Journeys into Madness: Representing Mental Illness in the Arts and Sciences, 1850-1930

This conference, organised by the University of Plymouth, will be held at Wellcome Centre, London on 11 & 12 October 2007. In recent years, the territory of mental illness has been re-mapped. In the Sciences, mental life and behaviour are linked to the workings of the brain and the body’s neurochemistry. In the Arts, creative genius and madness are interwoven by the belief that mental illness can provide a unique world view. These discursive constructions often fail to place mental illness into larger social, cultural, and historical landscapes.

By focusing on the representation of mental illness across disciplines, this conference intends to re-think the divide between scientific and aesthetic approaches. This event will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines such as art history, medical history, music, film, psychiatry, literature and intellectual history.

Deadline for Early Conference Registration

The deadline for early registration at this year’s annual Design History Society conference, Design/Body/Sense:Physical and Psychical Embodiment in Design, being held at Kingston University London from 5-7 September, is fast approaching – the deadline is 1 July 2007. So if you want to attend, do register early; below is the conference registration form. Hope to see you there . . . . .

Design/Body/Sense Conference: Registration Form

To follow up on

On reading Lee Holcombe’s Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850-1914, items to follow up on, and notes:

• Name of separate company formed in 1882 as international selling arm (Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict??)
• Touch typing first taught by an ‘American lady’ at a Cincinnati business school in 1882. NB Later update: contrasted with this biography of Sholes, which lays touch-typing at the feet of a law clerk Frank E. McGurrin, who won a publicised competition in 1888.
• Typewriting offices in general.

Presenting PhD Research

I am in the midst of a flurry of work, preparing for the following:

• Submission of Initial Monitoring Report to KU’s Research Degrees Committee, including work plans for the next two year, writing sample and bibliography, on Friday 29 June.
• Presentation of PhD research project at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture’s Research Students’ Summer Workshop at Kingston University, on Tuesday 10 July. (Guest Speakers: Deyan Sudjic, Director of Design Museum; John Miller, Director of Design at University College Falmouth; and Barry Curtis, Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University and a Fellow of the London Consortium.)
• Paper ‘Feminine Fingers: Women’s Labour with the Needle, at the Piano and on the Typewriter Keyboard’ accepted for Design/Body/Sense conference, at Kingston University, 5-7 September 2007. (My proposal was blind refereed, so nepotism is negated ….)
• Paper ‘The Body of Type and Types of Bodies’ accepted for The Past in the Present:  History as Practice in Art, Design and Architecture conference, at Glasgow School of Art, 27-29 October 2007.

Early Typewriters

Using Bee Document’s software Timeline, I have built an early typewriter history timeline. Not sure how well it works – I think the time span is too big and might separate it into a series of timelines.

Typewriter entry in The Great Encyclopedia

Following on from a previous post on the writing machine entry in La Grande Encyclopedie., here is a translation of the text (original French text is here and here):

The idea of replacing the fountain pen with a more advanced instrument has been around for a long time and on 7 July 1714 Henry Mill took out a patent in England for a machine designed to write characters similar to those produced in the print process, by touching letters and reproducing them one by one. We have to travel forward to 1841 to find an English patent in the names of Mr. Alexander Bain and Thomas Wright, then another in the USA for Mr Charles Thurber from Brooklyn. In 1845, Dr Leavitte from Kentucky invented a machine which Mr Prentice, editor of the Louisville journal, used to write to a journalist a letter in which he stated:

Conference on art collecting and nation formation

The conference State of the Art: Collecting art and national formation c. 1800–2000, is being held at National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London from Wednesday 18 July to Friday 20 July 2007. Registration fee is £60.00; contact is Mrs Janet Norton, Research Administrator, email research@nmm.ac.uk. Web site: www.nmm.ac.uk/conferences.

How to promote your book

If you have not seen No-one belongs here more than you, visit it now – it is fantastic.

Museum work experience

The curator at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at Middlesex University, is looking for two History of Art/Design/Architecture students to work on a cataloguing project this summer. Details are as follows:

MoDA has recently received AHRC funding for a project which will involve preservation and cataloguing for approximately 3,000 original Silver Studio designs. We require two students to help us increase accessibility to this important material. You should have an interest in documentation, and ideally a background in social history, design or art history.
Placements will take place during a ten week period between Monday 23rd July and Friday 28th September. This is a voluntary opportunity but a small daily allowance is available for travel and subsistence.
Please download full details of the project from MoDA’s website.
Closing date for applications is 5pm on Friday 29th June.

Design History Events in June

There are a number of seminars and workshops on in June relating to Design History, all of which I am hoping to attend (whilst also writing my initial monitoring report):

1. Hidden Histories: New Research in Material Culture and Design History from Brighton’s Design History Society is being held this Saturday, 9 June 2007, from 10AM-5PM, at the Design History Research Centre, University of Brighton, Faculty of Arts and Architecture, Grand Parade, Brighton. (Free). Contact: brightonpdhs [at] hotmail [dot] com by 6 June.
2. The RCA/V&A MA History of Design symposium Reading Materials is taking place on Tuesday 19 June, at 6pm, at the Royal College of Art, London, Kensington Gore, SW7. Contact: Ana [dot] Pereira [at] rca [dot] ac [dot] uk
3. The RX-History of Art, Architecture and Design is holding a Postgraduate Research Training Workshop on How to get published in History of Art, Architecture and Design on Friday 22 June 2007, from 2-5pm, at the University of Reading. Contact: s [dot] sullivan-tailvour [at] reading [dot] ac [dot] uk