Coffee House Perspectives, the official podcast of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, returns for the second in a trilogy of new Summer Specials, this time bringing together three experts to discuss the history of skin in the eighteenth century.
Beauty, perception, regulation, interpretation, oppression, fetishization, caricature, discrimination… are all words we associate with skin; its colour, its condition, its age, and that was no different in the eighteenth century.
Skin, as you’ll hear in this episode, has a long history as both a sign as a signifier, something that is real and something that represents, but who inscribes that meaning, who controls the stories that skin has been made to tell, and whose stories do we miss when we fail to properly interrogate the way skin has been represented in the eighteenth century?
These are just some of the questions that we’ll be posing to a panel of experts on the subject of skin in the eighteenth century:
Dr Karen Lipsedge from the University of Kingston
Dr Katie Snow from University College Dublin
Dr Katie Aske from Edinburgh Napier University
This installment of hosted by Dr Adam James Smith—Chief Editor of Criticks, the Online Reviews Hub for the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
The episode was edited by Charlotte Crawshaw (Northumbria University). It was produced by Adam James Smith in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.