TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the fourth in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Content Warning: This talk will include references to historic racist language and imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Performing Innocence: Baby Nation Moderator: Professor Alastair Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John's College Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Abstract: French artists often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious children. These modern children modeled artistic independence echoed in these painters’ aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the conceit framed by Henry James’s depiction of his child character in What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of 1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art practice. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Alastair Wright teaches modern art and visual culture for both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in subsequent years. At graduate level, his teaching focuses on French modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture. In all his teaching he encourages students to engage as closely as possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to collections in Oxford and beyond. Alastair Wrights's research focuses primarily on European modernisms. His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and more recently he curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. He has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World by Dr Ushashi Dasgupta. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction. In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. In Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction, Dr Ushashi Dasgupta demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of domesticity. Panel includes: Dr Ushashi Dasgupta is the The Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her research centres around nineteenth-century fiction, specialising in the relationship between literature, space and architecture, in particular, the ways in which fiction articulates urban and domestic experience. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction is her first book, and her next project asks what it means to feel at home in a book, exploring the practice of re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present. Professor Sophia Psarra is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design at University College London. Her research is transdisciplinary, spanning architecture and urbanism, spatial morphology, history, and cultural studies, and has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, NSF-USA and the Onassis Foundation. Professor Psarra is also a prize-winning practicing architect, and her work has resulted in creative installations and design projects as well as a number of publications, which include The Venice Variations and Architecture and Narrative. Professor Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic who has been engaged with education and teaching at all levels and across the range, including holding the Chair of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, and of Literature in Manchester. As a literary scholar, he uses critical and cultural theory, especially the culture of cities, and particularly that of London, as a way of approaching writing on many forms and periods of literature, as well as film and opera. Professor Tambling’s many publications include, most recently, Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on Sophocles: Antigone and other tragedies by Professor Oliver Taplin. With panellists Professor Karen Leeder and Dr Lucy Jackson. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men-or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Professor Oliver Taplin's original and distinctive verse translations of Antigone, Deianeira and Electra convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Panel includes: Professor Oliver Taplin is an Emeritus Professor of Classics at Oxford University. His research has focused on the reception of poetry and drama through performance and material culture in both ancient and modern times. He co-founded the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, and has collaborated on a number of high-profile theatre productions. In recent years he has turned his attention to translating Greek Drama as verse to be spoken and performed. Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Dr Lucy Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. Her research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman theatre and performance, neo-Latin translations of Greek drama and the reception of classical theatre in the sixteenth century, and translation studies and theory in the ancient and modern worlds. Her most recent publication is The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE.

At around 11am on Thursday 18 February 1943 two students in Munich were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. By Monday they had been interrogated, tried, and executed along with another member of the resistance circle. Further arrests followed. From 15-27 February 2021 the White Rose Project will be following the events as they happened in real time through daily posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This year marks the 78th anniversary of the first White Rose trials. It’s also a year when the dates and days of the week coincide. Imagine going about your normal routine on Monday, being arrested on Thursday, being interrogated over the weekend, and going to trial the following Monday morning. At the heart of our week is a live reading of the White Rose’s resistance pamphlets, translated from German into English by student members of the White Rose Project. Dr Alex Lloyd (Fellow by Special Election in German, St Edmund Hall) will give a short introduction to the pamphlets. The readers are current and former students and academics, mirroring the membership of the original group: Sophie Caws, Eve Mason, Adam Rebick, Elba Slamecka, Sam Thompson, Amy Wilkinson, and Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature, T.J. (Jim) Reed, FBA. The