Colloquium | Horace Walpole and His Legacies
Next week at Durham University:
Horace Walpole and His Legacies: A Tercentenary Colloquium
Durham Castle, 5 May 2017
Organized by Fiona Robertson
An informal gathering with presentations, discussion, and a workshop, as part of Durham’s series of events marking the tercentenary of the birth of Horace Walpole—novelist, playwright, designer, collector, and letter-writer extraordinaire. Friday, 5 May 2017, 10.00–14.00 in the Senate Suite, Durham Castle. This event is free of charge, and a working lunch will be provided. Participants are asked to register their interest in advance by emailing fiona.robertson@durham.ac.uk.
Presentations
• Peter N. Lindfield, Walpole’s Paper House
• Dale Townshend, Walpole, Enchantment, and the Legacy of The Castle of Otranto
• Serena Trowbridge, Teaching Gothic: Walpole’s Shadows
Workshop
• Stephen Regan, Reading Walpole’s Letters
New Book | Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum
Happy National Arbor Day!
Distributed for the Bodleian Library by The University of Chicago Press:
Stephen Harris, Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum: A Brief History (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2017), 144 pages, ISBN: 978 18512 44652, £15 / $25.
The Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest surviving botanic garden in Britain, occupying the same location in central Oxford since 1621. Designed as a nursery for growing medicinal plants amid the turmoil of the civil war, and nurtured through the restoration of the monarchy, it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a curious past.
This book tells the story of the garden through accounts of each of its keepers, tracing their work and priorities, from its founding keeper, Jacob Bobart, through to the early nineteenth-century partnership of gardener William Baxter and academic Charles Daubeny, who together gave the garden its greenhouse and ponds and helped ensure its survival to the present. Richly illustrated, this book offers a wonderful introduction to a celebrated Oxford site.
Stephen A. Harris is the Druce Curator of the Oxford University Herbaria and a University Research Lecturer. He is the author, most recently, of What Have Plants Ever Done for Us?, also published by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Call for Papers | Building the Scottish Diaspora
From the conference website:
Building the Scottish Diaspora: Scots and the Colonial Built Environment, 1700–1920
University of Edinburgh, 17–18 November 2017
Proposals due by 24 July 2017
This symposium takes as a point of departure, colonial cultures of Scottish entrepreneurship operating and building in the hemispheres of the Atlantic and the India-Pacific from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It seeks contributions that explore Scottish traders, merchants, agents, missionaries and others influential in colonial arenas of the Atlantic and India-Pacific ‘worlds’, especially within the analytical frameworks of regional, oceanic, and World/Global historiography, methods of cultural and historical geography, as well as economic and business history. We are interested in research that maps diasporic networks—familial, professional, entrepreneurial, religious etc.—and their material presence with a view to better understanding the significance of Scottish modes of operation, particularly (but not exclusively) those that demonstrate their achievement as entrepreneurs in a networked, international environment. In sum, we seek a range of disciplinary perspectives on the spatial and material dimensions of Scottish entrepreneurship in the colonial arena.
Related questions include (but are not limited to): how do we begin to understand the particular Scottish contribution to the colonial built environment, and why is it important? Does reference to a ‘British’ empire in this context too readily encourage coagulation, even confusion, especially where clear ethnic predominance was seen to occur? And how might architecture have been used to forge, or even dissolve, distinctive forms of Scottishness within the wider limits of British identity? Please send paper abstracts of no more than 300 words, plus a brief bio of 150 words, to buildscotdiaspora@gmail.com by 24 July 2017.
Conference | Allegory after 1789
From the Workshop des Kunstgeschichtlichen Instituts der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main:
Allegorie nach 1789: Kritik und Transformation
Museum Giersch der Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 19 May 2017
Workshop des Kunstgeschichtlichen Instituts der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in Kooperation mit eikones NFS Bildkritik, Universität Basel
Die Allegorie als künstlerische und literarische Form sah sich im Laufe des 18. Jahrhunderts vielfacher Kritik ausgesetzt, wobei die Vorwürfe von ihrer Abwertung als dunkel und unverständlich bis zur Diskreditierung als rein willkürlicher Modus der Bedeutungsproduktion reichen. Mit dem folgenreichsten Ereignis des 18. Jahrhunderts, der Französischen Revolution, gewannen diese kritischen Spannungen an verschärfter Aktualität. Angesichts der umwälzenden Ereignisse und der zunehmenden Schwierigkeit, diese historisch sinnfällig zu deuten, erlebte die Allegorie als Mittel der semantischen Stabilisierung jedoch auch eine Wiederbelebung sowohl in der Malerei wie insbesondere in der Druckgraphik.
Der Workshop beschäftigt sich mit der Wiederaufnahme der Allegorie, ihrer kritischen Debatte während und nach der Revolution und der transformierenden Kraft, die diese Kritik entfaltete. Dabei steht nicht nur die Frage nach der kunsthistorischen Bedeutung der ›Sattelzeit‹ um 1800 zur Diskussion, sondern mehr noch die Relevanz vormoderner Formen der malerischen und literarischen Sinnstiftung unter den Bedingungen moderner Autonomieästhetik. Nicht zuletzt entstehen mit der Transformation der Allegorie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert auch neue Lektüretechniken der Kunstkritik und schließlich der Kunstgeschichte, die an die Technik der Allegorese anknüpfen. Kontakt: Gabriel Hubmann, hubmann@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de.
P R O G R A M M
10:00 Ralph Ubl/Barbara Wittmann, Begrüßung
10:15 Gabriel Hubmann, Die Problematik der Allegorie in der französischen Bildproduktion um 1800
11:30 Barbara Wittmann, Allegorie und die Launen der Einbildungskraft nach Anne-Louis Girodet
12:45 Mittagessen
14:30 Ralph Ubl, Allegorien einer Allegorie? Delacroix’ Die Freiheit führt das Volk (1830) in den Salons von 1838 und 1845
15:45 Philipp Ekardt, Post-Pygmalionisch, Fast-Allegorisch: Körperfigurationen bei Eichendorff und Goethe
17:00 Pause
17:30 Regine Prange, Respondenz
18:30 Abendvortrag: Philippe Bordes, The Allegorical Imagination in French Painting around 1800: Poetic Invention versus Political Service
Enfilade 
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