Event Recordings from Out to Sea Now Live

Video recordings of 'Out to Sea', our Summer 2024 Seminar Series, are now available to view on our website.

The series was coordinated by our Research and Events Convenor Rebecca Tropp and focused on the influence of oceans and their coasts, in relation to Britain and its global empire, on visual and architectural imagination and production.

Before watching the series you may be interested to learn more from Rebecca about some of the thought processes behind this eclectic series:

“As testament to the power of inspirational colleagues and the work they do, the initial idea for 'Out to Sea' emerged during my first staff meeting at the PMC, when Baillie Card (Senior Editor) highlighted Molly Duggins' article on sailors' valentines from the December 2023 issue of British Art Studies.

From that tiny spark grew a cross-disciplinary programme that encompassed nineteenth-century deep-sea diving and visualisations of the underwater of Sydney Harbour (Ann Elias), ocean liners in theatrical productions in interwar Britain (Faye Hammill), the importation of British houses by Efik traders of enslaved Africans (Louis P. Nelson), historical associations between sailors and tattooing (Matt Lodder), and the development and self-fashioning of British naval portraiture (Katherine Gazzard).

The diversity of visual and architectural topics investigated and methods utilised was made all the richer through the probings of our respondents (Morgan Daniels, Bruce Peter, Shaheen Alikhan, Gemma Angel, and Sara Caputo), who revealed further unexpected facets to our speakers' lines of enquiry.

While these talks were merely the tip of the iceberg of these scholars' research, we hope that those who attended the seminars and/or watch online will be inspired to learn more about these individuals' work and the wider possibilities of art historical scholarship on oceans and their coasts.”

She also highlighted the ongoing work of each of the speakers:

“Katherine Gazzard's research seminar gave us a little window into her first book, The Art of Naval Portraiture, which was published in March (Royal Museums Greenwich, 2024).

You can learn more about the content of Louis P. Nelson's research seminar in his chapter, 'Global houses of the Efik', in Jon Stobart (ed.), Global Goods and the Country House: Comparative Perspectives, 1650–1800 (UCL, 2023).

Matt Lodder's research seminar provided an excellent taster for his forthcoming book, Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art, which will be published by Yale University Press this November.

Ann Elias's research seminar was based on the work she is currently undertaking for a new book on Sydney Harbour, which continues her enquiry into human entanglements with oceans; in the meantime, we recommend reading her previous book, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Faye Hammill's research seminar emerged from her current AHRC-funded project, ‘Ocean Modern’, which investigates the powerful symbolism and contested meanings of the ocean liner in twentieth-century literature, as well as ocean liners as spaces for literary activity."

To see recordings from all our events, visit our event recordings page.