This Saturday, September 8, you are cordially invited to join myself and a host of distinguished scholars, makers, and museum folk as we investigate, via a one day symposium termed "The Congress for Curious Peoples," some of the provocative intersections explored in the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy," on view at the London-based Last Tuesday Society until the end of the month.

This first ever UK edition of The Congress for Curious Peoples will feature participants from The Wellcome Collection, The Wellcome Library, and The Gordon Museum of Pathology, as well as some of my very favorite artists, thinkers and scholars, and will take on such heady topics as enchantment and enlightenment, or the sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both medicine and Catholicism, and will

Full info follows; hope very very much to see you there!

Congress for Curious Peoples: London Edition
Date: Saturday September 8
Time: 11am - 5:30 pm
Admission: £15.00 (Tickets here)
Location: The Last Tuesday Society
Address: 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP
Produced by Morbid Anatomy

11-12: Introduction by Morbid Anatomy's Joanna EbensteinKeynote panel: Enchantment and Enlightenment (20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

• Moderated by Joanna Ebenstein
• David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Modernity and the Sacred
• Simon Werrrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History

12-1: Lunch

1-2:30 The Secret Life of Objects: The Allure of Objects and the Psychology of Collecting (20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

• Moderated by Ross MacFarlane, Wellcome Library
• Petra Lange-Berndt, University College London
• Kate Forde, The Wellcome Collection

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-5:30 Beautiful Death and Incorruptible Bodies: Eternal Life and Aestheticized Death in Medicine and Catholicism (15 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

• Moderated by John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath 
• Eleanor Crook, Wax artist
• Gemma Angel, PhD Student ad UCL History of Art
• Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815
• Simon Chaplin, Wellcome Library
• Sigrid Sarda, Wax artist
• William Edwards, The Gordon Museum

You can find out more by clicking here, and purchase tickets by clicking here.

Source:
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