Madame Elisabeth de France – 1782 Oil on Canvas, 71 x 54 cm, Versailles
I was greatly saddened last week to hear of the passing of Mary D. Sheriff, the internationally celebrated art historian. Her obit on Enfilade was both touching, and a compelling reminder of her contribution to the history eighteenth-century art and gender. My favourite work of hers is perhaps her 1996 book, The exceptional woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the cultural politics of art, a text that I plan on re-reading imminently.
As part of my curation of the We the Humanities twitter feed this week, I shared a number of my favourite material culture podcasts. I thought I might also share them here: they include The Hunterian’s Object Lessons podcast, and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections podcast, The Collection. I’m also a big fan of the Histories of the Unexpected podcast, which often takes material objects as its point of departure.
I was very excited to see that next year’s LGBT History Month theme is ‘heritage’. I’m intrigued to see how this theme will be interpreted by historians, curators and material culture specialists as part of the month’s events.
I recently enjoyed Helen Rogers’ blogpost ‘Style, Story, History‘, which discussed the craft of historical writing, and the role of metaphor and narrative within it. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of writing as a collage, which is an issue I’ve been reflecting on as I continue work on my assemblage/collage project. Similarly, Jonathan Willis’s recent post ”For yee lead your liues in great ignorance’: Puritan Ponderings on the Patchwork of Popular Belief‘, for the collaborative blog, The Many Headed Monster, also used patchwork as a framework for his research. Going forward, I hope to employ some of these ideas in my own writing on collage.
Other CFPs, conferences and journals that caught my eye this week included:
The Decor and Architecture in the 17th & 18th Centuries conference.
The Working on Things. On the Social, Political, and Economic History of Collected Objects conference.
The latest issue of The BARS Review.
The programme for the Maritime Masculinities conference.
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