London Research Seminars: Helen Kilburn and Elizabeth Powell
In our next London Research Seminar, Helen Kilburn explains how seventeenth-century Catholics in Maryland used the Empire to safeguard wealth from English anti-Catholic penal codes. While Elizabeth Powell will explore the theme of the 'Poetics of Liturgy and Place' in relation to her research on the art and poetry of David Jones
The London Research Seminars will be an opportunity for our local London faculty members to present research they are undertaking, welcoming questions and challenges from a multidisciplinary audience. It is also an opportunity for our staff across the globe to find out what our London faculty are working on, and increase opportunities for collaboration.
No specialist knowledge is assumed - a wide variety of subjects will be presented in a manner that is accessible to all. Whatever your experience, your contributions will be appreciated greatly. Each presenter will have around twenty minutes to present on their topic before fifteen minutes of Q&A. For further information about each talk, please see below:
Kin, Catholics, and Colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Maryland
This paper provides an insight into Helen Kilburn’s first monograph, Catholics in the Colonies: Maryland in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic. It focuses on her current research towards the development of a database that reconstructs the capital networks of Catholic planters in Maryland before the Catholic Baltimore proprietorship was deposed in 1689 as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) in England. The research is beginning to reveal that these capital networks were structured along kinship and confessional lines, and for this reason Kilburn suggest that Catholics used colonialism to establish what today we might call "off-shore accounts" for the purpose of protecting community wealth and social standing from the financial and social censure they experienced under anti-Catholic penal codes in England.
"The Poetics of Liturgy and Place" the Art of David Jones
In this seminar, Elizabeth Powell will introduce the theme of ‘The Poetics and Liturgy and Place’ for the third international Catholicism, Literature and the Arts conference (12-14 July 2022) which she has been organising with colleagues at the Gateway and the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University. The conference will explore the Catholic tradition’s contribution to ‘place-making’ through the arts, including architecture, graphic arts, sculpture, drama, literature, and music. Guiding questions include: How do the arts create, shape, or contest Catholic global, regional, and local identities? How might the liturgy shape our understanding of ‘place’ and, in turn, how might our perception and creation of ‘place’ inform or reform the liturgy? What difference do the material surroundings in which we encounter religious artworks make to our reception of them? And how has art in the Catholic tradition attended to the ‘displaced’, the homeless, refugees, and to the ‘more-than-human’ world? Elizabeth will engage the theme of Liturgy and Place in relation to her own research on the twentieth-century artist and poet, David Jones..