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Event Series: Centre for British Studies - Monday Lectures WS 25/26
Reading

The Modern Dream of Order: Victoria, Photography, and the Social Imagination

Book Launch

Appointment

Mon., Nov. 24, 2025
5:00pm - 7:00pm

Venue

Centre for British Studies

Admission

free
Centre for British Studies / Großbritannien-Zentrum
Figure:Centre for British Studies / Großbritannien-Zentrum

This book offers a critical analysis of modernity through the lens of 19th-century photography in Britain.

The study combines art history, the history of photography, as well as gender, cultural and media studies, and features a wealth of previously unpublished visual material. it explores how commercial portrait photography - the largest and yet most neglected visual archive of the 19th-century - shaped social relations and provided visual stability in an era of rapid change. 

The book makes use of Queen Victoria's ubiquitous photographic presence in private and communal contexts, to demonstrate how new visual media undergirded the power of conventional concepts of social order and stability. Modernity, seen from this perspective, is not determined primarily by new technologies and their distributive power, but rather by the utilisation of these technologies for the visual construction of imaginations of the social.

A critical reflection of this mechanism is crucial to understanding current media practices as well.

Eva Ehninger is Professor of Modern Art History at the Institute of Art and Visual History and Co-Director of the Centre for Advanced Study 'inherit - heritage in transformation' at HU Berlin.

Registration necessary at: events.gbz@hu-berlin.de


Further information

Organizer: Centre for British Studies/HU Department Art and Visual History
Speakers: Prof. Eva Ehninger
Scientific director: Prof. Gesa Stedman

Further information on the event's website

Contact

Catherine Smith
Phone: 030 2093-99040
catherine.smith@hu-berlin.de

Address

Mohrenstr. 60
Room: 105, 1st floor

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