Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Rethinking Celtic Revivals
Session Convenors:
Frances Fowle and Heather Pulliam, University of Edinburgh, Frances.Fowle@ed.ac.uk, h.pulliam@ed.ac.uk
Murdo Macdonald and Lesley Lindsay, Window to the West Project, University of Dundee, m.j.s.macdonald@dundee.ac.uk, l.lindsay@dundee.ac.uk
We wish to address three related areas: How ‘Celtic’ was the Celtic Revival? In this regard papers are welcomed from both medievalists and modernists and might address the following questions: To what extent was the Celtic Revival a reaction to extant objects from the early medieval period? When and how would these objects have been seen? To what extent did the manner in which they were displayed, published and reproduced in the late nineteenth/early 20th century influence the Celtic Revival? What has the reception of the Celtic Revival been, historically and currently? Since Jeanne Sheehy’s The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival 1830– 1930 (1980), few scholars have explored the multifarious identities of the Celtic Revival in terms of the visual or the material. Yet it has permeated every conceivable form of artistic expression from miniature book illumination to monumental mural art. A century ago the Celtic Revival was heralded as a modern Renascence. Today it is often perceived as a marginalised type of medieval kitsch. Why is this? Can we think in terms of a current Celtic Revival? Is An Leabhar Mòr / The Great Book of Gaelic, a major contemporary art and Gaelic poetry project (2002), an indication of this? Is there a relevant ‘Celtic’ dimension to contemporary art? How should research, such as the AHRC-funded project, Window to the West, which explores art and the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, examine such questions?
Speakers:
Dorothy Verkerk (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Imagining Iona: The Celtic Revival in America
Tara Kelly (Trinity College Dublin)
Facsimiles and the Formation of a Canon of Irish Art
Frances Fowle and Heather Pulliam (University of Edinburgh)
Celticism and Cultural Revival: Revisiting The Druids by George Henry and E. A. Hornel
Janette Stokes (Independent)
Margaret Stokes (1832-1900) and Early Christian Art in Ireland: forgotten influences in the Irish Celtic Revival
Matthew Jarron (University of Dundee)
Stewart Carmichael and Aspects of the Celtic Revival in Dundee
Murdo MacDonald (University of Dundee)
A New Celtic Revival? - Researching Art and the Highlands today
Lesley Lindsay (University of Dundee)
James Drummond's 'Sculptured Monuments of Iona and the West Highlands': in search of 'a school of design'
Niamh NicGhabhann (Trinity College Dublin)
‘A complex metaphor' - developing a national canon of architectural form in 19th century Ireland?