Spring Lectures in Book History at Columbia
Spring Sessions of the Book History Colloquium at Columbia
Columbia University, 523 Butler Library, New York, 6:00-7:30pm
The Book History Colloquium at Columbia University, open to any discipline, aims to provide a broad outlet for the scholarly discussion of book history, print culture, the book arts, and bibliographical research, and (ideally) the promotion of research and publication in these fields. Our presenters include Columbia faculty members and advanced graduate students, scholars of national prominence from range of institutions.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Thierry Rigogne (History Department, Fordham University), “Writing About Coffee, Reading In Cafés: Literature and Coffeehouses in Early Modern France”
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Michael Suarez (Professor of English and Director of Rare Book School, University of Virginia), “The Two Futures of Book History”
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Mark Dimunation (Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress), TBA
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Ivan Lupic (Department of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University), “Shakespeare, Milton, and the Battle of the Books”
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Russell Marat (Printer, Book Artist, and Designer), “Notes of an Alphabetical Fetishist: Lettered in Rome”
Margaret Grasselli Speaks on Sunday
This Sunday at 2pm, in conjunction with the exhibition of French drawings in Washington, Margaret Grasselli will deliver the lecture Playing Favorites: A Personal Selection of French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art. For details of the exhibition, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800.
For more information, click here»
CAA Registration: The Last Week for Best Rates
The 2010 College Art Association conference takes place in Chicago, February 10-13, at the Hyatt Regency. The discounted ‘early registration’ rates end December 11 — after which the regular conference rate for CAA members jumps from $155 to $225 (the on-site rate is even higher at $270). Click here to register online. HECAA will be represented by two terrific-looking panels:
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New Scholars: Transforming Traditions in Eighteenth-Century Art
Chair: Laura Auricchio (Parsons The New School for Design)
Thursday, February 11, 12:30-2:00; Grand CD South, Gold Level, East Tower, Hyatt Regency
- Ryan White (independent scholar, Toronto), “Vision, Display, and Information: Chardin as Tapissier”
- Lyrica Taylor (University of Maryland, College Park), “Portrait of the Artist: John Francis Rigaud’s Vision of the Role of the Artist in Eighteenth-Century England”
- Hector Reyes (Northwestern University), “Classicism’s Secret Histories: On Jean-Germain Drouais’s Christ and the Canaanite”
- Amber Ludwig (Boston University), “Emma Hamilton as Grand Tourist”
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Representing the Psyche in Eighteenth-Century Art
Chair: Michael Yonan (University of Missouri, Columbia)
Thursday, February 11, 2:30-5:00; Grand A, Gold Level, East Tower, Hyatt Regency
- Heather McPherson (University of Alabama, Birmingham), “Thinking Heads: Representing Mental Activity in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture”
- Emma Barker (Open University), “Figures of Pathos: Melancholy and Interiority in Late-Eighteenth-Century Art”
- Thomas Beachdel (Graduate Center, City University of New York), “Awestruck: Claude-Joseph Vernet and the French Sublime”
- Yuriko Jackall (Université de Lyon 2), “Divas, Nymphs, and Fallen Maidens: Greuze’s Experiments in Expression”
- Barrett Kalter (University of Wisconisn, Milwauke), “Romantic Stained Glass and the Formation of a Neomedieval Consciousness”
Tracing Ownership at the British Library
Provenance Research in the British Library
British Library, London, Monday, 25 January 2010, 2:15 pm
Launch event for the publication of Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections, edited by Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2009).
Dispersed along the shelves of the British Library today are many volumes that once stood side by side in private libraries. Libraries within the Library explores some of the most important printed collections which have been brought together within the British Museum Library since its foundation in 1753, casting new light on the individuals whose personal interests and taste they reflect. The launch of this volume will provide an opportunity to hear papers on recent developments in the field.
2.15 Welcome
2.30 David Pearson, “Learning from Collections”
3.00 Alison Walker, “Halfway There? An Update on the Sloane Printed Books Catalogue”
3.20 Phil Harris, “The Old Royal Library and Legal Deposit in the Eighteenth Century”
3.40 Discussion
4.00 Tea
4.30 Stephen Parkin, “Finding and Losing: The Provenance of an Italian Polybius in the British Library”
4.50 John Goldfinch, “A Group of Incunables Collected in the Eighteenth Century”
5.10 David McKitterick, “A View from Cambridge”
5.40 Discussion
6.00 Reception
Attendance is free, but please register your name with Teresa Harrington at the British Library; email: teresa.harrington@bl.uk.
