Date/Time
Date(s) - 25 Apr 2016
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Next Monday, April 25, will be this semester’s last meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will convene at our usual time and place: 5:15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.
We will be welcoming Michael Suarez, S.J. (University of Virginia / Rare Book School) for a talk entitled “Transacting Artifacts: Sir William Hamilton’s Cabinet and its Afterlives.”
Michael writes:
With its striking ocher and black hand-painted illustrations of Greek vases, Pierre-François Hughes D’Hancarville’s Complete Collection of Antiquities from the Cabinet of Sir William Hamilton in four large folio volumes (Naples, 1766 [1767]ff) is a monumental textual artifact. This presentation will help seminar participants both to think about the Penn copy in its contemporary contexts, and to consider the manifold ways in which the representation of ancient artifacts in its pages occasioned a series of subsequent material representations–with remarkable cultural consequence. How does the material text, itself a collectible artifact, both depict and distort the historical object? What versions of antiquity ensue, and how do their embodiments shape the activities of both museum and marketplace? With the rise of antiquaries and the exhibition of their collections, how are the library and the museum united in the accumulation and display of artifacts–and in the knowledge that comes from reading historical collections with the book in hand?
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is University Professor and Director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and was recently nominated by President Obama to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities. Over the past six years, he has published four books, three of which were named by the Times Literary Supplement as Books of the Year. His 2015 series of Lyell Lectures in Bibliography and Book History at Oxford University will be published by the Oxford University Press next year.
All are welcome! Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the library building.