Slade Lecture Series 2025 - Lecture 2: Gaps in Archives

29th January 2025, 5:00 pm

Speaker: Professor Beate Fricke (2024/25 Slade Professor in Fine Art)

Location: The Auditorium, St John's College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JP

Booking Required 2024/25 Slade Lectures Booking Form (Names are checked upon entry)

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Archival documents do not always record and represent significant parts of past societies. The buildings of the Loge du Mer at Perpignan, the Lonja in Palma and the Lonja de la Seda in Valencia reveal how the construction of market halls and municipal organisations supporting trade can provide insights into the underrepresented histories of Muslims, enslaved people, or labourers. These presences are largely absent from archival records – but do emerge as significant elements in a painted panel for the Loge du Mer (1479). As a way to make sense of this apparent dissonance, this lecture unspools the material quality of the silk traded in these halls. A new reading of the architectural structures of the Lonjas through the lens of the material world of the cloth they contained leads to a reading of the markets’ spiral columns as spines supporting a different history. Shifting the narrative from the mastery of an architect towards the collectives involved in winding the threads of silk histories furnishes a new view of these innovative municipal buildings.

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Beate Fricke is Professor and Chair of European Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. Previously, she was professor for Medieval Art at the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of sculpture, image theory and the objects as archives of a history of applied arts, materiality, knowledge transfer and trade in the global "Middle Ages". Among her publications are Holy Smoke. Censers across Cultures, 2023, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conquest and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, 2015, and together with Finbarr Barry Flood Tales things Tell. Material Histories of Early Globalisms, 2024. She is leading the research project The Inheritance of Looting. Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums (SNF – https://looting.ch). She is founder and Editor-in-chief of the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und Visuellen Kultur (link: https://21-inquiries.eu/en).

Slade Lecture Series 2025 - Lecture 1: Gaps in Writing

22nd January 2025, 5:00 pm

Speaker: Professor Beate Fricke (2024/25 Slade Professor in Fine Art)

Location: The Auditorium, St John's College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JP

Booking Required 2024/25 Slade Lectures Booking Form (Names are checked upon entry)

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Focusing on this notion of gaps in the constitution of cultural heritage, the first lecture pursues the traces of loot and objects of war. Close readings of illustrations in fifteenth-century military manuals, of drawings in the Bernese chronicle of Diebold Schilling (1478-1483) and of drawings and prints by the mercenary soldier Urs Graf uncover important aspects of the transformation of booty into cultural heritage. The traces of the history of two pairs of looted canons from the 15th and 16th centuries are riddled with gaps. Following these blank spots reveals, however, how these objects and their fragmented histories may be understood as contributing to the pre-history of museums and their collections in Switzerland.

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Beate Fricke is Professor and Chair of European Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern. Previously, she was professor for Medieval Art at the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of sculpture, image theory and the objects as archives of a history of applied arts, materiality, knowledge transfer and trade in the global "Middle Ages". Among her publications are Holy Smoke. Censers across Cultures, 2023, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conquest and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, 2015, and together with Finbarr Barry Flood Tales things Tell. Material Histories of Early Globalisms, 2024. She is leading the research project The Inheritance of Looting. Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums (SNF – https://looting.ch). She is founder and Editor-in-chief of the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und Visuellen Kultur (link: https://21-inquiries.eu/en).

Elections to Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships

The Warden and Fellows of the College have elected to Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships:

Ruairidh Macleod (Archaeology; Cambridge)
Ioannis Apostolou (Classics; Tarragona)
Amélie Loher (Mathematics; Cambridge)
Syamala Roberts (Modern Languages; Cambridge)
Samuel Ritholtz (Politics; Oxford)
Akshat Pandey (Theoretical Physics; Stanford) 

Atlantic Slavery and its Aftermaths: "Between Civilization and Barbarism: The Antinomies of Atlantic Slavery"

12th March 2025, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Speaker: Professor Simon Gikandi, Princeton University

Location: All Souls College Library

This event will be followed by a wine reception.

All are welcome, but pre-registration is essential. Click here to book from Monday 13 January.

 

Carlyle Lectures 2025

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Professor Eric Nelson

(Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University)

Events in this series

Carlyle Lectures 2025: The Legitimacy of Expectations

11th March 2025, 5:00 pm

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

 

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures 2025: Conservatism and The Way Things Are

4th March 2025, 5:00 pm

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

 

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures 2025: “The Paradox of Conservative Justice”

25th February 2025, 5:00 pm

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College

 

The inaugural lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures 2025: Relational Conservatism

18th February 2025, 5:00 pm

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Examination Schools

 

The lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

Carlyle Lectures 2025: Conservatism and Theodicy

11th February 2025, 5:00 pm

Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought 2025

For the Way Things Are: In Search of a Defensible Conservatism

Speaker: Professor Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, Harvard University

Location: Examination Schools

 

The lecture will be limited to 160 places and tickets will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. 

The registration link will be listed here soon. 

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