Travel Lecture Series
Art and Travel in the Mediterranean, 1600-1900: A Series of Five Lectures
Paul Mellon Centre, London, November 2009 — February 2010
The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean –Samuel Johnson, 1776
In the history of British travel since the late sixteenth century, the Mediterranean has always played a prime role and inevitably captured the imagination like no other European region. Travel to the Mediterranean was stimulated by its art and architecture and in return inspired new art, architecture, collecting and art criticism. Images drawn, painted or photographed on these journeys by a diversity of travellers – artists, antiquarians, scientists, ethnographers, diplomats, navy personal, amateurs and tourists, to name just a few – have fulfilled a whole variety of purposes. This lecture series, organised by the National Maritime Museum’s Centre for Art and Travel and generously hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre, attempts a new overview on the subject from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.
26 November 2009
Edward Chaney (Southampton Solent University), The Origins of the Grand Tour and the Discovery of Art
10 December 2009
Charles Newton (V&A), ‘Present under the rose…’: Stratford Canning, His Greek Artist, and the Last Chance to See Turkey before the Tanzimat
21 January 2010
Briony Llewellyn (Independent Scholar), ‘These inhuman trafficers in flesh & blood’: British Artists and the Slave Trade in Egypt
4 February 2010
David Howarth (University of Edinburgh), Revolving Mirrors: Britain and Spain from the Armada to the Spanish Civil War
18 February 2010
Jenny Gaschke (National Maritime Museum), ‘Hellas… in one Living Picture’: British Artist Travellers in Greece
All lectures will begin at 6pm in the seminar room at the Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3JA. They are free of charge and there is no need to book, but if you wish to reserve a place, please contact Janet Norton, Research Administrator at 020 8312 6716 or research@nmm.ac.uk. For details along with abstracts for each lecture, see the website for the series.
The History of Libraries and Censorship
Seminar on the History of Libraries — Dr. Keith Manley
Stewart House, Russell Square, London, Tuesday, 1 December 2009
The next seminar in the History of Libraries series will take place on Tuesday, December 1, in the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Dr. Keith Manley (Institute of Historical Research) will speak on Infidel Books and Subscription Libraries: Government Censorship in Europe during the Napoleonic Period. Many governments tried to prevent libraries from acquiring politically inflammatory and heretical literature. In Germany secret societies of freemasons infiltrated libraries to promote their own views of Enlightenment and world domination, while Hanover feared for the morals of its children if they were allowed access to circulating libraries. Germany and Austria banned subscription libraries, fearing their malignant influence. In France, officials kept libraries under close surveillance. In comparison, British libraries escaped lightly from tight supervision, though in Ulster several were ransacked by yeomanry. The meeting will take place at 5:30pm in Room ST 275 at Stewart House, Russell Square, London WC1E 7HU, UK. Stewart House is adjacent to, and accessible through, Senate House, Malet St. All are welcome.
Media & Theology Conference in Los Angeles
The following two-day conference deals mainly with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the stakes could also bear on eighteenth-century studies. From the Clark Memorial Library website:
Cultures of Communication, Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Theology as Media Theory
Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, 4-5 December 2009
Organized by Christopher Wild and Ulrike Strasser; registration deadline is 25 November 2009.
The early modern period has long been recognized as a time of revolutionary change in the uses of media and forms of communication. Much attention has been focused on the history of print and the book in particular. Without questioning the importance of this technology- and book-oriented perspective, this series of conferences considers print media alongside a range of other media with which they interacted (“multimediality”) and re-approaches the history of media in early modern Europe from an original and timely perspective. It resists the technological focus and teleological pull of the Gutenberg galaxy and concentrates instead on the powerful religious and theological currents informing communication and media. We suggest that the history of media in early modern Europe is best understood in its longue durée from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century and in reference to the long-term aftershocks of the Reformation and the profound transformation of both media and mediation it set in motion. The sixteenth-century reformers not only revolutionized the use of media, they also formulated their own theories about media and communication, addressing issues that remain of concern to modern media theorists who, however, rarely consider their theological precursors.
Protestants and Catholic reformers, albeit in confessionally distinct ways, responded to the same cultural crisis in mediation between God and humanity, as well as within the community of believers, particularly as the latter began expanding rapidly with the onset of global evangelization. Each camp developed theories and practices of optimizing ‘vertical communication’ with the divine and ‘horizontal communication’ among humanity. Consequently, the recourse to the different theologies of early modern reform can help us examine the complex and competing media cultures of the time and what helped drive technological changes. The transformation of media had a persistent corollary in the critique of mediation. Once unleashed, this critique would not go away, but would be reformulated throughout the early modern period and beyond, and in a host of contexts within and beyond the religious domain.
Against this backdrop, our conference cycle takes as its starting point the conjunction of Reformation theology and the rise of new media in the sixteenth century to then traces the ripple effects of these phenomena in the following centuries. Our sites of investigation include European cultures, “New World” spaces, and the trans-oceanic communication networks linking them.
