Enfilade

This collection of essays (published by The Getty in February) includes a chapter by Giovanna Ceserani on “Antiquarian Transformations in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” pp. 317–42.

Alain Schnapp with Lothar von Falkenhausen, Peter N. Miller, and Tim Murray, eds., World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014), 464 pages, 
ISBN: 978-1606061480, $60.

The term antiquarianism refers to engagement with the material heritage of the past—an engagement that preceded the modern academic discipline of archaeology. Antiquarian activities result in the elaboration of particular social behaviors and the production of tools for exploring the collective memory. This book is the first to compare antiquarianism in a global context, examining its roots in the ancient Near East, its flourishing in early modern Europe and East Asia, and its manifestations in nonliterate societies of Melanesia and Polynesia. By establishing wide-reaching geographical and historical perspectives, the essays reveal the universality of antiquarianism as an embodiment of the human mind and open new avenues for understanding the representation of the past, from ancient societies to the present.

Alain Schnapp is professor of classical archaeology at the Université Paris I–Panthéon-Sorbonne and director of the Institut d’études avancées (IEA-Paris). Lothar von Falkenhausen is professor of Chinese archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Peter N. Miller is professor of modern history and dean of the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, New York. Tim Murray is professor of archaeology and dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at La Trobe University, Melbourne.

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From the Department of Classics at Stanford University:

Giovanna Ceserani works on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. She is interested in the role that Hellenism and Classics played in the shaping of modernity and, in turn, in how the questions we ask of the classical past originate in specific modern cultural, social and political contexts.

Her book Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology appeared from Oxford University Press in 2012. Her current book project concerns the emergence of modern histories of ancient Greece; she is now also writing on the transformations of antiquarianism in the eighteenth century and on modern travels to ancient lands. Her interest in travel is engaging new digital approaches with a focus on the Grand Tour for the Stanford digital humanities project Mapping the Republic of Letters.