Wolfson College Humanities Society

This paper offers a close reading of the grammar of the gaze offered in eighteenth-century prints that depict crowds of people looking at the window displays of London’s many print shops. It asks how far we can read them as accurate records of spectatorial practice, and what we can learn from the ways in which they advertise and project both their own public and their own position within the visual economy of the street in the Georgian city.

The images discussed can be viewed using the links below:

John Raphael Smith, "Miss Macaroni and her Gallant" (1773)

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1172511&objectId=3423048&partId=1

Piercy Roberts, "Caricature Shop" (1801)

http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr10184

James Gillray, "Very Slippy-Weather" (1808)

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=38375&objectId=1480045&partId=1

The media’s obsession with weight is perceived as a recent phenomenon but we have been struggling with what, when, and how we eat ever since the Greeks first pinched an inch. This surprising and sometimes shocking talk exposes the anxieties, fashions and ‘anti-fat cures’ that have driven an expanding dieting industry, and reveals the extreme and often dangerously absurd lengths people have gone to in order to slim down.

Slides from the presentation can be viewed at:

www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/LFoxcroft_Presentation.pdf

The two most fundamental transformations of economic life in human history were the Neolithic food revolution and the industrial revolution. It is no surprise that the latter was unexpected by contemporaries, but it is intriguing and instructive that those who were best informed, such as, for example, Adam Smith and the other classical economists, were explicit that such a transformation was impossible. The paradox can be resolved, however, by considering the role of energy supply in the transformation which was taking place.

How can the arts and humanities meet the challenges of contemporary society without relying on notions of socio-economic impact? This talk contributes to current debates on whether and why the arts and humanities matter to society, and how their value can be articulated in ways that avoid over-simplifications and the crude equivalence of ‘value’ with ‘utility’ in a narrowly instrumental interpretation of ‘impact’.

Why did Lincoln prompt a discussion of Sappho in the American Senate? And how does this lead us to explore why Sappho was good to represent for nineteenth century artists and what do these representations tell us about female desire in this era and the role of the classical past in it?

The talk will examine the history of Zimbabwe since Independence in 1980, paying particular attention to the origins and nature of the country’s economic and political crisis.

The production of culture is an open-ended and highly political process that demarcates the experience of daily life and its continuity and change within social institutions from the family to the state. The construction of modern ethnic identities and their politicization revealed the crucial role of the 19th and 20th century development of the intellectual ‘disciplines’ and institutions of the humanities and social sciences in the imagining and dissemination through mass media and popular culture of the often conflicting identities of ethnicity, race, class and gender. These have created contending claims to interpretive authority and a cultural politics that both unites and divides us.

This talk explores the ways in which the Marinid dynasty in Morocco exploited architecture and display to legitimise themselves before their subjects, a volatile mix of restive tribesmen and proud urbanites. Marinid ceremonial and demonstrations of power served to win over public opinion by providing employment and stimulating the economy in a manner as familiar today as it was then.

Constance Markievicz (nee Gore-Booth, 1868-1927), was born to the privileged Protestant upper class in the west of Ireland. She embraced suffrage and then scandal as she left the Slade School of Art in London for a bohemian life in a Parisian atelier. There she met Casimir Dunin Markievicz (1874-1932), becoming part of a local avant-garde, which had the painter and mystic, George Russell (AE) at its centre. The Markievices took a prominent role in anti-imperial debates that not only related to Constance’s home country but also Casimir’s native Poland during World War One and to the post –War Irish republican movement.

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s “Diary of a Man in Despair” has long been known as a searing indictment of Hitler and the Nazis, written in secret in a Bavarian hillside retreat. Asked to write a Foreword to a new edition, Richard Evans uncovered a hornet’s nest of allegations and counter-allegations about the author and his work. This talk investigates the book, its writer, and the charges that it was all falsified.