Institutions as Curators (Glasgow)

The network’s first workshop, ‘Institutions as Curators’, took place at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, on the 31st of March and the 1st of April 2017.

The workshop explored the changing manners in which institutions have conceived of and organised both disciplinary knowledge and physical collections.

The final programme is reproduced below, and can also be downloaded in convenient Word document form using this link.

Blog posts relating to this workshop can be seen here; posts by participants relating to the work that they presented are also linked from their entries in the programme below.

 

Friday March 31^st

 

9:30am – Introduction

• Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow)
• Jenny Buckley (University of York)

 

9:45am – Opening Talk: ‘Institutions and Literature in the Seventeenth Century: From the Third University to the Royal Society’

• Willy Maley (University of Glasgow): PowerPoint/Bibliography

 

10:45am – Tea

 

11:15am – Panel One: Organising Libraries

• Robert Betteridge (National Library of Scotland): “Answerable to the Facultie”: the organisation of the Advocates Library in the early 18th century

• Carolyn Oulton (Canterbury Christ Church University): From ‘Boy’ to ‘Britain’: popular fiction and the Folkestone Free Library 1881-1902

(Grouped papers)

• John West (Principal Libraries Manager, High Life Highland) and Julie Corcoran (Network Librarian, Inverness Library): The challenges facing public libraries in managing historic collections: a snapshot of the Highland experience
• Melanie Manwaring-McKay (Inverness College, University of the Highlands and Islands): Charles Fraser-Mackintosh: Victorian Book Collecting in the Highlands: a research student’s perspective
• Kristin Lindfield-Ott (Inverness College, University of the Highlands and Islands): The Inverness rare book collections as research, teaching and public engagement tool

 

1pm – Lunch

 

2pm – Panel Two: Sociability and Curation

• Jill Dye (University of Stirling): Innerpeffray and Leighton Libraries: How 17^th-century private collections, made publicly accessible, shape and are shaped by their users

• Dustin Frazier-Wood (University of Roehampton): Collecting, Classifying, Circulating and Creating Knowledge at the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society

• Anna Fleming (University of Leeds): Reconciliation and Continuity in Wordsworth’s Church

 

3:30pm – Tea

 

4pm – Panel Three: Musings on Museums

• Richard De Ritter (University of Leeds): Encountering the Wonders of Nature: Children’s Literature and the Leverian Museum

• Emma Peacocke (Queens University, CA): Romanticism, Literature, and Museums

• Nicola Watson (Open University): Curating Shakespeare: Making New Place New

 

5:30pm – Closing Discussion

• Jon Mee on Institutions and Literature

 

6pm – Adjourn to Pub

 

 

Saturday April 1^st

 

9:30am – Panel Four: The Uses and Users of Collections

• Gena McNutt (University of Edinburgh): Joseph Ritson and the British Museum, 1775-1802

• Suchitra Choudhury (University of Glasgow): Cashmere and Paisley Shawls: Collections and Literary Meanings

• Ruth Abbott (University of Cambridge): George Eliot in the Biblioteca Magliabechiana

 

11am – Tea

 

11:30am – Discussion: Is curation a good metaphor for modelling institutional practices?

Principal Reading

• Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16.1 (1986), 22-27: https://www.jstor.org/stable/464648 or mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf.

Secondary Possibilities

• Contributors’ thoughts: http://institutionsofliterature.net/category/thoughts-on-curators/.
• Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Director (1807): https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MWQHAQAAIAAJ.
• Markman Ellis, ‘Coffee-House Libraries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London’, The Library, 7^th Series, 10 (2009), 3-40: https://doi.org/10.1093/library/10.1.3 (requires subscription).
• Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (London: Penguin, 2015): https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Jhs0AgAAQBAJ (partial text).

 

12:30pm – Lunch

 

1:30pm – Panel Five: Expanding on ‘Literature’

• Catherine Jones (University of Aberdeen): The Edinburgh Medical Society and the Institutionalisation of Natural Knowledge in the Early Scottish Enlightenment

• Ian Newman (University of Notre Dame): Curating Taste at the Anacreontic Society (preliminary post on Taverns as Institutions)

• Sarah Crofton (King’s College London): The Book as Medium: How Victorian Spiritualists created a shared syllabus of proof

 

3pm – Tea

 

3:30pm – Concluding Roundtable: Curation – Legacies and Futures

• Alexandrina Buchanan (University of Liverpool)
• Mungo Campbell (Hunterian Museum)
• Giles Mandelbrote (Lambeth Palace Library)

 

5pm – Finish