Two July Conferences: 'Worlds of Faith' and 'The Matter of Silver'
Two conferences convened by members of the Department of History of Art will be held online in July: both are free to attend and open to all.
On Tuesday 6 July, the UKRI-funded research project Pantheons: Sculpture at St Paul’s Cathedral c. 1696-1916 will hold its first conference, Worlds of Faith: Sculpture and Faith at St Paul's Cathedral, c.1796 – 1916. The presentations will be object-focused on individual monuments; they will be available to watch during the week before the conference. The day of the conference itself will be made up of a Respondents’ Panel and a series of panel discussions: ‘Empires of Faith: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism’; ‘Sculpting the Bible’; and ‘The Victorian Church’. For further details about the project and the conference, including speakers, visit the Pantheons website. To book tickets, go to the Eventbrite page.
The Matter of Silver: Substance, Surface, Shimmer, Trauma will be held over three afternoons from Monday 26 to Wednesday 28 July. Convened by Professor Helen Hills, the conference is supported by the British Academy.
How and why did silver, more widespread than gold, extracted by force from the Andes, marked by trauma, become par excellence marker of and substance of social, political and spiritual refinement in Europe? This conference investigates silver as more than means or measure of empire, more than mere currency of emergent capitalism, more than inert matter from which luxury objects were fashioned, to ask how might these disparate stories, these two sides to the same coin, be brought together. What happens when we think them in relation?
This conference brings together scholars and practitioners from across the Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences, and institutions beyond the academy, including museums and galleries, to explore silver as an extraordinarily productive site of exchange and transformation in the early modern world and beyond.
Speakers include Dr Wim Nys, head of collections & research at the DIVA Museum, Antwerp, and Dr Elena Phipps, formerly Senior Museum Conservator in the Textile Conservation Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For the full programme and to book tickets, go to the Eventbrite page.
Worlds of Faith: Sculpture and Faith at St Paul's Cathedral, c. 1796-1916 - conference, 6 July 2021