REGARDING ROMANTIC ROME: Topography, Reverie, Destabilization

An international conference at the British School at Rome, 29-31 May 2003,
organized by Chloe Chard and Richard Wrigley, and co-ordinated and
hosted by the British School at Rome.

The diversity and complexity of cultural activity in Rome, during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has often been obscured by a
narrow focus on one or other of the most conspicuous features of the city
over this period: its role as a chosen place of work for artists and
poets, for example, or as the lieu privilégié for the study of antiquity.
The conference, in contrast, aims to explore the interconnections
between different aspects of Rome during this period, as a city that
provided a focus for multifarious fantasies, dreams, obsessions,
theoretical enterprises and practical projects, on the part of both
Italians and foreigners. It also sets out to consider the role of Rome as
a place that specifically invited an exploration of many of the themes
most closely associated with Romanticism: ruin and fragmentation, the
discovery of the self through exploration of the other, the relation
between nature and the imagination, and between the historical and the
personal, the oedipal struggle with tradition, memory and the haunted,
melancholy, solitude and the sublime, to name a few.
In considering the range of cultural practices that took Rome as their
starting-point or their setting, the conference supplies an occasion for
considering the theoretical issues raised by both Romantic-era and
contemporary concepts of place and topography. Contributions are invited
from scholars in the widest possible range of disciplines.

FRIDAY 30 May 2003

9.15 Introduction

CHAIR Richard Wrigley

9.30 Anne Marie Bush (University of Hawaii)
Inside Out: 19th-century Guidebooks to Rome

10.00 Chloe Chard (London)
Resuscitating Rome: Laughter, Digression and Disorder

11.00 coffee

11.30 Wendy Wassyng Roworth (University of Rhode Island)
Pulling Parrhassius' Curtain: Trickery and Fakery in the Roman Art World

12.00 Christoph Frank (Bibliotheca Hertziana)
Shaping the Image of Rome: the Role of International Agents

1.00 lunch

CHAIR Stephen Bann

2.30 Marian Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London)
Measuring Antique Sculptures

3.00 Susanna Pasquali (University of Ferrara)
The Pantheon and the Cult of Great Artists

4.00 afternoon break

4.30 Andreas Vejvar (Universitat Mozarteum Salzburg)
Karl Philipp Moritz's Die neue Cecilia, Rome and the Concept of Creative
Suffering

5.00 Brian Grosskurth (York University, Toronto)
Solitude as Style: Berlioz, Rome and the Topography of Sound

6.15 Reception at BSR

SATURDAY 31 May 2003

CHAIR: Wendy Wassyng Roworth

9.30 Massimo Cattaneo (University of Naples)
Trastevere: myths and stereotypes of a Roman rione between the 18th and
19th centuries [in Italian]

10.00 Stephen Bann (University of Bristol)
Léopold Robert and the Afterlife of Antiquity

11.00 coffee

11.30 Isobel Hurst (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
Reanimating the Romans: Mary Shelley's Response to Ancient Ruins

12.00 Sophie Thomas (University of Sussex)
Seeing Past Rome: Ruins and Fragmentation

1.00 Lunch

CHAIR: Chloe Chard

2.30 Richard Wrigley (Oxford Brookes University)
'The Dirtiest City in Europe': Hygiene, Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Rome

3.00 Julie Shaffer (University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh)
Abjecting Roman / ticism: Relocating Inspiration in Mrs Ross's The Woman
of Genius

3.30 Discussion;
Concluding discussion

Enquiries about registration should be sent to Richard Wrigley at
rwrigleybrookes.ac.uk

The British School at Rome
Via Gramsci 61
00197 Rome
Italy
tel. 0039-06326493.9
fax 0039-063221201
http://www.bsr.ac.uk/