Publications by Amanda Sciampacone
Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease since 1750: Capturing Contagion, edited by Marsha Morton and Ann-Marie Akehurst, 2023
As with past pandemics, the emergence of a novel coronavirus with seemingly no clear cause in Dec... more As with past pandemics, the emergence of a novel coronavirus with seemingly no clear cause in December 2019 led to the proliferation and use of images to make the invisible visible and comprehensible. In attempting to give visual form to this new illness, media portrayals of COVID-19 would reaffirm concerns of the unknown and ostensibly foreign origins of epidemic disease. Through a selective visual comparison, my chapter will examine how representations of COVID-19 in the British press, particularly in the Metro newspaper, would recall an older visual history of pandemics from the plague epidemics of the medieval and early modern periods and the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century. Cholera generated deep fears in British society because of its mysterious nature and apparent origins in India. As my chapter will demonstrate, nineteenth-century images reworked plague iconography of shrouded skeletons, dancing cadavers, and the king’s touch with martial and racial themes to depict cholera as an invisible Indian destroyer that endangered Britain. Two centuries later, newspaper articles would recall plague and cholera imagery by sensationalising COVID-19 as a virus purportedly carried and transmitted by Chinese bodies and as an invisible killer threatening the world.
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2022
The coronavirus pandemic has brought to the fore concerns over the emergence of a new deadly dise... more The coronavirus pandemic has brought to the fore concerns over the emergence of a new deadly disease, its rapid spread across global networks, and the ostensible threat posed by the Other. These concerns are not new. The emergence of an epidemic form of cholera in what European medics described as the fetid jungles of Bengal in 1817 and the five pandemics that swept across the world inspired similar fears. With cholera’s arrival in England in 1831, it took shape in the British cultural imagination as an Indian entity that threatened Britain not just with death, but with degeneration. As medics were unable to identify its cause, cholera was depicted both through its effects on the body and as an embodied figure. Medical and satiric illustrations attempted to make visible the invisible illness. In pictures of the cholera patient, the disease was framed not by its most visceral and racial effects, but by its most visible symptom: the body turned blue. It then became an embodied agent: first as an orientalized scarecrow supposedly used by doctors to frighten the populace and then as a malevolent spectre spreading death. Visually, cholera was characterized by the colour blue, which recalled another apparent product of India, indigo, and served to colonize medical knowledge through an acceptance of certain characteristics over others. Yet, circulated through print, these images depicted the horrors of the disease to the public, visually demonstrating how cholera could corrupt the English body and the heart of the British Empire.
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2020
The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and disse... more The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.
Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal, 2013
During the nineteenth century, issues surrounding ‘foreign’ contamination were raised by the emer... more During the nineteenth century, issues surrounding ‘foreign’ contamination were raised by the emergence of cholera in India, and by its rapid spread and frequent outbreaks in England. Between 1831 and 1866 Britain experienced four epidemics of the disease. While much of the discourse on cholera was textual, images were marshalled to support and visualize the arguments made about the disease and the conditions in which it bred. Cholera appeared to thrive in the fetid environments of the urban poor; therefore, the slums of London were represented as cholera’s home, while their inhabitants were characterized as immoral and unhealthy. Parts of the city were identified as possessing the same conditions as India and the Black Hole of Calcutta. Significantly, while the conflation of cholera with the slums, India, and the threat of degradation was explicitly stated in texts on the disease, the images that accompanied these texts did not directly depict the illness. Although cholera itself was not represented, the pictures moved beyond the texts by powerfully evoking visual tropes of Indian barbarism to confront and unsettle viewers with the dangers the malady posed to the heart of the British Empire.
Third Text, 2011
In 'A View of the Writers' Building from the Monument at the West End' (1824–1826), James Baillie... more In 'A View of the Writers' Building from the Monument at the West End' (1824–1826), James Baillie Fraser depicted the memorial to the Black Hole of Calcutta in ruins before the pristine Georgian façades of the Writers' Building and Saint Andrew's Church. Erected in 1760, the monument commemorated the British citizens who suffocated in a cell after they were captured by the Nawab of Bengal in 1756. Significantly, while earlier British representations present the monument as a marker of the origins of Britain's dominion over Calcutta, Fraser's image of the memorial is far more ambiguous. In Fraser's aquatint, its representation as a picturesque ruin appears to impinge on the very status of Holwell's monument as a memorial. Situated before the buildings that symbolise Britain's power and progress in Calcutta, the decaying monument troubles the scene by recalling the fraught nature of British hegemony in a city poised to become the capital of British India.
