Niklaus Cartwright French Lecture

Visiting speaker Dr David McCallam from the University of Sheffield will talk on: "The Volcano: A Tool for Thinking in Eighteenth-Century France”.

The lecture commences at 5.30pm on Thursday 9 March in Lecture Theatre 1, Queen’s Building.

Guests are warmly welcome to stay for refreshments afterwards.

The lecture will appeal to students and alumni with an interest in the Humanities, particularly Art History as well as Modern Languages. 

The Niklaus-Cartwright lecture is named after two eminent French academics, Professor Robert Niklaus, former Head of French at Exeter and his student Michael Cartwright who went on to become an eminent academic in his own right and generously bequeathed funding for French at Exeter.  Both Niklaus and Cartwright were experts in 18th century French.

Lecture Abstract from Dr McCallum
Seemingly both part of the natural order and a violent break in nature, the volcano constituted an important figure for French thinking in the eighteenth century, especially in science, aesthetics and politics. Volcanological fieldwork challenged religious chronologies of the Earth and increasingly replaced an understanding of nature based on mechanistic analogy with one determined by organic patterning. Aesthetically, the erupting volcano illustrated theories of the natural sublime, but also provided sites for explorers, and later tourists, to measure themselves against incommensurable volcanic power. For French revolutionaries and their enemies, the volcano represented both the irresistible force of the insurgent ‘peuple’ and a fear of the apocalyptic upheavals that revolution might unleash. This presentation will consider instances which illustrate and problematize these functions of the volcano as a ‘tool for thinking’ in eighteenth-century France.

Speaker
Dr David McCallam is Reader in French Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of monographs on the moralist Chamfort and on the libertine masterpiece Les Liaisons dangereuses. He has also published on Montesquieu, Voltaire, Sade, Xavier de Maistre and André Chénier, among others. In 2013 he was awarded the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Teaching Prize. His other main area of research is the history of earth sciences in eighteenth-century Europe, especially volcanoes and avalanches. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Mountains of Fire: Volcanoes in Eighteenth-Century European Culture.

How to book
Please book you place via the online registration form.