Scrambled Messages (Clare Pettitt & the Guildhall Art Gallery)
Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900 was a four-year interdisciplinary project that marked the 150th anniversary of the laying of cable for the trans-Atlantic telegraph. Among its outcomes was an exhibition, Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy, co-curated by Professor Clare Pettitt, held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, 20 September 2016 to 22 January 2017, whose catalogue is available to download freely at the project’s website.
Scrambled Messages proposed a reconceptualisation of the way that scientific and technical history can be brought into meaningful contact with the history of art and literary theory. Participants included literary scholars, art historians, historians of science, archaeologists, physicists and engineers. Bringing scientific and artistic objects into conversation with each other can challenge and change accepted notions of the aesthetic or the functional. By taking the idea of the telegraph as the primary object of their investigation, these scholars were able to break free of empirical scientific explanation on one hand, and from the non-specificities of literary ‘thing theory’ on the other.
They were able to track the mobility of objects and the ideas instantiated in them in ways that avoided the cybernetic bias of network theory and the anthropocentric bias of traditional theories of art or literary criticism. The result was the generation of a materialist paradigm of nineteenth-century realism that pivots on the notions of mediation that fascinated the Victorians themselves.
Charles Dickens: Man of Science (Adelene Buckland & the Charles Dickens Museum)
The exhibition Charles Dickens: Man of Science, whose guest academic co-curator was Dr Adelene Buckland, was put on at the Charles Dickens Museum, London, 24 May to 11 November 2018. In 1839, the writer and physiologist George Henry Lewes visited Charles Dickens at Doughty Street and examined his bookshelves. He left accusing Dickens of being ‘completely outside philosophy, science, and the higher literature’.
For over 150 years, it was thought that Charles Dickens was either not interested in science or was downright hostile to it. But Dickens's science was not the science of books or learned institutions; for Dickens, science mattered when it transformed lives by curing disease or cleaning streets, or opening up new vistas of wonder in a humdrum world.
Charles Dickens: Man of Science aimed to reveal Dickens not only as a scientific enthusiast, but as the key communicator of science in the Victorian age. Displaying his writings alongside artefacts, instruments, and texts of the developing sciences, it shared the story of Dickens’s friendships and scientific passions. Journeying through some of Dickens's favourite sciences—geology, thermodynamics, chemistry, and medicine—it revealed that what made him a great writer was precisely what made him a man of science.
Outreach with Westminster Abbey (Daniel Starza Smith)
When Matthew Payne, Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey was working through a trunk of unsorted fragments of early documents in the Abbey’s Library in autumn 2016, he came across a very early manuscript of John Donne’s The Courtier’s Library, a satirical attack on corruptions in the church and establishment: rather like a 17th century version of Private Eye.
He turned to Dr Daniel Starza Smith, Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature, for scholarly advice, and the two co-authored the essay detailing the find and its significance. The manuscript was on free public display in St Margaret’s Church, next to Westminster Abbey, 13 to 18 November 2017.
This is an extremely exciting find, and gives us important new clues about the life and writing of one of our most important writers. We might think of "fake news" as a modern phenomenon, but Donne saw something similar happening around him. He was horrified at the corruption of truth by the powerful, greedy, and wilfully ignorant, and he responded with this vicious satire, which was too dangerous to print until after his death. This discovery helps us understand how it circulated furtively among his trusted friends.
Dr Daniel Starza Smith
Theatre & Performance Studies Outreach
By its nature Theatre & Performance Studies at Kings has a dynamic outward aspect. We work as a team with close ties to a range of London institutions where performance is significant. This includes obvious staged environments such as Battersea Arts Centre, but it also includes environments where what is called the ‘broad spectrum’ evidence of performance is at work, the law courts for instance where nothing could take place without the rhetorics of performance. King’s is ideally placed for these kinds of engagements sitting at the central London spine between the historic legal quarter of Lincolns Inn Fields and immediately accessible to a multitude of venues.
Close working partnerships have been developed over the last decade between Theatre & Performance Studies in the English Department at King’s and a wide range of institutions and agencies.
During 2018-2019 there were projects conducted with the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the question ‘What is the Contemporary’, with the Whitechapel Art Gallery on ‘The Future as a Cultural Fact’, with the Royal Courts of Justice on ‘The Performance of Legal Process’ and a sustained undergraduate involvement with Battersea Arts Centre attending and critically addressing three performances: Keep by Daniel Kitson, The Justice Syndicate by Fanshen, and I’m A Phoenix, Bitch by Bryony Kimmings. This project also provided an opportunity for 40 students to explore the Battersea Arts Centre site and its history and to consider the post-fire rebuilding of BAC and how that relates to a long history of London theatre fires.
Tate Modern is a regular point of contact, work and projects, most recently with a sustained engagement with the participatory work of the Cuban visual artist Tania Bruguera whose 6-month Hyundai Commission explored harrowing questions of mass migration. For several years Theatre & Performance students have made a twice annual visit to explore the Freudian legacy at the Freud Museum, while the Freud Museum itself became the site for a staff book launch. The Live Art Development Agency in Bethnal Green is a close associate and often of critical support to students whose performance interests are at the cutting edge of the discipline.
The Theatre & Performance Studies team, Dr Lara Shalson, Dr Kélina Gotman and Professor Alan Read all conduct interdisciplinary, performance-based research and practice-based work that connects with each of these sites of enquiry. Most recently Alan staged an evening seminar in Bush House, Acoustic Shock, in which his writing on the extraordinary legal case of the viola player Chris Goldscheider seeking damages from the Royal Opera House for hearing loss during a rehearsal of Wagner’s The Walkurie, was the focus. Leading barrister Theo Huckle QC, who defended and won damages for Goldscheider in the High Court was the keynote contributor to that event which was attended by a wide range of international theatre experts concerned with the implications of the case for future venue architecture and health and safety.