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 42 (2011): 1–35., 2011
Produced during a period in which images were seen as inferior to words, and circulated and acces... more Produced during a period in which images were seen as inferior to words, and circulated and accessed by an educated and wealthy Carolingian elite, the Gospels of Saint-Médard of Soissons displayed an excess of matter. From the vellum pages painted with portraits of the evangelists framed by precious stones and engraved gems to the ivory or gold and jeweled covers, the physical substance of the book asserted the sacredness of Scripture and aided the viewer in comprehending the invisible, heavenly realm. However, as is argued, the juxtaposition of real and represented gems also troubled a viewer's access to God by confronting the viewer with multiple and contradictory materialities. As a result, the Soissons Gospels revealed the insufficiency of the material to picture the spiritual, and forced the viewer to struggle through these materialities in order to transcend them and approach God through the correct path — immaterial, intellectual vision.
Call for Papers by Amanda Sciampacone
University of Warwick, 2018
Keynote Speakers:
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) and Richard Hamblyn (Birkbeck, University... more Keynote Speakers:
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) and Richard Hamblyn (Birkbeck, University of London
Air has always had an influence on the health of individuals, societies, cities, and nations. From Hippocrates’s belief that air affected the human body to Victorian medical theories on tropical climates and bad air as the source of disease, air was understood to have a direct effect on health and to be a cause of illness. With the advent of modern medicine, the role of air’s impact on human health has shifted, but remains present. For instance, current concerns about air pollution and respiratory disease, as well as the role climate change is playing on the health of ecosystems and nations, demonstrate the continued significance of air’s relationship to health.
The Cultural Histories of Air and Illness Conference will span disciplines and periods to explore broadly the link between human health and the air. How have we thought about, studied, and depicted the connections between air and illness? In what ways have we represented air as a source or carrier of visible and invisible dangers? How have humans constructed their relationship with the environment and what role has the environment played in the history of human health? How has air pollution and climate change impacted health across a globalized world?
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Medical theories about air and the body across history
- Representations of the relationship between air and health in literature, art, visual culture, film, theatre, and the media
- Cultural constructions of healthy and unhealthy environments
- Air as a vector of disease
- Medical topography, meteorology, and climatology
- Air pollution and industrialization
- Urban planning, gardens, and green lungs
- Radiation and the threat of the invisible
- Climate change and global health
The conference welcomes proposals of 250 words for twenty-minute papers suitable for an interdisciplinary audience. The deadline for proposals is 15 January 2018. Please use the conference organizer’s email address for all correspondence and proposals: Dr Amanda Sciampacone
Association for Art History Conference, University of Edinburgh, 2016
‘The air is unique among the elements in having this affinity with nothingness, in signifying the... more ‘The air is unique among the elements in having this affinity with nothingness, in signifying the being of non-being, the matter of the immaterial’ (Steven Connor, The Matter of Air, 31).
The materiality of the air has long been at the forefront of our cultural and visual imaginary. Air has variously been associated with life and death, purity and pollution, circulation and stagnation. It is a thing that moves and flows across space and time. It is also a site of transmission, a force that conveys both the tangible and intangible. From vapours, microbes, and particulates to signals, sounds, and images, the air is heavy with matter and meaning. Air is an element that can produce, elude, and be captured by the visual.
Following Connor, this session seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. How has air, or its vacuum, been visualised in art? How do images of the air, and their very dissemination, highlight particular meanings and connections? How do new optical technologies, modes of visual reproduction, and methods of investigation allow people to study and depict the air? This session invites papers from across historical periods and media that engage with the visual, material, and metaphorical forms of air. Papers that explore the theme through a cross-disciplinary approach – for instance, linking art history to environmental studies, the history of science and medicine, or art theory and practice – are especially welcome.
