Fellows Seminar- 2 December 2020

On the 2nd December we were joined by Sasha Rasmussen (IHR Scouloudi Fellow) and Sasha Rasmussen (IHR Scouloudi Fellow) for an IHR Fellows Seminar. The session was chaired by Philip Carter, Director of Digital and Publishing, and Senior Lecturer in British History at the IHR.

Sasha Rasmussen, Scouloudi Fellow (University of Oxford)

Lorgnettes and Liubitel’ Kodakist: Women Looking in Late Imperial Russia

Sasha Rasmussen is a cultural historian working at the intersection of gender and sensory histories, and is currently in the final year of her DPhil – Sensory History and ‘Modern Women’ in Paris and St Petersburg 1900-1913 – at the University of Oxford. Beginning with an analysis of the publication Liubitel’ Kodakist (‘The Amateur Kodakist’), this paper explores how women embraced photography in pre-revolutionary Russia as one of a range of visual technologies through which the female gaze might be captured and curated, transforming the act of looking into an imaginative process. 

Lucy Clarke, Scouloudi Fellow (Jesus College, University of Oxford)

‘All and every person to keep silence’: finding the audience in the early modern ’theatre of state’

Lucy Clarke is an interdisciplinary historian of early modern England. She is now completing her DPhil thesis, ‘Public men on public stages: the performance of state authority by magistrates in popular drama, 1590-1610’. Her thesis investigates popular reception of the state in early modern England, through examining a series of plays staged in the outdoor theatres of London. Her work hinges on a consideration of acts of government as performances, where magistrates’ actions constituted the structure of the state in the minds of ordinary Englishmen and women.