Special Event: Samuel Butler in Italy (1/12/2013)

Samuel Butler in Italy - a special event at St John's College, Cambridge

Saturday 12th January 2013 at St John's College, Cambridge

Adventures in Italy is a celebration of the fascinating collection relating to the Victorian polymath Samuel Butler which is held in the Library at St John's College, Cambridge and is currently the subject of a Heritage Lottery Funded cataloguing project. All these events are free, and everyone is welcome. The programme is as follows:

10.00-16.00: 'Butler's Adventures in Italy' - a new exhibition of photographs, artworks, maps and books from the Samuel Butler Collection, displayed in the beautiful C17th Library at St John's
College.

12.00: 'Samuel Butler, un Amico dell'Italia: The History of a Cultural Partnership' - Cristiano Turbil (University of Kent)

14.00: 'Consigning the Old Masters to Limbo: Samuel Butler's Influence on How I Teach Art and Art History' - Clarice Zdanski (Franklin College, Switzerland)

15.30: 'Over the Range with Samuel Butler (and Some Remarkably Persistent Gnats)' - Julia Powles (St John's College, Cambridge)

Full outlines of the talks and details of the booking arrangements can be found on our website at http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/butler-day-adventures-italy. Please feel free to forward this information to any interested parties, or to contact the Library for more information.

A note on Samuel Butler: As well as being a writer, painter, photographer and evolutionist, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was a great traveller, who in the latter part of his life adopted Italy as his second country. From the Alpine ranges bordering Switzerland in the north to Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, Butler covered hundreds of miles (many of which were off the standard tourist track), carrying out hugely original literary-historical research and befriending the locals wherever he stopped to rest. The places and scenes that caught Butler's imagination in the 1880s and 1890s are beautifully documented in the Library's collection, which includes almost 2000 original photographic prints and several hundred artworks created by Butler as he went, as well as the maps he used and the souvenirs he collected on his travels.

Anyone with an interest in Italy, the Alps, nineteenth-century travel and culture, walking, photography, art, art history, classical literature (particularly the 'Odyssey') or Samuel Butler generally is sure to find something to interest them at these events. We hope to see you there!

www.joh.cam.ac.uk/samuel-butler-project

Last Call: NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA Supernumerary Conference “The Global and the Local” (10/4/2012; 6/3-6/2013)

The conference is a supernumerary conference for NAVSA, BAVS, and AVSA.  The dates will be June 3-6, 2013 and the deadline for proposals is October 4, just a few days after the NAVSA '12 Wisconsin conference.  NAVSA's regular conference will occur in 2013 at the Huntington, the Getty, and Pasadena from October 23-27.  You can find more information about the Venice conference at the following web site: http://glocalvictorians.wordpress.com/

The deadline, once again, is October 4.  

The conference will occur on the beautiful island of San Servolo, just a 10-minute vaporetto ride from Piazza San Marco, the tourist heart of Venice.  There will be the option to stay on the island of San Servolo, in dorm room housing (with bathroom in room) for the fee of €53.33 (US$69) per night per person (an unbeatable rate for Venice!).  The rooms are spare but clean and a number of the rooms will be doubles, triples, and quadruples, so you would likely be sharing a room in this scenario.  

Lynda Nead (Birkbeck, UK) and Lydia Wevers (Victorian U, Wellington, New Zeland) have been confirmed as plenary speakers.  An opening State of the Field panel will have position papers by Regenia Gagnier (U Exeter, UK), Jock Macleod (Griffith U, Australia), and Kate Flint (USC, USA).  The conference will include a special night time tour of Basilica San Marco and a series of material culture seminars spread around the city. 

Art, Literature, the Press, and Exile: Relationships between the United Kingdom and the Italian Risorgimento (9/9-11/2011)

Registration is now open for Art, Literature, the Press, and Exile: Relationships between the United Kingdom and the Italian Risorgimento, an international conference to be held 9-11 September 2011 at Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

The conference commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne, based in Bagni di Lucca, in collaboration with the University of Pisa and the Historical Institute of Lucca, and will take place in the former Anglican Church (now the Municipal Library) of Bagni di Lucca. It considers the representation of Italy in the work of nineteenth century British writers and examines perceptions and rationalizations of Italian aspirations for unity by British writers, artists, journalists and politicians. This is one of a series of Conferences at Bagni di Lucca which have concentrated upon nineteenth-century British literary figures who lived in Tuscany and particularly those associated with Bagni itself.

Presentations include, but are not limited to

• “'Stirring the waters roughly' Charles Lever, Blackwood’s Magazine and the Risorgimento"
• "Lord Byron fails to finish 'The Prophecy of Dante'"
• "George Eliot’s Romola as an expression of a cultural Risorgimento"
• "British Women Writers and the Risorgimento: Isabella Blagden between salons and political involvement"
• "Friends of Italy: The Risorgimento in Victorian Great Britain"
• "'Italy for the Italians': Jessie White, the Italian Risorgimento and the Formation of Victorian Identity
• "'Buy it, buy it! Fine statue! … very cheap'- Emigration to Great Britain from the Lucca Province in the 19th Century"
• "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Francesco Dall’Ongaro"
• "Arthur Hugh Clough and the Roman Republic of 1849"
• "Caricatures of leading figures of the Risorgimento as seen by the original Vanity Fair (1869-1878)"
• "Dickens and Gissing in Italy before and after the Unity"

For the full program, visit http://www.fondazionemontaigne.it/files/montaigne__programma_2011.pdf

For registration information, visit http://www.fondazionemontaigne.it/index.html