Features
Explore upcoming events, blog posts, and recordings from Arts of Place
Jenny Uglow: ‘A Year with Gilbert White’
Summer Lecture: Tuesday 17 June 2025, 4pm, UoB Arts Building
Reading Group: The Lunar Men
Monday 19th May 2025, Arts Building, Lecture Room 5
‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano
Seminar 19 March Arts 201, 3-5pm with Professor Simon Bainbridge
Pioneers of Local Thinking: Polly Atkin
Listen to the recording of our fourth talk on Pioneers of Local Thinking
Daphne Astor
In Memory of Daphne Warburg Astor (1949-2024)
The Allure of Lodore: Painting Sensation as well as Scenery
Feature Essay by William C. Snyder, opening a whole new perspective on late eighteenth-century landscape painting.
Arts of Place/Oxford Centre for Life Writing, Weinrebe Lecture 2024
Arts of Place/OCLW Annual Lecture: Fiona Stafford. Listen to the recording here.
Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820
Read more about our new project and seminar series for 2023-24
“To the Lakes!”: Local artistic perspectives
Pioneers of Local Thinking Seminar: Monday 20 May 2024, with guest speaker Jeff Cowton MBE
‘Seeds, to our eye invisible’:
Pioneers of Local Thinking Seminar: Monday 22 January 2024 with Dr James Bainbridge
Cotman, Aubrey, and the Neglected Places
Pioneers of Local Thinking Seminar: 27 November 2023 with Prof. Peter Davidson
Arts of Place/OCLW Annual Lecture 2023: Alexandra Walsham
Watch the recording and read highlights here
Land and Labour in Literary History
Monday Conversation in Birmingham: 6 March 5-6pm. With Paddy Bullard
Between the Kingdoms of Sleep and Waking
Blog Post: Hannah Christopher reflects on the WomenTalkPlace Symposium
Table Talks
Wine and dining with Heber Rodrigues and Will Bowers: watch the recordings here
Welcome Drinks and Research Exchange
Welcoming in the 2022-23 academic year
Trees of History
A summer evening of tree-themed readings and discussion in the Barber Gallery
“Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap…”
Our May 2022 Monday Conversation on the place of the churchyard with Ruth Abbott and James Metcalf
Daisy Hay: Stories of Romantic Birmingham
Weinrebe Lecture 2022: Daisy Hay on Joseph Priestley, Joseph Johnson, and ruins and riots
Songs of Spring
April 2022’s Monday Conversation, with Bethan Roberts and Francesca MacKenney
On Place Value
February’s online Monday Conversation: Christopher Donaldson and Pippa Marland consider representations of place value
Fire and Ochre: Films by Julie Brook
Alexandra Harris in conversation with our Artist-in-Residence Julie Brook
Tobacco and Feathers: The Art of Looking
November 2021’s online Monday Conversation: Lauren Working and Lucy Powell discuss art, literature, and colonialism with art historian Stephanie Pratt
Julie Brook: Arts of Place Artist-in-Residence
We welcome land artist Julie Brook for a summer residency at Arts of Place
Practical drawing with Julie Brook
On 23 June we held a drawing workshop with Julie Brook. Here’s a taste of some of the results.
William Cowper, Art and Afterlife
A two-day seminar on William Cowper’s poetry, organized by Arts of Place members.
The Lives of Naturalists
Weinrebe Lecture: Richard Mabey on Gilbert White of Selborne
Edward Thomas: Out of Place
Conversation: Andrew Hodgson and Ralph Pite consider the radical strangeness of Thomas’s writing
Dereliction and Healing among Coal Spoils
Essay: Michael Malay reflects on the hidden ecosystems that thrive on the sites of disused collieries.
A Street in a Global Pandemic
Gallery: Photographer Martin Stott has been capturing images from lockdown life.
A Month in the Country
Re-reading: Hermione Lee returns to J.L. Carr’s classic novel
A World on the Table: Still Life Paintings and their Global Stories
Conversation: Lauren Working and Lucy Powell bring questions of taste, trade and globalism to bear on scenes of feasting and beauty.
Difficult Paradises
Conversation: Tim Dee, Michael Malay, and Liam Olds ask what beauty means in the context of ecological renewal.
Wordsworth’s art of place
Essay: In the year of Wordsworth’s 250th birthday, Jessica Fay explores the contemplative stories he tells about ruins.
Explore the travels of objects at TIDEfest
Workshop 31 July: Explore migration and cultural memory through objects that cross borders.
Literature for quiet times
Podcast: Alexandra Harris talks to Kate McLoughlin about William Cowper’s great poem of quiet home life, The Task.