Expert On Victorian Culture And British Influence In India To Give McIntire Department Of Art Lecture On April 20

April 6, 2006 — Julie Codell, an expert on Victorian culture and British influence in India during the Colonial period, will give a McIntire Department of Art Lecture on Thursday, April 20, at 6 p.m., in Campbell Hall, Room 160.

In her talk, “Endless Objects of Attraction: Colonial Photography’s Identities and Interventions,” Codell will discuss photographic portraits of maharajas in Britain and in India under British rule. The photographs were taken for official government publications and many become popular images reproduced on postcards and in the press. Codell will focus on photographs from three elaborate coronations held in Delhi in 1877 to crown Queen Victoria Empress of India, in 1903 for Edward VII and in 1911 for George V (the only one to attend his coronation in Delhi). Codell explores these photographic portraits to understand how they draw on 17thand 18th century portrait conventions, how they invent new conventions for photography studio portraits and how maharajahs, through the photographs they commissioned, conveyed in public images their loyalty to the British and their Indian aristocratic lineages during a time of increasing public, and sometimes violent, resistance to the British empire in India.

Codell is author of the upcoming book “Pre-Raphaelitism,” to be published by Phaidon in its Arts and Ideas series. Other books by her include “The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870-1910” and “Images of an Idyllic Past: Photographs of Edward S. Curtis,” an exhibition catalog. She is also the editor of “Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press.”

Codell is professor of art history and English at Arizona State University,where she teaches representation of the body in art, Pre-Raphaelites in art and literature, films about the British empire, British culture and empire, the self in Victorian culture (autobiography and portraiture), British films and critical theory.

For more information, contact Sylvia Strawn at (434) 924-6122.