Workshop - Mediating History’s Materiality, 1700-1900

Programm Workshop 'Mediating History’s Materiality, 1700-1900'

Organizers: Dr. Katharina Boehm (FRIAS), Dr. Victoria Mills (Darwin College, Cambridge)

Date: 24th to 25th July 2014

This workshop explores how literary writers, antiquaries, early archaeologists, artists and engravers  encountered the material, tangible past – relics, monuments, collections of objects, etc. – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We are particularly interested in the ways in which texts and pictorial renditions mediate, struggle with and theorize the materiality of history in the two centuries that saw the rise and popularization of object-oriented antiquarianism and the emergence of archaeology as a scholarly field. The workshop will ask how aesthetic debates shape the translation of three-dimensional objects into texts and images – and how aesthetic choices in the visual and textual rendition of historical objects in turn reflect changing cultural conceptions of history and of the relationship between past and present.