Imagination tactile

The Victorian Tactile Imagination conference

Birkbeck, University of London, 19-20 July 2013

Keynote speakers:

Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge); Professor William Cohen (University of Maryland); Professor Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of London); Dr Constance Classen (author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch)

The programme will also include a roundtable on Victorian objects and touch, with confirmed panellists Professor Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University) and Dr Nicola Bown (Birkbeck).


“You people who can see attach such an absurd importance to your eyes!
I set my touch, my dear, against your eyes, as much the most trustworthy, and much the most intelligent sense of the two”.

(Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch, 1872)

This conference will explore the various ways in which the Victorians conceptualised, represented, experienced, performed and problematized touch. What does touch signal in nineteenth-century art and literature, and how is it variously coded? How are hands and skin – tactile appendages and surfaces – imagined in the period? By investigating the Victorian imaginary of touch, the conference will address and reappraise some of the key concepts and debates which have shaped Victorian studies in the past twenty years – in particular the emphasis on visuality as the dominant mode via which subjectivities and power were effected in the period: not least Jonathan Crary’s influential thesis that the nineteenth century witnessed a pervasive ‘separation of the senses’. The conference aims to investigate instead the workings of a more textured vision and reanimate the interoperability of sight and touch in nineteenth century culture.

The conference will also extend and build upon recent critical studies that have begun to explore nineteenth-century tactility in relation to material culture, bodies, and the emotions. By focusing closely on touch and tactility, it aims to establish whether and in what terms we might talk about a Victorian ‘aesthetics of touch’, and to explore how touch constructs and disrupts, for example, class and gender identities. It will also consider the historical trajectories of touch, asking, for example, in what ways does touch mark or blur the divide between Victorianism and Modernism?


Possible topics might include:
·Social history (domestic violence; hands and work; the gloved hand)

·Travel and place (the imperial touch; haptic geographies)

·The hand, skin and dermal structures in design theory and evolutionary science

·Medicine (blindness; physiology of touch; the medical touch; nerve theory and motor function; pain)

·Theories of mind and body (psychophysiology; cognitive psychology; phenomenology; psychoanalysis)

·The gender and sexual politics of touch, the queer touch (lesbianism, tender masculinities)

·Tactile/haptic aesthetics (representations of hands and touching; art historical writing on the senses; perspectival theory; nineteenth century sculpture; arts and crafts)

·Rethinking “visual” media and technologies (photography; stereoscopy;
cinema)

·Touch in the Museum (handling/viewing objects; curating; museum policy)

·Readers and writers (material cultures of the book; embodied readers and writers; the writer’s hand)

·Histories of touch (inheriting and disrupting eighteenth century models of touch; anticipating Modernist touch).

If this topic is of interest to colleagues, please let me know by 10 March 2013, either by emailing me at h.tilley@bbk.ac.uk or victoriantactileimagination@gmail.com.