November 8, 2022

Literature, Art, Environment: John Ruskin’s "Torcello"

Event Series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment

Showing the Literature, Art, Environment: John Ruskin’s "Torcello" Video

John Ruskin, a Victorian-era English writer known for his connections between nature, art, and society, released a treatise on Venetian art and architecture in three volumes from 1851 to 1853, entitled Stones of Venice. Using passages from Volume II of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1853), John Pfordresher will examine how Ruskin not only describes the environmental site for the first Romanesque Venetian church, but how he discerns in its characteristics the values and religious beliefs which initiated that city’s later cultural and political success. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, will provide opening and closing remarks, and Michael Collins will moderate a Q&A session following the presentation.

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Wellcome Images

Participants

John Pfordresher

John Pfordresher

John Pfordresher is professor emeritus of English at Georgetown University. His 50 years of teaching began in New Hampshire, shortly thereafter continued in Washington, DC, and concluded with 20 years in Florence, Italy. He has published books on Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Charlotte Brontë, as well as a theoretical study of the historical emergence of the Catholic imagination.

Michael Collins

Michael Collins

Michael Collins (moderator) is a teaching professor of English and dean emeritus at Georgetown University. He has published essays on Anglo-Welsh poetry in Poetry Wales, World Literature Today, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and the Anglo-Welsh Review. He is an honorary fellow of Wrexham Glyndwr University, University of Wales, and a recipient of Georgetown University’s Presidential Medal and its Bunn Award for Outstanding Teaching.