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Image of Speaker Liza Oliver smiling in front of a book case

Liza Oliver | An Economy of Sentiment: The Shared Language of Abolitionists and the West India Interest in Late Eighteenth-century British Print Culture

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
supported by the School of Art & Design Visitors Committee, Samuel Kress Foundation, the Institute for Global Studies through a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
Location
Virtual and in-person viewing of the livestream in the Lower Level, Auditorium (KAM62), Krannert Art Museum, 500 E Peabody Dr, Champaign, Illinois 61820
Date
Oct 20, 2022   5:30 pm  
Speaker
Liza Oliver
Contact
Krannert Art Museum
E-Mail
kam-info@illinois.edu
Phone
12173331861
Views
20
Originating Calendar
Krannert Art Museum Calendar

Join us for the first keynote lecture in the Early Modern Global Political Art symposium by scholar Liza Oliver.

This talk considers how spectatorial sympathy, a governing principle of eighteenth-century British art and literature, was deployed by opposing sides of the debate on Britain’s slave trade in the decades preceding its abolition.

Considering broadsides, travel narratives, and caricatures, it argues for the ways in which sentiment became a common visual currency among both abolitionists and the pro-slavery lobby, with each side respectively seeking to sever or reaffirm the connection between morality on the one hand and self-interest and economic prosperity on the other.

About Liza Oliver

Liza Oliver is an Associate Professor of Art History and South Asia Studies at Wellesley College. Her research and publications focus on European colonial and imperial histories in South Asia and the West Indies. Her first book, Art, Trade, and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (2019), examined the integration of the French East India Company with the eighteenth-century textile industries of India’s Coromandel Coast.

Her current book project, Empire of Hunger: Representing Famine, Land, and Labor in Colonial India, explores the many famines that devastated South Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century and how photographs aided the constitution of British colonial policies around famine, land, and agricultural labor.

Uniting art historical analysis with political ecology and environmental and food studies, it illuminates the fraught convergence of economic liberalism and humanitarianism in colonial India.

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