Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Autumn 2014 Programme
Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman: Roundtable with Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck) and Birkbeck colleagues
Thursday October 23, 2014
6:00 - 8:00pm
The first event of the autumn term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck) in discussion on her new book Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman on Thursday 23 October 2014from 6.00pm to 8.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.
The book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, the book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.
Future Autumn Term Forum events include:
- Wednesday 29 October 2014, 6.00 - 8.00 pm -- Paul White (Cambridge): 'The Evolution of the Blush'
- Friday 28 November 2014, 6.30 - 9.00 pm -- Sophie Thomas (Ryerson): 'A strange and mixed assemblage: Sir John Soane, Archivist of the Self' Room G10, 43 Gordon Square
- Wednesday 3 December 2014, 6.00 - 8.00 pm -- Our Mutual Friend Reading Project: Panel Discussion Room 112, 43 Gordon Square