It’s been a bit of a mad couple of weeks for me, as I’ve
been attending conferences and workshops left, right and centre and getting my
submissions sorted for approaching deadlines.
As the summer term draws to a close, us first-year PhD
students have some pretty major deadlines to meet. We’re all in the midst of
our final Thesis Advisory Panel meetings for the year and generating our
material to submit for progression to the second year. On top of this, I’ve
been putting together funding applications for another research trip to
Florence. With all this going on, it would be so easy to get bogged down in paperwork
and panic…. But thankfully, there is plenty going on to help us through this
potentially stressful time.
Perhaps one of the best things about being a PhD student is
being able to get to conferences and workshops and network with like-minded
scholars. I’ve been privileged over the last two weeks to attend several such
events that were not only useful and fascinating in their own right but have
also helped me to clarify some of my approaches to my own research.
The first of these was a lecture by Justin Underhill from
Berkeley about on ‘What Turns Pictures On.’ This was part of a wider
departmental event, the York Summer Theory Institute that, by all accounts, was
a great success. Underhill uses technology in amazing and innovative ways to recreate
the settings within which works of art were experienced in the past, and is
even branching out into the creation of soundscapes. With my research centring
on trying to access the world of the early modern Italian domestic interior,
this was hugely thought provoking and really brought home the potential for
extending such a project beyond the scope of my thesis.
The end of last week featured a WRoCAH –sponsored conference
in Sheffield on ‘Habitual Behaviour in the Early Modern World.’ Wonderfully
organised by three PhD students from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and
York, the conference spanned two days and featured a whole host of brilliant
papers, including keynotes from Sasha Handley (The University of Manchester)
and Steven Shapin (Harvard University), all of which were frankly inspiring.
Even those far outside my remit, including papers on gambling in seventeenth-century
Dutch comedy and the tobacco market in early modern England, were really
entertaining.
Finally, on Monday of this week I attended a workshop here
at the University of York on architectural drawings and models. It was great to
get the chance to have a think about the implications of the planning process
on the eventual outcome buildings and to hear a paper on my very own Palazzo
Strozzi from the wonderful Amanda Lillie (The University of York). This was followed
by a research seminar led by Mauro Mussolin (Metropolitan Museum of Art) on ‘Michelangelo
and Paper as Palimpsest,’ where he explored the potential for exploring use and
re-use of paper in the work of this most famous of artists, digging through
layers of drawing and writing and piecing together paper fragments in an almost
archaeological way. Fantastic!
I think it’s safe to say that I am currently feeling well
and truly edified. My mind is full of interesting and exciting new ideas that I
can’t wait to start bringing to my research and I’m looking forward to
continuing conversation with all the amazing people I’ve met over the course of
this whirlwind couple of weeks. Maybe things will calm down a bit now….. Oh no
wait…. York Festival of Ideas starts this week….
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