VISUALISING AND EXHIBITING FASCISM

Scholars and graduate students are cordially invited to this half-day workshop on 'Visualising and Exhibiting Fascism'. The workshop brings together academics and practitioners to explore some ideas, approaches and problems relating to the production and subsequent display of cultural artefacts associated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

PROGRAMME

13:00-13:15 Registration (entrance foyer)

13:15- Welcome (lecture theatre)

13:30-15:30 Session 1: Exhibiting Fascism

Gregory Maertz (St. John's College, New York) will present his remarkable discovery of an unknown collection of Nazi war art -- by a group of artists embedded in the German army, commissioned directly by Hitler -- and explore the surprisingly modernist character of the images. He will then speak about the political issues he has encountered in trying to stage an exhibition of these works in the United States.

Hans Ottomeyer (Director, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin) and Rachel Knight (Head of Exhibitions, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester) will then present short papers addressing some of the issues relating to the exhibition of politically sensitive works.

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break (South Gallery)

16:00-18:00 Session 2: Fascism and Its Images: Roger Griffin, Jeffrey Schnapp and Charles Burdett in Conversation

Three leading cultural historians of fascism, Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes), Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford) and charles Burdett (Bristol) will address a set of six questions, which concern the way we can interpret the cultural language of fascism, how our assessment of it has changed in the light of recent academic trends, and what implications this research has for the broader public encounter with fascism and its images.

For further information, please contact Maiken.umbach@manchester.ac.uk or Francesca.billiani@manchester.ac.uk. There is no fee, and all are welcome. (If we run out of space, seats will be allocated on a first come first serve basis, so please arrive punctually). The event is sponosred by the Institute for Transnational Studies in Languages, Linguistics and Cultures and CULTMEP, the Centre for Research on the Cultural Forms of Modern European Politics, University of Manchester.