We are excited to have Andrei Pop workshopping his paper “Sugar, Slavery, and Subjectivity: On Henry Fuseli’s Oroonoko and Several Others” on February 21. Sarah Jessica Johnson (English) will be the respondent. See below for more information.

Andrei Pop is Associate Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and Art History at the University of Chicago, where he researches narrative art, the relation between thinking and imaging, and between subjectivity and reality in art of the modern period. His first book, Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford, 2015) considered the novel tendency to view ancient Europeans as distinct cultures in the era of the French revolution. An edited volume on Ugliness (Tauris, 2014) and a commented translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s 1853 Aesthetics of Ugliness (Bloomsbury, 2015), both with Mechtild Widrich, address the continued relevance of aesthetic categories, particularly negative ones, in art and social life. Pop’s second monograph, A Forest of Symbols (Zone, 2019) investigates the related ways in which poets, visual artists, philosophers and mathematicians around 1900 turned their attention to the very means of symbol-making in various efforts to overcome the unintelligible privacy of meaning. Related projects, on allegory, the first-person view, and painter-printmakers, on Poe and Manet and Henry James and on topics in the aesthetics of fiction, are in development. Longer-term interests include the imagination of the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nineteenth-century mathematician-philosopher-priest Bernard Bolzano, and the collaboration between the eighteenth-century caricaturist James Gillray and his publisher Hannah Humphrey.

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Friday, February 21

Andrei Pop (Associate Professor in Social Thought and Art History)
“Sugar, Slavery, and Subjectivity: On Henry Fuseli’s Oroonoko and Several Others”

Foster 103, 11:30am-1pm

Pop’s paper can be downloaded here. To get the password and to RSVP to the workshop, please email fraga@uchicago.edu.

 

 

 

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