Please email paper proposals to the session convenor by 9 November 2015. Download a paper proposal form from: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session1
To view the full list of sessions, see: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016
Conference Presentations by Amanda Sciampacone
Representing the Medical Body Workshop, Science Museum, London, 2019
European Social Science History Conference, Queen's University, Belfast, 2018
College Art Association Conference, Los Angeles, 2018
Mediating Climate Change Conference, University of Leeds, 2017
New York University/Purdue University North American Victorian Studies Association/Australasian Victorian Studies Association La Pietra Supernumerary Conference, Florence, 2017
Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar ('Victorians and the Environment'), Birmingham City University, 2017
Northern Nineteenth-Century Network Conference ('Water'), Leeds Trinity University, Apr 7, 2017
Underwater Worlds: Aquatic Visions in Art, Science, and Literature Conference, University of Oxford, 2015
British Association for Romantic Studies Conference ('Romantic Imprints'), Cardiff University, 2015
Victorian Modernities Conference, University of Kent, 2015
Postgraduate History and Cultures Workshop, University of Birmingham, 2014
British Association for Victorian Studies Conference ('Victorian Sustainability'), Univeristy of Kent, 2014
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Publications by Amanda Sciampacone
Call for Papers by Amanda Sciampacone
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) and Richard Hamblyn (Birkbeck, University of London
Air has always had an influence on the health of individuals, societies, cities, and nations. From Hippocrates’s belief that air affected the human body to Victorian medical theories on tropical climates and bad air as the source of disease, air was understood to have a direct effect on health and to be a cause of illness. With the advent of modern medicine, the role of air’s impact on human health has shifted, but remains present. For instance, current concerns about air pollution and respiratory disease, as well as the role climate change is playing on the health of ecosystems and nations, demonstrate the continued significance of air’s relationship to health.
The Cultural Histories of Air and Illness Conference will span disciplines and periods to explore broadly the link between human health and the air. How have we thought about, studied, and depicted the connections between air and illness? In what ways have we represented air as a source or carrier of visible and invisible dangers? How have humans constructed their relationship with the environment and what role has the environment played in the history of human health? How has air pollution and climate change impacted health across a globalized world?
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Medical theories about air and the body across history
- Representations of the relationship between air and health in literature, art, visual culture, film, theatre, and the media
- Cultural constructions of healthy and unhealthy environments
- Air as a vector of disease
- Medical topography, meteorology, and climatology
- Air pollution and industrialization
- Urban planning, gardens, and green lungs
- Radiation and the threat of the invisible
- Climate change and global health
The conference welcomes proposals of 250 words for twenty-minute papers suitable for an interdisciplinary audience. The deadline for proposals is 15 January 2018. Please use the conference organizer’s email address for all correspondence and proposals: Dr Amanda Sciampacone
The materiality of the air has long been at the forefront of our cultural and visual imaginary. Air has variously been associated with life and death, purity and pollution, circulation and stagnation. It is a thing that moves and flows across space and time. It is also a site of transmission, a force that conveys both the tangible and intangible. From vapours, microbes, and particulates to signals, sounds, and images, the air is heavy with matter and meaning. Air is an element that can produce, elude, and be captured by the visual.
Following Connor, this session seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. How has air, or its vacuum, been visualised in art? How do images of the air, and their very dissemination, highlight particular meanings and connections? How do new optical technologies, modes of visual reproduction, and methods of investigation allow people to study and depict the air? This session invites papers from across historical periods and media that engage with the visual, material, and metaphorical forms of air. Papers that explore the theme through a cross-disciplinary approach – for instance, linking art history to environmental studies, the history of science and medicine, or art theory and practice – are especially welcome.
Please email paper proposals to the session convenor by 9 November 2015. Download a paper proposal form from: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session1
To view the full list of sessions, see: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016
Conference Presentations by Amanda Sciampacone
Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) and Richard Hamblyn (Birkbeck, University of London
Air has always had an influence on the health of individuals, societies, cities, and nations. From Hippocrates’s belief that air affected the human body to Victorian medical theories on tropical climates and bad air as the source of disease, air was understood to have a direct effect on health and to be a cause of illness. With the advent of modern medicine, the role of air’s impact on human health has shifted, but remains present. For instance, current concerns about air pollution and respiratory disease, as well as the role climate change is playing on the health of ecosystems and nations, demonstrate the continued significance of air’s relationship to health.
The Cultural Histories of Air and Illness Conference will span disciplines and periods to explore broadly the link between human health and the air. How have we thought about, studied, and depicted the connections between air and illness? In what ways have we represented air as a source or carrier of visible and invisible dangers? How have humans constructed their relationship with the environment and what role has the environment played in the history of human health? How has air pollution and climate change impacted health across a globalized world?
