Conference invitation

William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond photography
Thursday, 24 June to Saturday, 26 June

Location: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) is remembered primarily as a
photographic pioneer and influential early voice on photographic
aesthetics, but his activities as a Victorian intellectual and ?gentleman
of science? ranged widely across the natural sciences, classical
scholarship and Assyriology. This interdisciplinary conference will
approach Talbot?s work with this wider perspective in mind, bringing
together art historians, curators, historians of science, and
practitioners of the many scholarly fields to which Talbot contributed. It
will situate Talbot against the networks and institutions of Victorian
intellectual enterprise, while raising basic questions about the relation
between photography and these other fields.

The occasion for this conference is the British Library?s recent
acquisition of a large archive of Talbot?s manuscripts, including research
notebooks, diaries, correspondence, and photographic prints. The majority
of papers delivered during this conference will present new research based
on the study of hitherto unexamined items in this collection. They will
explore such topics as Talbot?s lifelong engagement with mathematics, his
successful attempts to decipher cuneiform scripts, his interest in
philology and literature, the meaning of his botanical specimens, and his
fascination with optical illusions and physiological optics. Contributions
on Talbot?s photographic oeuvre will take into account the connections
between Talbot?s invention of photography and his other scholarly and
scientific activities. Further papers will explore the historical context
of Talbot?s Cambridge education at Trinity College and his habitual
practice of keeping research notebooks, in order to suggest how we might
understand the manuscripts as material records of an intellectual culture
and way of life that both enabled and constrained Talbot?s activities. The
two keynote lectures, by James Elkins and Larry Schaaf, will explore the
conference?s larger themes: the relationships between science, art and
photography, and Talbot?s identity as a Victorian intellectual.

Programme: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1113/programme/

Exhibition

The conference will be accompanied by an exhibition (14 June to 9
July 2010, date tbc), displaying facsimiles of a selection of Talbot?s
manuscripts and photographs at the Wren Library, Trinity College
Cambridge, Talbot?s former college.

Registration

Please register on the Crassh website:
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1113/

Deadline for booking is Friday 18 June 2010.

For administrative enquiries please contact mm405cam.ac.uk

Sponsors

This conference has been organised with the support of the British
Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, The Mellon Centre for Disciplinary
Innovation (CDI) at CRASSH, The British Library and Trinity College Cambridge.

Convenors

Mirjam Brusius (History and Philosophy of Science, University of
Cambridge and the British Library)
Chitra Ramalingam (Mellon/ACLS Fellow, CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
Katrina Dean (Curator for the History of Science, British Library)

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