Wendy Graham

Simeone Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 1864 Watercolour on paper, Tate Britain

February 19, 2020.

Wendy Graham, Professor of English and Chair of  the Department of English at Vassar College, talks about her latest monograph, Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia University Press, 2017.)

Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity sheds new light on Victorian discourses on sexuality and masculinity through a thick description of literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding within cliques, and homoerotic frissons among the creators and reviewers of Pre-Raphaelitism. Graham threads together the qualities that made William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Gabriel Rossetti exemplary figures of aesthetic celebrity in the 1850s; Algernon Swinburne and Simeon Solomon in the 1860s; and Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Pater in the 1870s. The book documents the symbiotic relationship between periodical writers and the artists and poets they helped make famous, demonstrating that the origin myth of Bohemian artistic transcendence was connected with the rise of a professional class of journalists. Graham shows that the Pre-Raphaelites innovated many of the phenomena now associated with Oscar Wilde, arguing that they were foundational for him in forging an artistic and personal identity with a full-blown publicity apparatus. Wilde had models. This book is about them.

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Ronald Patkus, Nikolai Firtich, Dan Ungurianu

April 10, 2019.

Historian and Associate Director of the Library for Special Collections Ronald D. Patkus joins Professors Nikolai Firtich and Dan Ungurianu of the Vassar Department of Russian to discuss the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and the exhibit on view 23 January through June 10, 2019 in the Thompson Memorial Library entitled Ivan Turgenev and His Library, celebrating the bicentennial of Turgenev's birth.

Download the exhibition catalogue (PDF)

Lydia Murdoch

October 8, 2014.

 Lydia Murdoch (VC'92), Associate Professor of History at Vassar College, talks about her book Daily Life of Victorian Women (Greenwood, 2014).

"Contrary to popular misconception, many Victorian women performed manual labor for wages directly alongside men, had political voice before women's suffrage, and otherwise contributed significantly to society outside of the domestic sphere. Daily Life of Victorian Women documents the varied realities of the lives of Victorian women; provides in-depth comparative analysis of the experiences of women from all classes, especially the working class; and addresses changes in their lives and society over time. The book covers key social, intellectual, and geographical aspects of women's lives, with main chapters on gender and ideals of womanhood, the state, religion, home and family, the body, childhood and youth, paid labor and professional work, urban life, and imperialism."

58:55 minutes

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Nicholas Adams

February 5, 2014.

Architectural historian and Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art Nicholas Adams talks about the exhibition now on view in the Vassar College Library, Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Center entitled: The Architect's Library: Notable Books on Architectural Themes in the Vassar College Library.

"The book as the site of canonicity and debate from Vignola to Robert Venturi was the overarching theme of the exhibition,  one of whose contributions was to remind us that the design of the book itself participated powerfully in projecting the artistic attitudes that shaped its content. . . . This exhibition showed that the study of what libraries own in the field of architecture, how titles were acquired or received through donation, and the significance of a collection for an institution’s identity and development are worthy educational topics."  -- Joseph M. Siry,  JSAH

41:43 minutes.

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Leah Price

May 8, 2013:  SEASON FINALE.

Leah Price, Professor of English at Harvard University and Senior Advisor in the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, discusses her book: How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

“Leah Price has challenged every book historian, librarian, and reader of secular or spiritual scripture to think through the object we fondle or maul and the ways in which it circulates in whole and in pieces through our home and global economies. . . . [T]here's no doubt in my mind that this is a potent intervention in the study of material culture. No one who cares about books should miss handling and reading it." -- Robert L. Patten, Review of English Studies

1:05:23 minutes.

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