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Medical theories about air and the body across history
- Representations of the relationship between air and health in literature, art, visual culture, film, theatre, and the media
- Cultural constructions of healthy and unhealthy environments
- Air as a vector of disease
- Medical topography, meteorology, and climatology
- Air pollution and industrialization
- Urban planning, gardens, and green lungs
- Radiation and the threat of the invisible
- Climate change and global health
The conference welcomes proposals of 250 words for twenty-minute papers suitable for an interdisciplinary audience. The deadline for proposals is 15 January 2018. Please use the conference organizer’s email address for all correspondence and proposals: Dr Amanda Sciampacone
The materiality of the air has long been at the forefront of our cultural and visual imaginary. Air has variously been associated with life and death, purity and pollution, circulation and stagnation. It is a thing that moves and flows across space and time. It is also a site of transmission, a force that conveys both the tangible and intangible. From vapours, microbes, and particulates to signals, sounds, and images, the air is heavy with matter and meaning. Air is an element that can produce, elude, and be captured by the visual.
Following Connor, this session seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. How has air, or its vacuum, been visualised in art? How do images of the air, and their very dissemination, highlight particular meanings and connections? How do new optical technologies, modes of visual reproduction, and methods of investigation allow people to study and depict the air? This session invites papers from across historical periods and media that engage with the visual, material, and metaphorical forms of air. Papers that explore the theme through a cross-disciplinary approach – for instance, linking art history to environmental studies, the history of science and medicine, or art theory and practice – are especially welcome.
Please email paper proposals to the session convenor by 9 November 2015. Download a paper proposal form from: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session1
To view the full list of sessions, see: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016
Visualising Disease in Victorian Britain (2020)
A Visual History of London (2020)
Art and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (2019)
Modern Art in Britain, Europe, and America: 1900–1950 (2019)
London and its Museums (2019–2020)
First-Year Undergraduate Tutor (2019–2020)
Guest Speaker, Postgraduate Training Forum (2019)
Disease and Representation in the Nineteenth Century (2017–2018)
Introduction to Art History: The Natural World and the Arts of Modernity (2016–2017)
History of Art and Interpretation (2016–2017)
Methods of Art History (2015–2016)
Postgraduate Modules:
Art History and its Methods (2016–2017)
The materiality of the air has long been at the forefront of our cultural and visual imaginary. Air has variously been associated with life and death, purity and pollution, circulation and stagnation. It is a thing that moves and flows across space and time. It is also a site of transmission, a force that conveys both the tangible and intangible. From vapours, microbes, and particulates to signals, sounds, and images, the air is heavy with matter and meaning. Air is an element that can produce, elude, and be captured by the visual.
Following Connor, this session seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. How has air, or its vacuum, been visualised in art? How do images of the air, and their very dissemination, highlight particular meanings and connections? How do new optical technologies, modes of visual reproduction, and methods of investigation allow people to study and depict the air? The papers in this session will engage with visual, material, and metaphorical forms of air. Papers will explore the theme through a cross-disciplinary approach, linking art history to the history of science, environmental studies, musicology, and art theory and practice.
Hyejin Lee (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): 'Of Air and Men: Bodily-Moral Ambiguities of Eighteenth-Century Luxury Barometers'
Richard Taws (University College London): 'Lead Balloon: Drawing, Atmosphere, and Erasure in Post-Revolutionary France'
Anne-Maria Pennonen (Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery; Helsinki University): 'From Puffy Cumulus Clouds to the Lapping Waves of a Lake'
Emily Marsden (Durham University/National Media Museum, Bradford): '"The violent dissolution of form": Explosion Images and Abstraction in First World War Visual Culture'
Corrinne Chong (University of Edinburgh): 'Evoking Wagner’s "espace mystique": Henri Fantin-Latour’s Immersion in Sound and Space'
Gabriella Daris (University of London Alumna): "Breathing Space: Void and Corporeality of Air in the Work of Gustav Metzger"
Emma Cheatle (Newcastle University): "Un air embaumé: air, pleasure and repression in the work of Marcel Duchamp"
David Hopkins (University of Glasgow): "The Re-materialisation of Art: Back to the Presocratics"
Debates in Art History (2012–2014)
Introduction to European Art pre-1800 (2012–2013)
Introduction to Modern Art (2011–2012)
Postgraduate Modules:
Inventing the Victorians (2012)
The 29th Annual AHVA Graduate Symposium and Exhibition, held on the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia, includes a two-day symposium on January 29th and 30th, concurrent with a two week exhibition scheduled from January 29th to February 11th, 2010.