Professor Luisa Calè's Inaugural Lecture - Exodus: Reading for the Pictures in and out of Books
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
Exodus is a foundational narrative of captivity, resilience, and liberation, which addresses and guides “the children of Israel” “out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” in pursuit of the promised land (Exodus 1; 20:2; 12:25). Engaging with the book of Exodus means raising and historicizing questions, and exploring alternative points of view on the visions, narratives, theologies, and politics of people on the move. This lecture explores visual responses to the plagues of Egypt, combining book history with literary and visual analysis to think about pictures from single to serial forms and reconstruct how their media ecologies intersect with the unstable and open-ended structures of the codex, retooling the Bible as a repository for reading and collecting, including drawings, watercolours, prints, manuscripts and newspaper clippings. This practice, called extra-illustration since the 1880s, opens up the book to the multiple temporalities of the Biblical encounter, by augmenting the codex with series of images from different times, in different media, collated and hybridized with other materials. This lecture concentrates on J.M.W. Turner’s paintings and mezzotints in the wake of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign, then follows Romantic period plates inserted in late nineteenth-century Bibles.
When the story of Exodus is translated into a series of visual subjects, drawing, painting, and printmaking capture a point in time, suspend the plot, and release it from its narrative. Being in the moment raises ethical questions. What happens when we suspend the providential narrative of the exit from Egyptian bondage and the journey to the promised land, engage with it from multiple points of view, and activate different modes of address and structures of feeling in specific places and times?
Biography
Luisa Calè is a Professor of Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture at Birkbeck, University of London, exhibitions editor at Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, and Associate Editor at Word and Image. She has published on extra-illustration, literature and visual and material cultures of reading and collecting, from her monograph Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators” (Oxford University Press, 2006) to The Book Unbound: Material Cultures of Reading and Collecting, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her current project explores Exodus, Verbal and Visual Narratives, and the Politics of Feeling in the Long Nineteenth Century.
This inaugural lecture will be held in the Clore Management Centre basement lecture theatre, B01. The lecture will also be live-streamed via Teams and recorded. Please select a live-streaming ticket if you are unable to attend in person. You will be emailed a live-streaming link the day before the lecture.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Clore foyer.
Contact name: Chris Fray
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