event will open and close with music by the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA, recorded on 22 February 2020. This event is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund. It is part of the White Rose Project, a research and public engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences. Dr Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has published widely on post-war Germany, most recently in her book Childhood, Memory, and the Nation: Young Lives under Nazism in Contemporary German Culture (Legenda, 2020). She is currently a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at TORCH working with the White Rose Foundation in Munich, and is Project Lead on a Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund project, ‘Resistance: The Story of the White Rose’, in collaboration with the award-winning vocal ensemble SANSARA. Eve Mason is a final-year student of English and German at the Queen’s College, Oxford. Her passion for translation led her to the White Rose Project, where she was one of the original translators of the pamphlets for The White Rose: Reading, Writing, Resistance. She was awarded a prize for German in the Warwick Prize in Undergraduate Translation in 2019 and has gone on to self-publish A String of Pearls: A Collection of Five German Fairy Tales by Women Writers, for which she won the LIDL Year Abroad Project Prize 2019–20. Sophie Caws is a final year student of French and German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After taking German as a beginner’s language, she now studies modern German literature with Dr Lloyd, with a particular interest in Freudian psychology and the literature of the former GDR. She spent 9 months living in Leipzig, Germany, where she worked as an English Language Assistant with the British Council and a teacher of English as a Second Language. She was also involved in English-language community theatre with English Theatre Leipzig, with the aim of promoting intercultural linguistic and artistic exchange within the Leipzig community and beyond. Sam Thompson is a fourth-year PhD student at King’s College London, where he is completing a thesis on Classical Reception in German-language exile literature, 1933-45. Sam previously studied Classics and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also received an MSt in German (with a dissertation on Austrian memory literature). His recent research interests include the work of Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, and Interbellum literature more broadly.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In this joint event between St Peter's College and TORCH, distinguished and multi-award-winning British filmmaker, social campaigner and St Peter’s College alumnus, Ken Loach (Jurisprudence, 1957), will discuss his filmmaking career with Professor Judith Buchanan, Master of St Peter’s College Oxford. Their conversation will concentrate on two remarkable films: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016).

Internationally-renowned composer Anne Boyd is in conversation with composer Thomas Metcalf, discussing her life and music ahead of a performance of her String Quartet No. 2 ’Play on the Water’ later this year. This is part of the TORCH project ‘Pixelating the River’: Engagement with Contemporary Music through Graphical Inputs, played by the Kreutzer Quartet, alongside a new work by Thomas Metcalf. Professor Anne Boyd AM is one of Australia’s most distinguished composers and music educators. Her undergraduate studies were in the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, where Peter Sculthorpe was her earliest and most influential composition teacher. The award of a Commonwealth Scholarship enabled her to undertake a PhD in composition at the University of York (1969-72), where her supervisors were Wilfrid Mellers and Bernard Rands. In 1990, Boyd became the first Australian (and the first woman) to be appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney. Before this, she was the Foundation Head of the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong (1981–90) and taught at the University of Sussex (1972–77). The hallmarks of her musical style are its transparency, gentleness and delicacy, attributes which reflect her long involvement with Asian traditions, especially those of Japan and Indonesia. Two solo CDs of her music are Meditations on a Chinese Character (ABC Classics, 1997) and Crossing a Bridge of Dreams (Tall Poppies, 2000). Professor Boyd was honoured with an AM in the Order of Australia in 1996, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2003, the Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award at the APRA-AMC Classical Music Awards in 2005 and the 2014 Sir Bernard Heinz Award for service to music in Australia. Biography taken from Faber Music, 2021 Thomas Metcalf is a composer and DPhil candidate in Music at Oxford University (Worcester College), where he is researching the transformation of graphical spaces into determinately–notated music – focusing on a range of composers in the 20th and 21st centuries. His research has been recognised in the UK and internationally, appearing in peer-reviewed journals as well as diverse conference settings in Europe. Beginning his composition training with Robert Saxton at Oxford in October 2014, Thomas subsequently achieved a first–class BA in Music and an MSt in Composition with distinction as the Ogilvie–Thompson Scholar of Worcester College. Since January 2020, Thomas has studied with Kenneth Hesketh, focusing specifically on graphical methods of determinate composition, a process that is present in much of Hesketh’s recent work. Thomas’s works have been performed by a variety of ensembles, such as the ANIMA Collective, BBC Singers, Christ Church Cathedral Choir, GBSR Duo, Oxford Philharmonic, St. Pancras Parish Church Choir, and the Villiers Quartet. He has worked with composers such as Judith Weir, Michael Zev Gordon, Henning Kraggerud, and Dario Marianelli. He has also collaborated with festivals such as Oxford Lieder Festival (2018), Oxford Chamber Music Festival (2019), and the Vale of Glamorgan Festival (as part of the Peter Reynolds Composers Studio) (2020).

