Conference: Imagineering Violence. Spectacle and Print in the Early Modern Period

How can violence be represented and imagined? How can an artist document the violence of the times? What about the numerous ethical implications? When does a spectator become a voyeur? When does violence turn into spectacle? Can violence be aestheticized? Does an artist have a duty to document contemporary violence? These questions saturate modern art, from the horrors of War in Goya to the racial violence in Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s ‘Five Car Stud’. However, they are not new in themselves. The early modern period witnessed a true explosion of images on pain, suffering and violence across painting, print, theater, and public space. The public had plenty to choose from: sieges, executions, massacres: violence fascinated the early modern spectator, yet it simultaneously conjured up numerous questions, some of which are not unlike those posed today.

Together, historians and artists explore the early modern period, looking for new answers on the questions that concern us in the present by means of lectures, artistic presentations, and round table talks. Together, they will investigate how artists in the early modern period dealt with the violence of their time, and whether these age-old answers might shine a light on today’s ‘spectacle society’.

With artistic works by, amongst others,  Stef Lernous van Abattoir Fermé, Simon Pummell, Doina Kraal, Jan Rosseel, Enkidu Khaled, e.a. and lectures by internationally renowned cultural historians such as Jonathan Davies, Katie Hornstein and Benjamin Schmidt.

Find the short program here, and the poster here.

For the Huizinga Institute masterclass by Benjamin Schmidt (currently fully booked, with waiting list), see: https://www.huizingainstituut.nl/masterclass-by-benjamin-schmidt-violent-images-in-the-in-early-modern-period/

Advertisement

Graduate conference The Body and Politics, 18-19 March 2019, University of Cambridge: https://ptih.wordpress.com/2019-conference-the-body-and-politics/

Graduate conference The Body Productive, 8 Dec. 2018, Birkbeck, University of London: https://thebodyproductive.com/call-for-papers/

Seminar series in Body History

You are all cordially invited for the next meeting of the Seminar series in Body History on Wednesday 7 November 2018, 13.15-15.00; Venue: Janskerkhof 2-3/room 115, Utrecht. Sara Ray  will speak ‘On Mothers and Monsters: Maternal Testimony, Monstrous Births, and Embryology, 1700-1849′; Amber Striekwold‘s talk is titled: ‘By sheer weight of numbers. Ideas about man and health in the practice of insurance medicine for modern life insurance companies 1880-1920′.

Sara Ray (Doctoral Candidate, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, currently Fulbright Scholar at the UvA, where she will be researching ‘Human Anatomical Collecting and the History of Disability in the Netherlands 1820-1850′): On Mothers and Monsters: Maternal Testimony, Monstrous Births, and Embryology, 1700-1849

 In 1704, Czar Peter the Great issued an order forbidding midwives, surgeons, or mothers from killing or burying infants born with congenital abnormalities. Instead, these “monstrous” bodies were to be sent to Peter’s museum to be collected, anatomized, and studied. Along with the bodies, Peter collected information about the mother and her pregnancy: was she healthy? Injured? Frightened? Were other children in the village similarly deformed? 150 years later, the Dutch anatomist Willem Vrolik published a catalog of his museum, which contained 500 preparations of “monstrous births.” In the catalog, Willem— like Peter— included information about the mother and her pregnancy alongside individual cases. Though separated by a century and a half, the two men collected these bodies and information in pursuit of shared a scientific question: what caused a child to be born monstrous? 

In the period separating Peter and Willem, scientific beliefs about gestation changed dramatically with monstrous births acting as crucial “test cases” for competing embryological theories. This paper examines how maternal testimony was used in scientific arguments about the cause and the significance of bodily abnormality. Was the mother to blame for her monstrous child? Was her account of her pregnancy reliable? Could her imagination influence the child’s body or was the body’s form shaped by other means? Examining maternal testimony alongside embryological theory highlights how moral and social meanings are written into the body even when it has just been born. 

