History at the Theatre: Paul Delaroche's 'Execution of Lady Jane Grey' Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities is delighted to announce that Professor Stephen Bann, the distinguished historian of culture and art, will give the inaugural talk in this new series of annual lectures on Friday, 10 February 2006, at 6pm. The talk is free of charge and will take place in the Brabourne Lecture Theatre, Keynes College, which is accessible to wheelchair users.

Celebrated throughout Europe in his day, the French painter Paul Delaroche had perhaps his greatest public success with 'Jane Grey'(1833) which has since become one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery in London. Professor Bann looks at new evidence bearing on the composition of the work, and considers its close but ambivalent relationship to French theatre and spectacle in the Romantic period.

Stephen Bann has had a long association with the University of Kent where he was Professor of Modern Cultural Studies. In 1997 he organised a conference at Kent on the bicentenary of the birth of Delaroche, subsequently publishing the first monograph on his work.

Professor Bann’s has made a particular contribution to the history and interdisciplinary study of signs and images, while his work on curiosity and antiquarianism has considerably advanced the cultural understanding of representations, art, artefacts, and their collection. His writing encompasses English art criticism, 20th century avant-garde practices and movements as well as post-modern media and installation art, land art, and landscape theory and gardens.

Stephen’s important role in furthering knowledge has been widely honoured, being made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998 and named a CBE in 2004. He is currently Professor of Art History at Bristol University.

His publications include The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (1989), Romanticism and the Rise of History(1995), Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (2001). He recently edited The European Reception of Walter Pater (2004) and the forthcoming The Coral Mind on Adrian Stokes. He is a founding editor of Twentieth Century Studies and Word and Image.

Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities is delighted to announce that Professor Stefan Collini, FBA, will give the second  talk in its new series of annual lectures on Friday, 4th May, at 6pm.  The talk is free of charge and will take place in the Brabourne Lecture Theatre, Keynes College, which is accessible to wheelchair users.

Modern Britain has been haunted by anxieties about cultural decline.   Such anxieties have frequently focussed on allegedly novel developments such as the rise of 'the yellow press' and the flourishing of 'middlebrow values' in earlier decades of the 20th century, or   contemporary controversies over 'dumbing down' and the dominance of 'celebrity culture'.   Concern about these particular issues has been underwritten and fuelled by longer-term anxieties about the decline of 'standards', the loss of 'values', the disappearance of 'community', all understood as casualties of historical change, primarily driven by economic growth but also by the democratisation of social mores and the proliferation (and allegedly 'debased' character) of popular media.

But, Professor Collini asks, from what perspective could such large-scale qualitative decline ever be assessed and in what vocabulary could an implied alternative vision of human flourishing ever be expressed? He presents a lucid and provocative exploration of these questions in his lecture, examining the claims that literary criticism might offer ways of identifying an alternative locus of value, of providing tools for social criticism, and of furnishing a repository of possibilities for the more fully expressive life that contemporary society is presumed to have lost.

Stefan Collini is a leading historian and cultural critic.  His most recent book, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006), is a history of cultural criticism in Britain that is authoritative and accessible, while being both provocative and challenging in its examination of the debates about the role of  intellectuals. 

Professor Collini has held visiting appointments in Canberra, Caracas, Paris and Princeton. He has taught at Sussex and at Cambridge, where he is currently Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English.   He has written widely on 19th and 20th-century intellectual history and literature and  his books include Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (1991), Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (1994), and English Pasts: Essays on History and Culture (1999). He is a frequent contributor to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books.   He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.