Save the Date! Useful and Beautiful Conference in Delaware, October 2010

Save the Date!
Useful and Beautiful:
The Transatlantic Arts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites
7–9 October 2010
Newark and Wilmington, DE
A conference and related exhibitions, 7-9 October 2010, at the University of Delaware (Newark, DE) and at the Delaware Art Museum and the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate (Wilmington, DE). Organized with the assistance of the William Morris Society, Useful and Beautiful will highlight the strengths of the University of Delaware’s rare books, manuscripts, and art collections; Winterthur’s important holdings in American decorative arts; and the Delaware Art Museum’s superlative Pre-Raphaelite collection (the largest outside Britain). This conference will focus on the multitude of transatlantic exchanges that involved Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the arts and crafts and aesthetic movements of the late nineteenh century. We will invite papers that explore relationships and influences—whether personal, intellectual, political, or aesthetic—that connect William Morris, his friends, associates, and followers in Britain and Europe with their contemporaries and successors in the Americas. The “arts” will include not merely those at which Morris himself excelled—i.e., literature, design, and printing—but also painting, illustration, architecture, performance, and anything related to print culture in general. A formal call for papers and other details will follow in Fall 2009.

For more information, please contact Mark Samuels Lasner, marksl@udel.edu, (302) 831-3250.