about the past and its relation to sex, gender and sexuality. The conference brings together contributors from a variety of disciplines, including history, gender and sexuality studies, literary and cultural studies, art history, classics, archaeology and philosophy.

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P R O G R A M M E

Thursday, 26th April 2012

9.00  Registration

9.45  Welcome

10.00  Session 1
Panel 1: Gender and the Erotics of the Living Statue
•Beth Brunton (Queen Mary University of London), From Motherhood to Mannequin: Bodily Perfection in Good Morning Midnight
• Lynsey McCulloch (Anglia Ruskin University), ‘Why, did you think you had married a statue?’ The Erotics of Sculptural Motion in English Renaissance Drama
• Will McMorran (Queen Mary University of London), Made of Stone: Reading And Watching Sade’s ‘Eugénie de Franval’
Panel 2: Statues, Censorship and Nudity
• Julie Anne Godin Laverdière (Université du Québec à Montréal), The Arrest of The Family (1949) and the Destruction of The Peace (1951): The Reception of Two Indecent Sculptures in Montréal
• Linda Ann Nolan (John Cabot University and American University of Rome), Deadly Nudity and Xenophobia in St. Peter’s Basilica in Early Modern Rome: the reception of the figure of Justice on the Tomb of Pope Paul III
• Sophie Schoess (University College London), The Naked Truth: Ancient Greek Sculpture in the Face of Christian Censorship

11.30  B R E A K

12.00  Session 2
Panel 1: Statuary, Sexuality and Modernity
• Andrew Eschelbacher (University of Maryland), Gendering Modernity/Modernizing Masculinity
• Charles Miller (University of Manchester), The Sex of an Origin: Picasso, Freud, Glozel
• Bernard Vere (Sotheby’s Institute of Art), ‘A Token of Triumph Cut Down to Size: Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill as Fetish Object’
Panel 2: The Erotics of the Gaze: Interacting with Statuary Objects
• Sarah Jones (University of Exeter), ‘The Art of Love’: Religion, Sex, and the Tourist Gaze at the Temples of Khajuraho
• Amy Mechowski (Victoria and Albert Museum), ‘Britain’s Most Romantic Museum’ or a ‘Temple of Lust’?: Statuary, Lesbian Spectatorship and the V&A
• Lisa Trentin (Wilfrid Laurier University), The Sleeping Hermaphrodite: Desirous Viewing in Ancient and Eighteenth-Century Rome

13.30  L U N C H

14.30  Session 3
Panel 1: Desiring the Past: Eighteenth-Century Uses of Statuary
• Sarah Betzer (University of Virginia), Dangerous Admiration: Sculpture and Desire on the Grand Tour
•  Katharina Boehm (University of Regensburg), Desiring Antiques: Sir William Hamilton, Commercial Antiquarianism and the Cult of Priapus
• Elsje van Kessel (DFK, Paris and Leiden University), Longing for the Past: Eichendorff’s Marmorbild and the Lives and Deaths of Statues
• Katie McAfee (University of Cambridge), The Sexy Statue: Venus’ Body through Eighteenth-Century Eyes
Panel 2: Sculpting Gender and Sexual Norms in Antiquity and Beyond
• Linnea Åshede (University of Gothenburg), Hermaphroditos: Desired Object and Desiring Subject
• Glenys Davies (University of Edinburgh), The Gendered Body Language of Roman Portrait Statues
• Jane Draycott (British School at Rome), Determining Desirability: Aphrodite of Cnidus vs. Baubo of Eleusis
• Fabio Guidetti (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), “I am black, but comely” desire, sensuality and colour in Roman ideal statuary

16:30  B R E A K

17.00  Keynote Lecture by Dr. Ian Jenkins (Senior Curator, Ancient Greece at the British Museum), The Body Beautiful: The Human Body in Greek Art and Society

19.00  C O N F E R E N C E  D I N N E R

Friday 27th April 2012

9.00  Registration

9.30  Session 4
Panel 1: Statuary (Im)Possibilities of Desire
• June Dunn (Eastern Connecticut State University), Statuesque Landscape: The Cailleach and the Topolatry of Desire in Colm Tóibín’s “A Long Winter”
• Sarah Parker (University of Birmingham), ‘Which is the god, / which is the stone / the god takes for his use?’: H.D. and Bryher’s Sculptural Exchanges
• Ery Shin (University of Oxford) “She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden”: Nightwood’s Robin Vote, Impossible Object Desire, and the Culture/Nature Binary
Panel 2: Sculptural (In)Decency
• Catriona MacLeod (University of Pennsylvania), Flirting with Sculptural Indecency: The Realist Psyche
• Melissa Percival (University of Exeter), Angelina Jolie as a Breastfeeding Muse: The Nude Female Portrait in Context
• Linda Walsh (The Open University), Houdon’s Winter and the Problematic Sexuality of Youth

11.00  B R E A K

11.30  Session 5
Panel 1: Agalmatophilia
• Jane Fae (Independent Scholar) “Agalmatophilia” as Paraphilia
• Caterina Y. Pierre, (Kingsborough Community College, CUNY), The Pleasure and Piety of Touch in Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Tomb of Victor Noir
• Shawn O’Bryhim (Franklin & Marshall College), In the Footsteps of the Greek Agalmatophiliacs
• Lise Wajeman (Aix‐Marseille Université), The Erotic Power of Sculpture and the Question of Artistic Superiority: Agalmatophilia and the Paragone during the Sixteenth Century
Panel 2: Statuary and Science
• Richard Brown (University of Leeds), “Silent veining…drinking electricity”: The Bodies of Statues in Joyce
• Melissa Haynes (University of Wisconsin, Madison),  A Unique Anthropometry: Measuring the Venus de Milo and a Rationality of Desire
• Alice McEwan (University of Hertfordshire), Mythological Sculpture at the Service of Eugenicist Desire in the early
Twentieth Century: the Case of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Living Statues’
• Guillermo de Eugenio Pérez (Carlos III University of Madrid), Wax Dolls and the Dream of Asepsis

13.30  L U N C H

14.30  Session 6
Panel 1: Statuary, Colonialism and Nation
• Cora Gilroy‐Ware (University of Bristol), “The Fragment of the Negro’s Chest”: Benjamin Robert Haydon and the Black Body
• James Hargrove (Roanoke College), Paris 1900: Bodies of National Identity
• Gráinne O’Connell (University of Sussex), Embodying the Nation; Emancipated Ex-Slave Statues in Jamaica’s Emancipation Park and the Jamaican Afro-Creole Nationalist Project
Panel 2: Metamorphosis, Materiality and Desire
• Vito Adriaensens (School of Arts, University College, Ghent) and Steven Jacobs (University of Ghent), Mysteries of the Wax Museum: Eros, Thanatos and Sculpture in American Cinema
• Katie Faulkner (Courtauld Institute of Art), Metamorphosis in Sexuality and Sculpture in the Nineteenth century: G.F. Watt’s Clytie, 1868-78
• Ashley Hannebrink (University College London), Stone and Flesh in Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Galantes

16.00  B R E A K

16.30  Keynote Lecture by Dr Stefano Evangelista (Fellow and Tutor in English, Trinity College, University of Oxford), Title TBC

17.30 Closing remarks

Please note that the programme might be subject to minor changes due to unforeseeable circumstances.