Aubrey Beardsley 150: The Artist Resurgent
Anniversary conference
21 August 2022, St Bride, London
Organised by the Aubrey Beardsley Society
in association with the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS), and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
The Beardsley ‘craze’, indeed – if ‘craze’ there be – is really just beginning.
H. C. Marillier (1899)
Aubrey Beardsley entered the last Victorian decade a precocious 18-year-old with a passion for music, art, literature, and theatre, obliged to earn a living as a clerk at an insurance firm. He died of tuberculosis two years before the decade’s end, having lent his name to the period, an author of a thousand radical designs which achieved ‘publicity without a frame, and beauty without modelling’, and of a decadent erotic novel that is yet to be fully appreciated. The year 2022 will mark the 150th anniversary of Beardsley’s birth – which the Aubrey Beardsley Society will celebrate in style.
Organised in association with the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, the British Assocation of Decadence Studies, and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, the one-day conference Aubrey Beardsley 150: The Artist Resurgent aims to reclaim Beardsley for the twenty-first century by employing interdisciplinary approaches as interventions to the established modes of Beardsley scholarship. While highlighting new archival work, it seeks to reassess Beardsley in relation to the urgent debates around intermediality, queerness, transnationalism, and camp aesthetics.
We invite 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers which may address but are not limited to the following themes:
- Beardsley Women, Beardsley Men, Beardsley Non-Binaries
- AB’s sexuality and sexual iconography
- AB’s verbal and visual techniques
- AB and medical humanities
- AB and queer perspectives
- AB and transnational perspectives
We are interested in featuring creative responses to Beardsley and the Beardsleyesque, including poetry readings and other forms of performance such as theatre and dance. We welcome 350-word proposals which may include up to 6 links or images of previous/related work, accompanied by the artists’ CVs.
Please email your proposals to Dr Sasha Dovzhyk at contact@ab2020.org by 10 January 2022.
