Contact
Expertise Summary
My research is focused within the 18th and 19th centuries, and has dealt with French material, and also Rome. Topics I have worked on include iconoclasm, various aspects of the visual culture of the French Revolution, Italian travel (especially to and in Rome). My current work centres on questions of health, disease, and hygiene, and their significance in shaping in material and metaphorical terms the experience of Rome; a particular aspect of this project is to reassess the Roman landscape as a subject for visual representation.
I have recently edited two volumes of essays, Regarding Romantic Rome (Peter Lang, 2007), and Cinematic Rome (Troubadour, 2008), and curated Ruination, an exhibition for the Djanogly Gallery (Feb.-April 2008). I have recently completed a book, Roman Fever: influence, contagion, and the experience of Rome. My future plans are to complete articles on: the origins of the flâneur; the critical reception of Ingres' Monsieur Bertin; and the phenomenon of incognito travel, and to develop a project with the working title 'After Piranesi', on the evolving representation of Rome in the early 19th century, with particular reference to the impact of photography.
Supervision
I would be interested in supervising research projects on French art across the 18th and 19th centuries, especially ones to do with travel, criticism, the Salon, academic art, and representations and experience of Italy.
Research Summary
My current research centres on questions of health, disease, and hygiene, and their significance in shaping in material and metaphorical terms the experience of Rome; a particular aspect of this… read more
Recent Publications
RICHARD WRIGLEY, 2013. 'Vêtements’. In: STEPHEN CLAY, ed., Dictionnaire de la Révolution française (In Press.)
2013. Roman Fever: influence, infection, and the image of Rome Yale University Press. (In Press.)
SARAH HIBBERD AND RICHARD WRIGLEY, ed., 2013. Exchanges and Tensions between Art, Theatre and Opera in Paris 1750-1850 Ashgate. (In Press.)
2013. Léopold Robert's 'Arrivée des moissonneurs' and the dislocations of narrative. In: Narrative in French Art Ashgate. (In Press.)
Current Research
My current research centres on questions of health, disease, and hygiene, and their significance in shaping in material and metaphorical terms the experience of Rome; a particular aspect of this project is to reassess the Roman landscape as a subject for visual representation.
I am also developing a project 'After Piranesi', on the evolving representation of Rome in the early nineteenth century, which will include an exploration of the relations between print-making and early photography.
I am developing an exhibition proposal on Robert Macpherson, the great Scottish photographer of Rome..
A new project is on the flâneur, considered both in terms of its origins in early nineteenth-century Paris and it subsequent transformations as it migrated abroad. See below for a Call for Papers for a conference: 'The Flâneur Abroad'
Future Research
The Flâneur Abroad:
international and historical perspectives
on an urban archetype
A conference co-organised by the Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture, and the Urban Culture Network at the University of Nottingham
Friday 6-Saturday 7 July 2012
CALL FOR PAPERS
The flâneur - the leisurely but vigilant urban stroller - is well-known as a quintessential nineteenth-century Parisian archetype, and has attracted a distiguished array of champions and historians - from Balzac and Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin. However, although recent writing on the subject (The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester, and The Invisible Flâneuse. Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2006), ed. Tom MacDonough & Aruna D'Souza) have certainly been eclectic in their scope, there has been little sustained attention given to the adaptation of the phenomenon outside Paris, let alone outside France and indeed Europe, whether in the form of modern sequels, contemporary echoes, as well as historic antecedents.
The flâneur as self-contained but all-seeing city-dweller has been seen as an icon of modernity, tyrant of the empowered male gaze, and anguished urbanite in retreat from the inhospitable environment of the city and its threatening crowds. Within Paris its meanings evolved from early nineteenth-century versions, including alienated consumers and voracious voyeurs, to more second-order types of pedestrian observer, as in the case of self-indulgent touristic fantasies.
Yet the allure of the flâneur's persona has led to its translation far beyond Parisian boulevards and arcades. This conference aims to map some of the flâneur's travels and transpositions. In doing so, it may be possible to clarify how far the flâneur is dependent on Paris as a milieu. And in historical terms, is it in fact a variant form of older, more inclusive patterns of walking, viewing and writing the city? Can we find models and antecedents for pedestrian spectators in earlier ages and locations? When modern flâneurs step out in foreign cities, how much of a Parisian ethos clings to them? How limiting is the flâneur's gaze and mind set? This might also apply to Parisians (or adopted Parisians) travelling abroad, or francophile pedestrians.
The flâneur's afterlife has been versatile and vigorous. In addition to the well-established genre of novels of the city, new media of photography, film and TV have successively adopted the peripatetic as a mode of vision. When the modern flâneur has migrated into other media, how has this reinforced or reinvented the motif?
The conference is intended to be interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars from art history, history, literary studies, film, history of photography, music, historical and cultural geography. Research students are encouraged to offer work in progress papers.
The keynote to the conference is geographical and temporal diversity; however, papers related to the following topics would be welcome:
- Pedestrian spectators in the metropolis: Berlin, Madrid, Naples, St Petersburg, New York, Los Angeles… Papers on Asian and African sites are especially welcome - Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Beijing, Tokyo…
- The artist as flâneur / flânerie as art
- Musical forms of expression which invoke flâneurie, and related forms of living in the city.
- The mobile spectator as critic, iconoclast
- The flâneur as role model for Situationism
- Id