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Faces of the Past, Images in Question

When:
Venue: External

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Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in Collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery

Catherine Hall discusses with Hilary Fraser how historians' discoveries and analysis change the way we remember the fundamental causes of the country's history. In connection with the international conference: Feminist Emergency, organised by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and taking place from 22-24 June 2017, they will explore some of the women and men who took part in the campaigns for racial equality and women's rights, many of whose portraits are included in the National Portrait Gallery collections.

Chair: Marina Warner, Birkbeck. University of London

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Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre for the Study of British Slave-ownership at University College London. Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (1987/2002) was co-authored with Leonore Davidoff. Her recent work has focused on the relation between Britain and its empire: Civilising Subjects (2002), Macaulay and Son (2012) and Hall et al, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). Between 2009-2015 she was the Principal Investigator on the ESRC/AHRC project Legacies of British Slave-ownership - which seeks to put slavery back into British history.

Hilary Fraser holds the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is Executive Dean of Arts. She was for more than a decade Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and was Founding Editor of its open-access e-journal Nineteen. She has written monographs on the Victorians and Renaissance Italy, aesthetics and religion in Victorian literature, nineteenth-century non-fiction prose, and gender and the Victorian periodical press. Her most recent book, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, and she is now beginning a book on art writing and preparing a scholarly edition of The Renaissance by Walter Pater, both for Oxford University Press. She is currently President of the British Association for Victorian Studies.