Note to editors and reporters: John Brewer is available by appointment for interviews. To schedule an interview, call the CSULA Public Affairs office at (323) 343-3050.
‘Sublime, spectacular’ as technology, imagination converge
Los Angeles, CA – History and literature scholar John Brewer will present “Taste and Modernity: Sentiment, Spectacle and the Sublime in Georgian England,” at the 2008 David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture on Thursday, Jan. 31, 6:30 p.m., at Cal State L.A.’s Golden Eagle Ballroom.
Brewer—the Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at California Institute of Technology—will examine the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ fascination with a broad range of effects achieved with new technologies.
Focusing on the revolution of technology and the exultation of human imagination, Brewer will explore how paintings, novels, and plays portray intimate circumstances and intense moments of everyday life.
A Cambridge-educated historian, Brewer formerly served in positions at Yale, Harvard, UCLA, and the University of Chicago. He also served as director of the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Brewer has published widely on topics ranging from 18th century British political figures and politics to the relationship between art, publishing, and consumer culture. He has also written and edited many books on 18th century British culture. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, his study of the emergence of high culture in the age of consumerism, was awarded the Wolfson Prize in History and was a National Book Critics Nominee in Criticism. His most recent book, A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century, uses a sensational 1779 murder to “explore the relations between history and fiction, storytelling and fact, and past and present.”
For more background on Brewer, go to http://www.hss.caltech.edu/media/profiles/brewer.doc
What & Who:
The Annual David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture Series will present “Taste and Modernity: Sentiment, Spectacle and the Sublime in Georgian England” by internationally recognized scholar John Brewer.
When:
Thursday, January 31, 2008, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. (A reception will follow immediately after the lecture.)
Where:
Golden Eagle Ballroom, on the Cal State L.A. campus. The University is located at the Eastern Avenue exit, San Bernardino (I-10) Freeway, at the interchange of 10 and 710 Freeways. Public permit dispenser parking is available in Lots 2 and 7 or upper level Parking Structure C.
Info:
Free to the public. For details, call the English Department at Cal State L.A., (323) 343-4140.
Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 200,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to a unique university center for gifted students as young as 12. Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH- and Rockefeller-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu