On 27 May 2022 Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, Emeritus Professor of History and Visual Culture and Emeritus Director of the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, Durham University delivered the fourth Eoin MacNeill Lecture. Established in 2011, these lectures provide an opportunity for distinguished scholars from outside Ireland to discuss the importance of archives and primary sources, both in their own work and more generally, with an Irish audience.
In her lecture, entitled ‘Intricate threads and bigger pictures: Lives in archives’, Professor Jordanova examined the place of extra-illustrated books in archives, noting “These unique artefacts are not typical printed sources and therefore raise questions about collecting, its emotional and sensory dimensions, the role of prints and especially portraits in their dynamic interplay with text, the sense of the past that compilers manifest, the ways in which institutions elicit attachment and devotion and the meanings generated by the resources involved — time, money, skills. There are intricate connections in play, threads for historians to follow, while such case studies have the potential to shed light on broader issues, including the mediating capacities of portraits, which enable people — historians included — to explore and express their kinship with past lives.”
A recording of the lecture will be published on our YouTube channel and it will be made available as a pamphlet in due course.
Pictured above with IMC Chair Professor John McCafferty, Professor Jordanova takes questions from the audience after her lecture.