CONFERENCES

PAST CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS

There were three major conferences emerging out of the project Ruskinian Theatre. The most recent one was ‘New Issues in Theatre Historiography’, University of Birmingham, 6-7 July 2007.
See http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/ruskin/documents/TheatreConferenceprogramme.doc.

November 24th, 2007, ‘Memory as historical material’, Liz Leicester (Birkbeck and Ruskin Colleges) explores the relationship of memory to the past through looking at a little-known strike of 30,000 mainly women clothing workers which took place in Leeds in 1970. Ruskin Public History Group, Ruskin College, Oxford.

January 26th, 2008, ‘Living in Victorian London: a material history of everyday life’, Alastair Owens and Karen Wehner (Queen Mary, University of London) and Nigel Jeffries and Rupert Featherby (Museum of London Archaeology Service). This presentation derives from an on-going AHRC-funded research project, which aims to understand the ‘social complexity and geographical diversity of metropolitan lives in the mid-nineteenth century through a study of the material culture of everyday domestic life’. Ruskin Public History Group, Ruskin College, Oxford.

FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS

The Ruskin Centre holds weekly research seminars during term time. For Lent Term Programme 2007 - 2008 Seminar Series and Autumn Term Programme 2007-2008 Seminar series,
see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/ruskin/events/seminar.htm

15th March, 2008, ‘Remembering the Women’s Freedom League: suffragette memories and public history’, Mandy Richards. Ruskin Public History Group, Ruskin College, Oxford.
See http://www.ruskin.ac.uk/news/page.php?news_id=58

18th - 19th July 2008, ‘Persistent Ruskin–Aesthetics, Education, Social Theory, 1870-1914’, University of Lancaster. The conference is being organized by The Ruskin Centre at Lancaster University, in association with Leeds Metropolitan University and the University of Salford as part of the John Ruskin, Cultural Travel and Popular Access project. For the call for papers, see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/ruskin/event/2116/.

25th - 27th September 2008, ‘Ruskin, Venice, and 19th Century Cultural Travel’, Venice. The conference is being organized by The Ruskin Centre at Lancaster University; INCS: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies The Department of European and Postcolonial Studies of University of Ca' Foscari Venice. For the call for papers,
see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/venice/

14th-16th November 2008 North American Victorian Studies Association Annual Meeting, Yale University, New Haven, CT

NAVSA 2008 is an interdisciplinary conference on Victorian culture in Britain and it will foster the examination of ‘high and low, domestic and imperial, metropolitan and regional’ cultures. It aims to ‘encompass comparative perspectives on colonial and continental subjects’ (See https://webspace.yale.edu/navsa2008/).

There is going to be an entire panel on entire panel on Ruskin titled ‘Rethinking Ruskin’, which will be chaired by Deanna Kreisel. The panel aims are as follows: ‘This year marks the 150th anniversary of Ruskin’s famous ‘turn’ from art criticism to economic theory and politics; 1858 was also the year Ruskin renounced evangelical Protestantism and met his impossible beloved, Rose LaTouche. It thus seems a fitting time to re-evaluate his extensive, and contradictory, critical legacy. This panel will examine Ruskin's aesthetic theories in light of his later writings on social justice and vice versa, and will particularly welcome papers that invite us to re-think commonplaces about his political predilections, his quixotic economic theories, and his influence on later author’

There might be papers on Ruskin in other panels like the ‘The Victorian Critic’ and, of course, any other panels on art history. See https://webspace.yale.edu/navsa2008/callPapers.html.

The Eighth Lamp will attempt to notify the readers of the titles and abstracts of the Ruskin papers in the next issue.