Registration Fees: $15 per person; UC faculty & staff, students with ID: no charge (photocopy of student ID should accompany registration the completed registration form). Complimentary lunch and other refreshments are provided to all registrants. Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration closes when capacity is reached. No confirmation will be sent, but we will contact you if we receive your registration after we reach capacity. (more…)
Revisiting the Gaze
The Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Group at CUNY invites you to a talk at the Graduate Center in New York on Friday, 20 November 2009 at 2pm:
Rivka Swenson, Assistant Professor of English (Virginia Commonwealth University),
‘The Eye, in this Respect, is a Female’: Subjects, Objects, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze
5414, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
Everyday Objects Symposium
Everyday Objects: Art and Experience in Early Modern Europe
Courtauld Institute Inaugural Early Modern Symposium, London, 21 November 2009
Through a focus on the everyday object, this one-day symposium explores both the experience of visual culture in everyday life and the phenomenon of the everyday in visual culture. Drawing on theories of the everyday from such fields as anthropology, phenomenology and sociology, papers will examine the seemingly banal things that formed the culture of daily life, asking: what constitutes an everyday object? How were everyday objects experienced, represented or collected? And how does their study enhance our understanding of the cultural history of early modernity?
Papers by established and emerging scholars will explore the theme of the everyday object in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, dress, furniture and the graphic arts. Presentations will investigate ephemeral objects, quotidian spaces and habitual activities — from the social rituals of marriage, food consumption and waste disposal, to overlooked ‘things’ like taxidermy, miniature furniture and clothing accessories.
Organised by Edward Payne and Hannah Williams. To book a place, please send a cheque for £15 (£10 students) made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN — clearly stating that you wish to book for the Everyday Objects Conference. For credit card bookings, call 020 7848 2785/2909. For further information, send an email to ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk, or visit the Institute’s website.
Introduction – Edward Payne & Hannah Williams
Session 1 – Chair: Edward Payne
- Samuel Bibby (University College London), “The Triumph of the Everyday: Sculpture, Marriage, and Memory in Fifteenth-Century Florence”
- Joanna Woodall (The Courtauld Institute of Art), “Laying the Table. The Procedures of Still-life”
Session 2 – Chair: Hannah Williams
- Katie Scott (The Courtauld Institute of Art), “Cochin’s Handkerchiefs”
- Ariane Fennetaux (Université Paris-Diderot), “What’s in a Pocket? The Contribution of Material Culture to the Cultural and Social History of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain”
Session 3 – Chair: David Solkin
- Paula Radisich (Whittier College), “Theorizing ‘Things’ in French Genre Painting of the 1740s”
- Melinda Rabb (Brown University), “Mimesis Reconsidered: Everyday Objects in Miniature”
Session 4 – Chair: Sheila McTighe
- Beth Fowkes Tobin (Arizona State University), “Women, Decorative Arts, and Taxidermy”
- Olivia Fryman (Kingston University and Historic Royal Palaces), “‘Necessary Stooles’ and Necessary Women: Dealing with Royal Dirt, 1660-1714”
Broadside Symposium in Oxford
Taking Sides: The Printed Broadside 1450-1830
Merton College (Mure Room), University of Oxford, Saturday, 14 November 2009
In association with Merton College, The Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford is holding a symposium on the early-modern broadside in the age of its digital reproduction. Printed for display purposes (typically on one side of a single sheet), the broadside arguably addressed a wider audience than any other publication of the handpress period. Broadsides were advertisements, religious indulgences, political addresses, civic discourses, teaching aids, ballads and other forms of entertainment. This symposium will explore how the broadside demarcated or connected both public and private worlds and popular and learned cultures. What is recovered of the broadside and its world through digitization, and what remains to be reconstructed? What is its place in histories of collecting, literacy, popular culture and antiquarianism?
- Falk Eisermann (Berlin State Library), “Medium of the Masses? Some Observations on Press Runs and Audiences of 15th-Century Broadsides”
- Susanna Berger (University of Cambridge), “Pedagogical Broadsides and the Study of Aristotelian Logic”
- Richard Sharpe (University of Oxford), “The Vending of Books: Sheldonian Sales-catalogues 1694 to 1720”
- Angela McShane (Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art), “Cultural Economics in the Broadside Trade: ‘Commissioned’ and ‘Retail’ Broadsides”
- Eric Nebeker (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Musical Broadsides and Their Audiences in the Seventeenth Century”
- Sara Mori (Gabinetto Vieusseux, Florence), “Between Censorship and Permission: Tuscan Broadsides at the Beginning of the 19th Century”
- E. Wyn James (Cardiff University), “Illustrating Welsh Broadsides”
- John Bidwell (Morgan Library and Museum), “Broadside Editions of the Declaration of Independence”
Supported by Merton College, All Souls College, Bodleian Library Centre for the Study of the Book and The Bibliographical Society. Graduate student travel bursaries are available, generously funded by The Bibliographical Society. E-mail for information: giles.bergel@merton.ox.ac.uk / alexandra.franklin@bodley.ox.ac.uk
Dr. Giles Bergel
JPR Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Book
Merton College, University of Oxford
Enfilade 
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