Amber Striekwold (student Research Master History, Utrecht University): By sheer weight of numbers. Ideas about man and health in the practice of insurance medicine for modern life insurance companies 1880-1920

How to determine if someone is healthy? And what is the probability of that person staying healthy? These questions were on the minds of life insurance medical directors at the end of the nineteenth century, when the discipline of insurance medicine was taking form. To make an ‘objective’ and accurate ‘risk-assessment’ about the life of an applicant, different medical techniques were developed and used like urine-analysis, and height- and weight tables based on statistical knowledge. Using corpulence as a case-study, it is found that the height- and weight tables used to make risk-assessments are neither neutral, nor objective. Health is not a pre-discursive entity, it is –to a certain extent – produced within social, cultural and medical practices. The standards for healthy weight produced by insurance medicine became general guidelines for society and determine what we currently perceive to be a healthy body. 

Olfactory Fictions research talk

Bas Groes:

I’m giving a research talk about new research mapping smell and (childhood) memory at the UvA this Thursday. For more details, please see http://aihr.uva.nl/content/events/events/2018/11/smell.html 

The lecture is in preparation of a new research project on smell and culture in the UK.

https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/snidge-scrumpin-mapping-smell-and-memory-21-november/ 

https://beinghumanfestival.org/snidge-scrumpin-mapping-smell-and-memory-in-the-black-country/

Before the Aftermath: Emotion, Affect and Time

CLUE + & the The Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies (Access)

invite you to a festive book launch and mini-colloquium:

Tuesday 23 October 2018, 16.00–17.00, drinks afterwards

VU University, Kerkzaal

Frans Willem Korsten and Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen (University of Leiden) will present their recent monographs A Dutch Republican Baroque: Theatricality, Dramatization, Moment and Event (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and A Literary History of Reconciliation: Power, Remorse and the Limits of Forgiveness (Bloomsbury, 2018).

In their presentations, van Dijkhuizen and Korsten will focus on the relations between emotion, affect and time – crucial concepts in current debates in emotion history on which they will offer complementary perspectives.

Korsten’s book argues that the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was fascinated by the idea that the existing world emerged from a moment at which for a split second, two or more possible realities are equally real – the course of history as yet undetermined  – and after which only a singular one is actualized. Korsten examines this fascination by drawing on a distinction between emotion and affect.

Van Dijkhuizen’s book examines literary representations of interpersonal reconciliation from the early modern era to the present era. It shows how literary writers imagine reconciliation as forever deferred, while presenting feelings of remorse over wrongdoing as never-ending. In the aftermath of grievous wrongdoing – with history having run its course – reconciliation seems to remain beyond reach.

The festive event will be illuminated by a “remorse/reconciliation poetry reading” & by a mini scent event.

Emotion Mining Seminar with James Pennebaker, creator of LIWC

The October issue of the Mind, Text, and Mining seminar presents:

Q&A (via Skype) with James W. Pennebaker (University of Texas Austin) & round table discussion.

Professor James Pennebaker is Centennial Liberal Arts Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a key figure in the study of psychology using text both through his wide-ranging research and through development of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program, which is being used by many researchers within the social sciences and in industry.

NB: Although there will enough room for discussion with James Pennebaker, we ask you – if you have specific questions – to send them to us a week in advance so that we can forward them to James Pennebaker. The number of participants is limited. If you want to participate, please send an email to Martijn Schoonvelde (mschoonvelde@gmail.com).

For more info, see: http://mschoonvelde.com/seminar/

Date and time: October 18, 2018 | 3-5PM

Location: NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide studies (Herengracht 380 1016 CJ Amsterdam)

In various academic fields texts are analysed for indicators of speaker personality, or speaker emotions like disgust, anger, and happiness: concepts which have been shown to drive (political) behaviour or to represent opinions, attitudes or emotionality in relation to certain topics. Quantitative analysis or ‘mining’ of these psychological constructs in the study of historical, social, and political phenomena is burgeoning.

To learn more about these developments, we are forming a multidisciplinary group of interested and active researchers in the Netherlands by means of a regularly occurring seminar in which best practices in applied work, new methodologies, and substantive new findings are exchanged and discussed. We aim for a group of committed members who intend to participate on a regular basis.