Curious Specimens: Enlightenment Objects, Collections, Narratives

Curious Specimens will take place at the Victoria and Albert Museum, April 15-17, 2010. This conference takes its starting point from two major exhibitions on enlightenment collecting: Walpole and Strawberry Hill (YCBA & V&A 2009-10) and Mrs Delany’s Circle and the Art of Natural History (YCBA & John Soane’s Museum, 2009-10). The fresh finds emerging from these two major curatorial projects will inform new ways of thinking about eighteenth-century practices of collecting.

Curious Specimens is co-organized by Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London) in conjunction with the Lewis Walpole Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, Yale Center for British Art Speakers include: Malcolm Baker (University of California Riverside), Stephen Bann (Bristol), George Haggerty (University of California Riverside), Lucy Peltz (National Portrait Gallery), Pamela Smith (Columbia), as well as curators Cynthia Roman (Lewis Walpole Library, Yale) and Michael Snowdin (V&A), who co-curated Walpole and Strawberry Hill and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (YCBA), co-curator of Mrs Delany’s Circle.

Adriana Craciun
Professor of English
University of California, Riverside
Co-Organizer, The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge, 1660-1850. A Series of International Events
http://ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/disorder_of_things/
Visit the website at http://ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/disorder_of_things/curious_specimens.html