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on The Political Life of an Epidemic – Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe written by Professor Simukai Chigudu. About the book: Zimbabwe's catastrophic cholera outbreak of 2008–9 saw an unprecedented number of people affected, with 100,000 cases and nearly 5,000 deaths. Cholera, however, was much more than a public health crisis: it represented the nadir of the country's deepening political and economic crisis of 2008. This study focuses on the political life of the cholera epidemic, tracing the historical origins of the outbreak, examining the social pattern of its unfolding and impact, analysing the institutional and communal responses to the disease, and marking the effects of its aftermath. Across different social and institutional settings, competing interpretations and experiences of the cholera epidemic created charged social and political debates. In his examination of these debates which surrounded the breakdown of Zimbabwe's public health infrastructure and failing bureaucratic order, the scope and limitations of disaster relief, and the country's profound levels of livelihood poverty and social inequality, Simukai Chigudu reveals how this epidemic of a preventable disease had profound implications for political institutions and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Panel includes: Professor Simukai Chigudu is an Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony's College. Prior to academia, he was a medical doctor in the National Health Service where he worked for three years. He is principally interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa, which he examines using disease, public health, violence, and social suffering as organising frameworks. He has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Uganda, The Gambia, Tanzania and South Africa. Professor Sloan Mahone is an Associate Professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford University. She specialises in the history of psychiatry and neurology in Africa as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry globally. Her current research projects, funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and Oxford's James Martin School, involve the implementation of oral history programmes on epilepsy in Africa and in resource poor settings globally. She is a member of Oxford's Epilepsy Research Group. Professor Mahone has also worked extensively in historical research and community development in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar. Doctor Jon Schubert is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Brunel University. He is a political and economic anthropologist working on state institutions, infrastructures, and transnational trade in Angola and Mozambique. He is the author of Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola and has previously held postdoctoral research positions at the universities of Leipzig and Geneva.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, written by Dr Priya Atwal. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed. Panel includes: Dr Priya Atwal is Community History Fellow at Oxford. She is a historian of empire, monarchy and cultural politics across Britain and South Asia. She has taught History at King's College London and Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Her research has been featured in collaborative projects with Historic Royal Palaces, among others; and she makes regular broadcast appearances, most recently presenting the BBC Radio 4 series, Lies My Teacher Told Me. She tweets @priyaatwal. Professor Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History and the Director of the Asian Studies Centre at Oxford. His research focuses on political thought in modern South Asia, and is more broadly concerned with ethics and violence in a globalized world. He is the author of four books, most recently Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge and was formerly Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Professor Polly O’Hanlon is a Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford and co-course director for the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. Her research interests focus on the social and intellectual history of India. Her most recent book was At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India, which explores new approaches to questions about caste, gender, and religious cultures across a range of historical environments.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation, TORCH is delighted to support the Annual Besterman Lecture, 2020 Lecture by Professor William Doyle. Introduced by Karen O'Brien (Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University) and Gregory S. Brown (General Editor of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Senior Research Fellow, Voltaire Foundation). Moderated by Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. When Napoleon in 1799 declared that the French Revolution was over, he said that was because it was now established on the principles with which it began. The implication was that much of what had happened over the preceding decade of upheaval had not been in accordance with those principles. Napoleon took care, of course, not to state what they were: his constitution was the first since 1789 not to contain a declaration of basic rights. Yet everyone during the Revolution claimed to be acting on revolutionary principles, or denounced their opponents for betraying them. Can we distinguish between those who held to and those who ignored or compromised revolutionary aspirations? This lecture will make the attempt, challenging some of the most enduring assumptions in revolutionary historiography. Professor William Doyle Professor William Doyle is Professor Emeritus of History