Organized by Professors Lyle Massey (University of California, Irvine), Vin Nardizzi (The University of British Columbia), Tiffany Jo Werth (University of California, Davis), and Bronwen Wilson (University of California, Los Angeles) Co-sponsored by the UCLA Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art Conference organizers are grateful to the Hannah & Edward Carter Endowment for 17th-Century Art History for generous programming support. Critiquing the environmental humanities’ narrowly earth-centric focus, Carl Phelphstead asks us to look heavenward, to think “cosmocritically” and expand our awareness for how attitudes towards the heaven shape those on earth. What is sky? Both a border for land and sea, and a blank canvas for...

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library is pleased to present the exhibition Printing the Gothic: Horace Walpole and the Reimagining of English Aesthetic Tradition, curated by Edward Hyunsoo Yang, Loren and Frances Rothschild Endowed Graduate Research Fellow. The Gothic has long carried a reputation of being little more than cheap entertainment: a genre thought to possess limited literary or cultural value. This exhibit challenges that view by tracing the Gothic’s connection to a collective cultural effort to establish, and promote, an identifiably English art. At the center of this exhibit is Horace Walpole—antiquarian, collector, and author of the first Gothic novel—whose Castle...

William Andrews Clark Oscar Wilde Lecture Lecture by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware Oscar Wilde’s importance in the world of the theatre is, of course, unparalleled. His effect on Gothic fiction (and on queer fiction) has been equally profound, due to the popularity of his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This talk, however, will suggest that his fairy tales have been just as influential, and that their influence was clear almost immediately after the publication of both The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House...