2024-25 S. J. Stubbs Lecture in English Literature
White Gold: Extractive Logic and Seriality in the Nineteenth Century
Hybrid Lecture
Wednesday January 22, 4:30-6:00 p.m. ET
In-person and online (followed by a reception)
Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House
15 King’s College Circle, Toronto ON M5S 3H7
*This event is free and all are welcome though registration is required and seating is limited for in-person attendance. Please sign up for the virtual or in-person sections below.
Presented by
Clare Pettitt
Grace 2 Chair, Faculty of English
University of Cambridge
White Gold: Extractive Logic and Seriality in the Nineteenth Century uses the pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner’s career as a case study to ask conceptual questions about the role of ‘global’ serial publications, long-distance communications, and compressive forms in the establishment and maintenance of white colonial authority in the mid-nineteenth century. Woolner travelled to Australia to dig for gold in 1852 and then stayed on to start a successful sculpting business before returning to England in 1854 to continue his artistic career. With Francis Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson, Woolner curated a poetry anthology, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which became widely known as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Using sculpture and poetry, White Gold will consider the emergence of an extractive imagination in both material and literary terms, continuing the investigation into nineteenth-century seriality in Pettitt’s recent monographs.
*Please note that this lecture will contain references to racism and colonial violence in the nineteenth century and viewer discretion is advised.
Register for In-person Attendance
The in-person lecture will be followed by a reception. Please submit one registration under the name of each guest who plans to attend.
Register for Virtual Attendance
To attend this lecture virtually please click the link below. A webinar link will be sent to the email listed on the registration. Please submit a registration under the name of each person who plans to attend.
About the Speaker
Clare Pettitt is Grace 2 Chair at the Faculty of English, the University of Cambridge. Pettitt has taught at the universities of Oxford, Leeds and King's College London. She is the UK General Editor of the 19th-century Literature and Culture monograph series at Cambridge University Press, and an editor of the journal, Cambridge Quarterly. Pettitt reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. In June 2020, she published Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 with Oxford University Press, which is the first volume of a three-volume reassessment of the impact of the media on political and literary culture from 1815 to 1918. The second part, entitled Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form, shows how press reports and literary witness accounts of the 1848 European revolutions were crucial to creating international ideas of global citizenship and human rights. The third and final part of the trilogy will track the emergence of the digital and its effects on literary culture and imperial and racial identities.
The Stubbs Lectures were founded in 1988 by Helen Eunice Stubbs, a graduate of University College, in honour of her father, Samuel James Stubbs, also a UC graduate. The lectures commemorate his love of Classics and English Literature. Learn more about our Endowed Public Lectures.