“Marco Polo’s Tomatoes, or on Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early European Art”, Professor Anne Dunlop

Date: Wednesday, 4 May, 2016
Time: 6:45–7:45pm
Venue: Old Arts Public Lecture Theatre, The University of Melbourne (map)
RSVP: Free event, registration required. Register here.

In the last decades, the question of cross-cultural contact and exchange has emerged as a major field of research in Art History and the humanities in general. This work is driven by the need to understand the early history of our own global moment, but it is also part of a larger and more ambitious project: the attempt to write a global history of art, one that does not privilege Western production at the expense of other cultures. The importance of the project is clear, but there are many competing, and conflicting, ideas about how such a history should be written.

To explore the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, this lecture will focus on a limit-case: the possibility that renewed contact between Italy and Eurasia after the rise of the Mongol Empire had an impact on European art. On the one hand, it is clear that this was a moment of renewed and intense contact and exchange: Marco Polo travelling to China is only one famous example of a much larger phenomenon. Artists, materials, technologies, and objects travelled across Europe, Africa, and Asia as they had not done in a thousand years. It is also clear that there were fundamental changes in Italian art in the years around 1300. Yet how can we determine cause and effect, given the limited historical evidence that survives? The challenge is to avoid anachronistic interpretation, what will be discussed here as the danger of Marco Polo’s tomatoes.

Anne Dunlop was appointed to the Herald Chair of Fine Arts in the School of Culture and Communication in 2015. Her research and teaching focus on the art of Italy and Europe between about 1300 and 1550, including the role of materials and technology in the making of art, and the relations of Italy and Eurasian in the years after the Mongol Conquests.

“A state of excitement? WA’s heritage of European emotions”, (Professor Susan Broomhall, UWA)

Date: Tuesday 10 May, 2016
Time: 5:45pm – 7:00pm
Venue: The University of Western Australia, Hackett Drive, Crawley, 6009 WA
Booking: Free event. RSVP online here, 08 6488 3858, emotions@uwa.edu.au

Professor Susan Broomhall, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, examines the long history of emotional contact between our continent’s western edge and Europe, stretching back well before British settlement in 1829. From medieval maps to early exploration, these lands and their peoples have been the subject of curiosity and wonder, greed and envy, fear and anger: a site of European competition far away that has shaped the borders of our state and of profound, sometimes difficult, interactions with local peoples. The heritage of these emotions has continuing impact on the state today, from geographic markers, the location of towns and cities to our cultural institutions and social orientations.

“The Eye Sees Not Itself: Shakespeare and Aristotle on Friendship”, Dr Patrick Gray (Durham University)

Date: Wednesday 11 May, 2016
Time: 4:30–5:30PM
Venue: 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne (map)
More info: sarah.balkin@unimelb.edu.au and (03) 9035 8617

In a conversation in Troilus and Cressida between Ulysses and Achilles, Shakespeare presents a remarkably sophisticated account of the relationship between the self and the other, adumbrating the concept of intersubjective “recognition” (Anerkennung) more commonly associated with Hegel, as well as other, later Continental philosophers such as Sartre, Ricoeur, and Levinas.

The idea that the other, especially, the friend or lover, is a mirror or “glass,” enabling and mediating self-definition, reappears in Julius Caesar, as well as Antony and Cleopatra; even as early as King John. Shakespeare anticipates Hegel here not only because he himself influences Hegel’s thought, but also because both he and Hegel are drawing on a common source, Aristotle’s account of the role of friendship in his moral philosophy.

More specifically, the image of the friend as mirror can be traced to a treatise attributed to Aristotle, the Magna Moralia, now considered of doubtful authenticity, as mediated through influential commentaries on Aristotle’s ethics by Shakespeare’s English contemporary, John Case: the Speculum Moralium Quaestionum (1585) and the Reflexus Speculi Moralis (1596). Case further complicates Aristotle’s original metaphor by emphasizing the eye of the other as providing the most revealing reflection of the self, drawing upon related conceits in Plato’s First Alcibiades and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations.

Patrick Gray is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is the co-editor with John D. Cox of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2014) and guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of Critical Survey on Shakespeare and war. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Critical Survey, Comparative Drama, and Cahiers Shakespeare en devenir. He is currently working on a monograph on shame and guilt in Shakespeare, as well as co-editing a collection of essays on Shakespeare and Montaigne. In April and May 2016, Patrick Gray is Early Career International Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100-1800.

Lecture and Panel Discussion: “Shakespeare & Co: The Bard and His Peers in the Digital Age”, Professor Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle), with Dr Jennifer Clement (University of Queensland) and Professor Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland)

Date: Wednesday, 11 May 2016
Time: 5:30pm (for a 6pm start)
Venue: F.W. Robinson Reading Room, Fryer Library, Level 4 Duhig Building, University of Queensland (St Lucia campus)
Register: Free. RSVP here

Professor Hugh Craig is Deputy Head of the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle and Director of the University’s new Centre for Twenty-First Century Humanities. His work is based largely on frequency data and has led to several breakthrough findings in regard to Shakespearean works. Using computational techniques he found that Shakespeare was the likely author of a number of passages from The Spanish Tragedy that had previously been attributed to the playwright Ben Jonson. The results are presented in his co-edited book Shakespeare, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Following a lecture about his work in the digital humanities, Professor Craig will be joined in conversation by Peter Holbrook, Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland, and Dr Jennifer Clement, who teaches the undergraduate course “Introduction to Shakespeare” at UQ.

This event, part of the Friends of the Library program, coincides with the establishment in 2016 of UQ’s Centre for Digital Scholarship, located above the Fryer Library.

Presented by the Fryer Library, University of Queensland.