- 5 December 2022
- 5:00 – 7:00 pm
- Online
This is an event in support of ECRN members. You can find out more about the network here.
This event aims to foster research feedback, debate new ideas and provide networking opportunities in an informal setting.
Early Career Research and postdoctoral fellows, affiliated or unaffiliated to the Paul Mellon Centre, are invited to host a twenty-minute lecture of ongoing and unfinished research. After two presentations a ten-minute Q&A session will follow allowing fellows to share and discuss their research and receive friendly feedback.
Programme
17:00 Intro
17:10 Dr Juliet Learmouth, PMC Postdoctoral Fellow: Women and the West End Town House: Designing, Decorating and Inhabiting Domestic Space in London, 1700–1760
17:30 Dr Asad Ullah Khan, tutor, University of Edinburgh: The Gaseous-Thermodynamics of Point Clouds and J.M.W. Turner’s Atmospheric Works
17:50 Dr Marte Stinis, PMC Postdoctoral Fellow: Music and Victorian Aestheticism
18:10 Break
18:20 Q&A ECRN Research Discussions
18:50 Closing Remarks
Abstracts
Dr Juliet Learmouth, PMC Postdoctoral Fellow
Women and the West End Town House: Designing, Decorating and Inhabiting Domestic Space in London, 1700–1760
Juliet’s PhD explored the relationship between elite women and the London town house in the first half of the eighteenth century and is currently being revised to produce an academic monograph. To date, the scarcity of scholarly literature on the town house, relative to the country house, has meant that the important roles of women as patrons, owners and inhabitants of this building type have been substantially overlooked. In seeking to address this neglect Juliet adopts two different (but equally important) approaches: Firstly, exploring women’s roles in the design, construction, and decoration of their London residences, assessing the extent to which they facilitated innovation in terms of architectural design and interior decor. Secondly, showing how the town house provided a vital plank in the structure of elite women’s lives, underpinning family relationships, key moments in the lifecycle, engagement in politics and influence at court.
Dr Asad U. Khan, University of Edinburgh
The Gaseous-Thermodynamics of Point Clouds and J.M.W. Turner’s Atmospheric Works
What unseen spatiotemporal experiences might surface at the outer edge of human perception and further after human extinction? Departing from Michel Serres’s thermodynamic reading of J.M.W. Turner’s atmospheric works as ‘heat engines’, what follows will be a parallel reading of point cloud digital datasets as the spatial synthesis of electromagnetic radiation.
Dr Marte Stinis, PMC Postdoctoral Fellow
Music and Victorian Aestheticism
Music is a fascinating phenomenon in the world of painting – why represent something that is, by its nature, so unrepresentable? There are many – so many – reasons why visual artists become interested in something as ambiguous as music, perhaps even because of the challenge of representation, yet there was a very particular situation in 1860s Victorian England that made this inter-art relationship not only attractive but fruitful for painters working there. In Marte’s research, she looks at the musical and artistic situation in the 1860s to analyse and explain why artists associated with the avant-garde movement of aestheticism were attracted to music. Within this process, she focuses on Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore and James McNeill Whistler as a subset within Victorian Aestheticism as she perceives a communal approach towards music in their respective oeuvres.
Listing image credit: Spencer Frederick Gore, Ballet Scene from "On the Sands", 1910, oil on canvas. Collection of the Yale Center for British Art, (B1983.11.2).
About the speakers
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Juliet Learmouth is an architectural historian and a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. After obtaining her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016, she undertook her doctoral studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, focusing on the relationship between elite women and the London town house, 1710–1750 (completed in 2021). She is now working on converting her PhD thesis into a monograph. Her publications include “The London Town House of Lady Isabella Finch” The Georgian Group Journal, vol 25 (2017); “Living Amid the Ruins: The Women of Whitehall” in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol 44, issue 4 (2021); “Holding Court at Marlborough House: The London Town House of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough” in Politics and the English Country House 1688–1800 edited by Joan Coutu, Peter Lindfield and Jon Stobart (McGill Queen’s University Press, forthcoming 2023).
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Asad Ullah Kahn is a computational designer and researcher at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He develops research through practice at the crossroads of computational architecture, remote sensing earth science, artificial intelligence and design informatics to anticipate spatial and temporal experiences of a post-extinction world in multimodal artefacts. Last year’s exhibitions included: large-scale cinematic installations at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Italian Virtual Pavilion; Liste Art Fair Basel, Switzerland; and Future Lab, Shanghai, China.
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Marte Stinis is a postdoctoral fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre, working on her book on music and Victorian Aestheticism in the nineteenth century. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2021, and is a regular contributor to both international conferences and journals. She has publications forthcoming on John Singer Sargent and music, on Alma-Tadema and pictorial immersion, and is organising a conference entitled Ugly Modernity: Its Unseen Sides for June 2023. Her research interests include music, inter-art relations, (metaphorical) synaesthesia, art and empire, reception studies and immersion.