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GV Art & Mind Symposium 13: Marius Kwint

A film of this presentation is available at http://vimeo.com/68641982

A full report by Ruth Garde can be found at http://www.wildculture.com/article/descartes-circus-views-brute-creation-performance/937

Descartes goes to the Circus: Views of the Brute Creation in Performance, c. 1750-1850.   13 November 2012

Dr Marius Kwint

http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/adm/staff/title,82848,en.html

Marius Kwint is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, School of Art, Design and Media, University of Portsmouth

Marius Kwint joined the University of Portsmouth in 2008. He graduated in the new interdisciplinary Cultural History degree at Aberdeen University in 1988, before taking his doctorate in History at Oxford University. His previous lecturing posts have been at Southampton Institute (now Solent) and Oxford Universities, and he has held research fellowships at the Houghton Library, Harvard University and at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In this talk Marius considers how performances of trained humans and other animals during the period were framed first in terms of Enlightenment rationalism, and later to furnish Romantic spectacles of sublime and untamed nature. This form of popular entertainment, which had its modern origins in eighteenth-century London, both reflected scientific trends, and was credited to a surprising degree with helping to change prevailing attitudes towards animals.

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