SPAH Seminar Series Week 24: Dr Ting Chang

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Dr Ting Chang gives a talk on 'Nineteenth-Century Imperial Games: Visuality, Tactility, Ludicity'.

This paper examines the role of boardgames, toys and optical devices in the construction of an imperial subjectivity in the nineteenth century. I suggest that the objects in my study were uniquely powerful because they connected different spaces of knowledge production, performance, and pedagogy. Using examples from France and Britain that variously positioned their players as adversaries or allies in empire building, I wish to investigate the particular efficacy of combining visuality, tactility and ludicity. I hope that students of art history and visual culture, long habituated, like me, to the interdiction to touch, will grasp the opportunity to consider tactility as a historical concern and a theoretical framework. I further wish to integrate playful practices to historical inquiry and consider the methodological gains and limits. Other issues to be examined include materiality, transmediality, scale, miniaturization.

About the speaker:
Ting Chang teaches art history in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her monograph, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris is available in paperback with Routledge. Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, The Oxford Art Journal, L’Esprit Créateur, Les Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, among other journals and edited volumes in English and French. She is the grateful recipient of grants and fellowships from the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Institute, UCLA-Clark Memorial Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. Ting Chang is working on a monograph provisionally titled Playing Empire: Games, Spectacles and Colonial Subjects, first supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 

This event will be via Zoom only. To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link.