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Birkbeck conference explores Arts and Feeling in the 19th Century

How did nineteenth-century artists represent emotion in their work?

Birkbeck, University of London will be hosting an international conference this week to explore how nineteenth-century artists, sculptors, musicians and writers represented emotion and feelings in their work.

Featuring speakers from both Birkbeck’s School of Arts as well as scholars drawn from across the UK and internationally, the conference reflects the growth in interest by scholars of the nineteenth-century in how people across the arts thought about emotional responses to the aesthetics of work of the period.

The conference will also explore the interaction between mind and body when experiencing a wide range of different art, and the psychology and physiology of how we perceive aesthetics, as well as how developments in science during the Victorian period influenced artistic production and, as a consequence, how this also affected emotions responses to this art.

In addition, speakers will be exploring artistic conventions of the period for artists expressing emotion in their work and, in parallel, strategies writers used in literature to generate a distinctive aesthetic to their work and, from that, specific emotional responses.

Specific sessions will look at areas as diverse as exploring depictions of blushing; the emergence of a nineteenth-century fascination with pyromania, which occurred as a new diagnosis from developments in the then-new science of psychology; and the different way that painters of the period have set out to depict or induce a feeling of melancholy in their audiences.

Two members of Birkbeck’s Professorial staff are involved in the conference. Professor Lynda Nead, Pevsner Chair of History of Art, will be chairing a panel discussion on how Victorian artists represented feeling in their work, with academics drawn from Cambridge and Warwick universities, as well as the Tate Britain. The debate will draw on a forthcoming exhibition at the Foundling Museum, ‘The Fallen Woman’, on which Professor Nead has consulted.

Similarly, Professor Hilary Fraser, Tillotson Chair in Nineteenth Century literature in the School of Arts will deliver the Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture, exploring the Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture, in the Clore Management Lecture Theatre on the first day of the conference, 16th July, at 6pm.

Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, and organiser of the lecture, said:

“This lecture will explore both historical and modern responses to fin-de-siècle sculptural memorials, with a particular emphasis on the work of Edward Onslow Ford.

"We aim with this lecture to celebrate the work of our late colleague, renowned Professor Sally Ledger, who was a leading intellectual on fin-de-siècle culture - and whose intellect and passion are still very present at Birkbeck College, and at its Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, of which she was the director for a number of years.”

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