Things Seminar

Professor Jo Ann Oravec (University of Wisconsin at Whitewater)

Sleight of Hands: Cheating and Deception Detection by Human Observers and Artificial Intelligence Systems

Professor David Gentilcore (University of Leicester)

Richard Fitch (Historic Royal Palaces)

Rebecca Unsworth (QMUL/V&A)

Dr Elizabeth Currie (Central Saints Martins)

Associate Professor Sean Silver (University of Michigan)

Dr Ruth Scurr (University of Cambridge)

Professor Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling)

Professor Gunther Rolf Kress MBE (UCL)

Dr Daniel Jütte (Associate Professor, Department of History, New York University: Eurias Fellow, CRASSH 2016-17)

Jacqueline Nicholls (Independent Artist)

Abstracts

Jacqueline Nicholls

Doors, Gates & Curtains

Traditional Jewish texts utilises imagery of different types of entrances, each evoking particular ideas with regard to the relationship between physical reality and the world of the divine. This visual art presentation will focus on drawings that interpret relevant Talmudic texts about doors, gates and curtains as barriers and entrances.

Daniel Jütte

Living Stones: Architecture and Embodiment in Premodern Europe

Among the arts, architecture is often considered a particularly rational manifestation of human creativity. The desire for the perfect form runs deep in modern architecture, culminating, perhaps, in Le Corbusier’s notion of the “house as machine for living in.” Historically, however, there have also been other, very different ways of conceptualizing architecture. Following the call of this year’s seminar convenors—to “investigate human understanding of the world vis-à-vis objects”—the talk will probe the history of one particular idea: the house as a living being. The focus will be on the late medieval and early modern period when human attributes were explicitly assigned to the house: it had a name and life story, displayed bodily features, and was invested with a specific individuality. I will also address the question of why and when this notion of the house as actor began to decline.

Victoria Bartels (University of Cambridge)

*Site visit to the Fitzwilliam*

Encounters on the Shop Floor: Embodiment and the Knowledge of the Maker

Dr Marta Ajmar (Victoria &Albert Museum)

Professor Roger Kneebone (Imperial College, London)

Fleur Oakes (Independent artist)

This talk will present research from a five-year collaborative project co-led by Marta Ajmar and Roger Kneebone, supported by the V&A Research Institute (VARI) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It will consider the models of thinking and doing that emerge from 'encounters on the shop floor', where invention and innovation result from the exchange between different kinds and communities of 'knowledge-makers'. The significance of embodiment in the processes of cognition and learning will be explored, moving beyond an unhelpful divide between 'mind' and 'hand' and between 'intellectual' and 'manual' knowledge and their disciplinary and institutional compartmentalisation.

During this seminar we will present the project in conversation with textiles artist Fleur Oakes. Our speakers aim to connect different worlds and experiences of knowledge-making around a common nucleus of embodied practice, combining academic work with the scientific expertise of the surgeon and the craft of the artistic practitioner.

Dr Victoria Avery (Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)

Andrew Lacey (Artist and Independent Scholar)

Bronze was used in Renaissance Italy for numerous types of functional objects (artillery, bells, coins, lamps, inkwells) as well as decorative ones (equestrian monuments, statues, busts, medals). Extremely expensive, meaning-laden and complex to produce, works of art cast in bronze were desirable status symbols for Humanist patrons, and proofs of incredible technical mastery by sculptors and casters. Sculpture historian, Vicky Avery, and sculptor-founder, Andrew Lacey, will discuss 'bronze in Italy c. 1500' in terms of its meanings, usage and technology, focussing on the enigmatic Rothschild Bronzes, recently attributed to Michelangelo.

Dr James Poskett (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)

Remembering Haiti: Phrenology, Slavery and the Material Culture of Race, 1791-1861

Dr Stefan Hanß (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)

Familiar with the Matter: Slavery and the Body in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Abstracts:

Dr James Poskett. Eustache Belin saw the violence of slavery and revolution first hand. Born a slave on the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1773, Eustache spent his youth toiling in the sugar mills. But amidst the Haitian Revolution of 1791, he escaped to Paris. Incredibly, in the 1830s, a French phrenologist took a cast of Eustache’s head. Over the next thirty years, Eustache became a focal point for discussion of African character. Phrenologists wanted to understand the relationship between the African mind, slavery and revolution. In this talk, I follow the bust of Eustache as it travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, I show how a single phrenological bust was deployed by both supporters and opponents of abolition. More broadly, this talk suggests that the history of race needs to be understood as part of a history of material exchange.

Dr Stefan Hanß. Traditional definitions of slavery strongly connect forced labour to the absence of a slave’s autonomy of decision over his body. Coerced labour, in that sense, is enforced, ensured and perpetuated through an owner’s power over another human’s body. Sociologists and anthropologists, however, have broadened the definition of body techniques and practices that prompt historians to rethink the relationship of labour and the body. My presentation thus discusses slavery in the early modern Mediterranean in the light of recent research on the history of the body. I examine how the bodies of slaves were a targeted yet negotiated scene of constraint and agency. Whilst Mediterranean slave-owners indeed tried to mark slavery through the bodies of enslaved men and women, their strategies in body practices enabled slaves to constantly re-negotiate their servile status. I first examine archival lists in which slave-owners described their slaves’ bodies in detail. These descriptions enabled identification and guaranteed the slaves’ status as commodities on the one hand. On the other, slaves were familiar with the significance of these lists. Consequently, they tried to influence both the processes of commodification and their servile status by making active use of their masters’ records. My presentation’s second focus lies on how former slaves described their own bodies and body practices in servility. When enslaved Germans returned to the German lands, they often wrote in incredible detail about the shaving rites they had to endure whilst living in Ottoman or North African servitude. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narratives, again, underline that slaving and body practices posed constraints as much as scopes of actions of which slaves were well aware of and keen to use.