Stetz will address what Victorianism seems to mean today, as well as the current expectations about women artists, their lives and their relationship to their work that shape the film's representation of Beatrix Potter.
Stetz is the curator of an exhibition, “Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection,” that is on view at the Grolier Club, 47 E. 60th Street, New York City, until April 26th. The catalogue of the exhibition, which uses works collected by Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at the UD Library, was published in 2007 by the University of Delaware Press. In that show, Stetz looks at the birth of celebrity culture in Britain, which emerged at the end of the 19th century through the production and circulation of portraits of creative figures.
"Beatrix Potter, Victorian Woman Artist" is a free public event and is part of UD's English department's Victorian Semester, which combines four complementary courses for students with a series of evening lectures and films on Victorian culture. Stetz has been teaching one of the courses--"Women and British Theatre, 1880-1930." The Victorian Semester is being held in conjunction with the Delaware Art Museum's celebration of "The Return of the Pre-Raphaelites," the homecoming of its collection of 19th-century art.
The series concludes on May 5, with Heidi Kaufman, assistant professor of English, who will lecture on “Imagining Africa,” and be followed by the film, King Solomon's Mines.
For more information, e-mail [pflynn@udel.edu] or call (302) 831-2212.
