Recent plenary lecture by Professor Deirdre Coleman at ISECS International Congress

Ethnicity, Skin Colour and Constructed Identities

Professor Deirdre Coleman recently presented an 'Opening World Plenary' lecture on 'Ethnicity, Skin Colour and Constructed Identities' at the ISECS International Congress on the Enlightenment at the University of Edinburgh, 14-19 July 2019.

Professor Coleman was one of six international plenary speakers presenting on the theme of 'Enlightenment Identities: Definitions and Debates'. Focusing on a series of portrait paintings from 1760s and 1770s, including Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Keppel and Miss Susanna Gale, her lecture described how ideas of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are experienced by individuals and the societies in which they live. The lecture was delivered in the grand McEwan Hall, a Victorian-period ceremonial hall presented to the University of Edinburgh by the brewer William McEwan in 1897.

Biography

Deirdre Coleman is Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC, Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, has served as Vice-President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA), and held Visiting Fellowships in the UK and Sweden. Her research interests are wide-ranging, encompassing slavery, colonialism, science, racial ideology and women’s travel writing. Key publications include Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (2005); as editor, Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770-1930 (2011); and Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century (2018).

Image: Detail from Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Keppel (1761)