On 18 November 2011 an interdisciplinary seminar dedicated to early popular print and visual media will be held at Utrecht University. We kindly invite you to attend the public lectures by Professor Angela Vanhaelen (McGill University, Montreal) and Professor Alison Griffiths (City University of New York) in the afternoon.

Programme

Afternoon Session Public lectures, U-Theater, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht

14:30 – 15:30 Professor Angela Vanhaelen: ‘Publishing the Private in Dutch Penny Prints’
15:45 – 16:45 Professor Alison Griffiths: ‘Staging Death: Cinema, Capital Punishment, and Spectacle’
17:00 – 18:00 Drinks

From the eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century, inventions in printing technologies and expanding transportation infrastructure allowed for production and dissemination of print and visual media on an as yet unprecedented scale: print and visual media became mass media. Reduction in production costs led to popularisation of media. Therefore, increasingly more people got access to print products in a variety of media formats.

In their lectures, the speakers will address the historical popularisation process of various forms of emerging media. They will discuss how present day media studies concepts, such as intermediality, transmediality and remediation, need to be modified in historical studies of the dynamics of early popular print and visual media.

Professor Angela Vanhaelen is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, specializing in the study of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture. She is the author of Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City, which explores shifts in the popular culture traditions of late seventeenth-century Amsterdam, particularly the ways that inexpensive printed imagery worked to define key urban spaces and generate new practices of everyday life.

Professor Alison Griffiths is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York, and a member of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. She is the author of the award-winning book Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. Her second book Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema and the History of the Immersive View examines the history of the spectacle in old and new media contexts.

This seminar is a joint collaboration between the NWO (Cultural Dynamics) projects ‘Popularisation and Media Strategies (1700-1900)’ and ‘The Nation and Its Other: The Emergence of Modern Popular Imagery and Representations’.

For registration and more information, please contact Dr. Roeland Harms: r.harms@uu.nl