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Professor Richard Taws - Inaugural Lecture
30 April 2024, 6:30 pm–9:00 pm
Join UCL History of Art to celebrate Richard Taws's professorship with a lecture in the Gustave Tuck followed by a reception in the Haldane. There will be a welcome from Professor Bob Mills and an introduction from Professor Susan L. Siegfried, University of Michigan.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Queenie Lee – History of Art
Location
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Gustave Tuck Lecture TheatreSouth WingGower StLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
Revolutionary Paper Trails
What might it mean to ‘pass’ as post-revolutionary? In France, the last decade of the eighteenth century witnessed an explosion in the use of paper of diverse kinds, for new political ends. However, in the long aftermath of the French Revolution, paper was also instrumentalised to articulate histories of revolutionary participation. Paper objects found a place at the heart of sentimental accounts of sacrifice or exile. Conversely, paper was central to claims for culpability or reparation—most strikingly, assorted papers were mobilised as defence against recrimination for involvement in regicide. Tracing the long history of such effects over the course of the nineteenth century, this lecture will consider how the apparent abundance that characterised the period’s paper ecology, and new attitudes and technologies that responded to or enabled paper’s proliferation, preservation, and disposal, bore the imprint of political justification, evasion, and imposture.
Lecture: Gustave Tuck LT (18:30-19:30)
Reception: North Cloisters (19:30-21:00)
Image: Paul Nadar, Mlle Beaumaine, Théâtre des Variétés, c. 1900, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
About the Speaker
Professor Richard Taws
Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UCL
Richard Taws is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture. He is the author of Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, forthcoming 2024) and The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013) and, as a member of the ‘Multigraph Collective’, co-author of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago University Press, 2018). With Iris Moon, he co-edited Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (Bloomsbury, 2021) and, with Genevieve Warwick, Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).