First up, I really enjoyed watching Dr Juliet Shields’ fortuitously timed lecture, ‘Did Sir Walter Scott Invent Scotland?’, which comes just ahead of my lectures on Scott’s legacy, visual representation, and his home of Abbotsford, which begin next week.
Secondly, I’m excited to see the National Museum of Scotland’s new free exhibition, Scottish pottery: Art and Innovation, which examines the wide range of pottery produced in the last 250 years.
I was interested to see that The John Rylands Library is hosting the event Rip It Up: A Celebration of the Counter-Culture, which includes a zine workshop. Thanks to their evocative collaged forms, zines are something that I’m becoming increasingly interested in. Due to their strong counter-cultural, extra-canonical nature, the production and consumption of zines can be a useful way to explore minority and non-heteronormative identity, something that I’d like to investigate in the future.
I’m looking forward to spending a few hours reading the latest volume of the Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens journal, a special issue entitled Object Lessons: The Victorians and the Material Text.
The Morgan Library’s new exhibition, I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson, examines twenty-four poems as well as ‘an array of visual material, including hand-cut silhouettes, photographs and daguerreotypes, contemporary illustrations, and other items that speak to the rich intellectual and cultural environment in which Dickinson lived and worked’.
This post about the wallpaper collector Suzanne Lipschutz is full of beautiful examples of vintage wallpapers.
I enjoyed reading a number of blog posts this week, including Shane Doyle’s post for Notches Blog (which is a perennial favourite of mine) ‘Local Sexual Cultures and the Response to HIV/AIDS Along the Uganda-Tanzania Border‘, which explores the history of how HIV understood within African communities. Hailey Maxwell’s post ‘DECAPITATION IN THE “LOW” SURREALIST REVOLUTION‘ is fascinating exploration of what ‘revolution’ is.
The following workshops and conferences also caught my eye this week:
CFP: International Design Organisations (Brighton, 8-10 Nov 17)
CFP: On the Matter of Blackness in Europe: Transnational Perspectives (May 4-5, 2017)
CFP: Corporeal Materiality (Dallas, 8 Apr 17)
CFP: David B. Warren Symposium on American Material Culture and the Texas Experience
CONF: Private Collecting and Public Display (Leeds, 30-31 Mar 17)
CONF: Symbolic Articulation (London, 10 Mar 17)
CFP: Culture on the Move in Edwardian Britain (Lancaster, 8-9 Sep 17)
CFP: The material culture of exploration and academic travel, 1700-1900
Finally, I was thrilled to see that the National Trust and National Archives are hosting the event, ‘Queer city: London club culture 1918 – 1967‘, which will re-create the interiors of The Caravan, London’s queer-friendly members club of 1934.
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