On Conversation: Kate Retford and Jon Mee (Warwick)
When:
—
Venue:
TBC
No booking required
Led by Professor Jon Mee (Warwick) and Dr Kate Retford (Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck).
Preparatory reading
the preface from William Godwin's Enquirer (1797)
the essay on politeness from William Godwin's Enquirer (1797)
Preparatory looking:
Gawen Hamilton's portrait of 'The Du Cane and Boehm Families' 1734-5 in the collection at Tate Britain.
Jon Mee is Professor of Romanticism Studies at the University of Warwick. His presentation stems from a Leverhulme funded research project on literature, conversation and contention, 1711-1832, which will be published by OUP in 2011 under the title, 'Conversible Worlds: Literature and the Idea of Conversation in the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Periods'. His previous publications include 'Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period' (Oxford University Press, 2003) and 'Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s' (Oxford University Press, 1992), as well as a multi-volume edition of the sedition trials edited with John Barrell, and editions of Keats, Dickens, Wollstonecraft, and Hazlitt.
Kate Retford is Lecturer in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century art history at Birkbeck. Her contribution to the reading group originates in her current book project on the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain. This was begun during a Leverhulme Fellowship in the History of Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, 2006-7.
Her previous book, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England, was published by Yale University Press in 2006. In addition, she has written a number of articles on topics relating to eighteenth-century portraiture, gender, and the country house art collection.
Contact name:
Ann Lewis