PROGRAMME: 3rd EUI Conference in Visual and Material Culture Studies.
Souvenirs, Keepsakes and Tokens: Material and Visual Expressions of Personal Memories
16 May 2022 – 17 May 2022
REGISTRATION:
Monday 16 May 2022: eui.eu/events?id=543819
Tuesday 17 May 2022: eui.eu/events?id=547460
Organisers: Elisa Chazal, Isabelle Riepe, Ana Struillou (Visual and Material History Working Group)
The researcher-led Visual and Material History Working Group of the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence is hosting a two-day hybrid conference on the material and visual expressions of individual memories. This event is the third conference in visual and material culture studies.
People use objects as a memento for fragments of their lives, be they ordinary memories of childhood or old age, or extraordinary memories of travel, wonder, belief, war or oppression. From the inception of pilgrimage, travellers collected and carried tokens of the places they transited through to be later displayed back home or carrying with them reminders of the people they wanted to keep close. Similarly, souvenirs are also meaningful objects in sedentary lives, materialising domestic and intimate moments and tensions within the home and the family. From medieval pilgrimages to present-day immigration, sedentary and mobile individuals all over the globe are engaged in a form of emotional attachment to objects, as reminders of their past. We define souvenirs as mementoes of places and times, tied to individuals and communities who ascribed to them changing meanings and functions throughout their existence. These ever-evolving objects acquired new values and symbolic status. Taking this broad definition of souvenirs, this conference seeks to ascertain how individuals, families and communities memorialise their past through the visual and material world in form of four panels focusing on the themes of time, emotions, prisons & war and travel.
Monday 16 May, Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati and ZOOM
09:00 Opening remarks
9:30-11:00 Panel 1: TIME – Chair: Érika Wicky, EUI
Imogen Peck (Coventry University)
The Anxious Afterlives of Letters
Elisa Chazal (EUI)
Playing with Temporalities: Anachronic Personalized Souvenirs from the Fin-de-siècle Historical Re-enactments
Ludwig Pelzl (EUI)
When I was younger… Thinking back of work in old age through memorial portraits, 17th and 18th Centuries
11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
11:30-13:00 KEYNOTE
Leora Auslander (University of Chicago),
Bras, rings, belts and spoons: Materialized memories of survivance in NS camps
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-15:30 Panel 2: EMOTIONS – Chair: Julie Deschepper, KHI
Stephanie Koscak (Wake Forest University)
Inscribing Absence: Mourning and Love Tokens in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Loanh Mirande (Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne; Université de Lille)
Musical iconography in 18th-century Brussels painting cabinets: emotional souvenirs ?
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-17:30 Panel 3: PRISONS & WAR – Chair: Tara Zahra, Chicago
Maaheen Ahmed (Ghent University)
Keepsakes from the Second World War: Lies Den Houting’s Comics Notebooks
Marilyn Campeau (University of Toronto)
Sketching Frontline Mementos: Red Army Soldiers’ Drawings during World War II
Josefina Vidal Miranda (Universidad de Chile)
Remembering from the Material: Unveiling Affections in Prison
17:30-18:00 Summary of Day 1
Tuesday, 17 May ZOOM
11:00-12:00 BOOK DISCUSSION
Emma Gleadhill, Independent Scholar
Taking travel home: the souvenir culture of British women tourists, 1750-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2022)
12:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Panel 4: TRAVEL – Chair: Giorgio Riello, EUI
Emily Carrington Freeman (Independent)
Materiality in John Ruskin’s continental diary-keeping (1835)
Jaclynne J. Kerner (State University of New York at New Paltz)
The Material Dimensions of Shrinedom and Its Pilgrimages
15:30-16:30 Closing Remarks
IMAGE CREDITS: National Trust Images, Killerton / Malcom Jarvis