and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol. Professor Doyle is a British historian, specialising in 18th-century France, and is most notable for his one-volume Oxford History of the French Revolution (1st edition, 1989; 2nd edition, 2002; 3rd edition, 2018). Professor Doyle one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution, obtaining his doctorate from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled The parlementaires of Bordeaux at the end of the eighteenth century, 1775-1790 - he is also the author of sixteen books on French and European history, five of which have been translated into Chinese. Professor Doyle is also a fellow of the British Academy and a co founder of the The Society for the Study of French History. Introduced by: Karen O'Brien, Head of Humanities Division, Oxford University. Before taking on this role in 2018, Professor O’Brien was Vice Principal (Education) and Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London. At King’s she oversaw institutional strategy for all undergraduate and postgraduate students, the university Maths school, admissions and widening access, and the financing and implementation of student-facing capital projects. She implemented major changes in the areas of online degrees and digital learning, new classroom and clinical teaching spaces, careers and co-curricular learning. Prior to this, she was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Birmingham University and held academic posts at Warwick, Cardiff and Southampton Universities. Originally educated at Oxford, she held a Harkness fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge where she is now an Honorary Fellow. She is a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, a trustee of Chawton House, a member of Princeton University Press’s European advisory board and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In addition to being Head of the Humanities Division, she is a professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature, particularly the historical writing and fiction of the period. Professor Gregory S. Brown, Professor of History; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Senior Research Fellow; Voltaire Foundation and general editor of OSE. He is author, with Isser Woloch, of Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress (2nd edition; Norton, 2012), and author of Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (Greenwood, 2003); and A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (Columbia, 2002). Professor Brown will be delivering the ASECS-BSECS lecture at this winter's virtual BSECS conference, on the intellectual origins of "eighteenth-century studies. Moderated by: Professor Lauren Clay, Vanderbilt University. Lauren R. Clay is an historian of Old Regime and revolutionary France and its empire, with particular interests in urban cultural and civic life and the emergence of a commercially oriented society. Her book Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines the establishment of professional public theaters in cities throughout France and the French empire during the prerevolutionary era. Stagestruck was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History by the American Society for Theatre Research and was named a finalist for the 2013 George Freedley Memorial Award, for exceptional scholarship examining live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association. Her article “Provincial Actors, the Comédie-Française, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (2005) was the co-winner of the 2006-2007 James Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has a chapter on Voltaire’s fortunes at the box office forthcoming in Databases, Revenues, & Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793/Données, recettes et répertoire. La scène en ligne (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Eds. Sylvaine Guyot and Jeffrey S. Ravel (MIT Press, 2020). Lauren's work has also appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Slavery and Abolition, and The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Currently, she is writing about the debate over the legality of the slave trade during the early French Revolution. Lauren completed her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she spent several years teaching at Texas A and M University. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches courses on the history of early modern France, the economic history of the eighteenth century, revolutions in the modern world, European imperialism, and the history of Paris. She is a past Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.

This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones of the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Supported by TORCH through the Humanities Cultural Programme. Join us for an online in-conversation with Prof Geoffrey Batchen and Dr Lena Fritsch, discussing the work of pioneering British photographer and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871). Her innovative use of new photographic technologies linked art and science, and exemplified the potential of photography in books. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford and Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. This talk accompanies the 2020 Photo Oxford festival, Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen. Biographies: Geoffrey Batchen is professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016), and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018). Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her monographs on photography include Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson / Japanese version with Seigensha 2018), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (Georg Olms 2011), and Yasumasa Morimuras Self-Portrait as Actress: Überlegungen zur Identität (VdM 2008).