Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COPAST (The Colours of the Past in Victorian England)
Reporting period: 2016-03-01 to 2018-02-28
During the course of this two-year Fellowship, Dr. Ribeyrol pursued three innovative and interrelated objectives:
- to explain how colour became a central cultural concern in 19th century England due to major scientific innovations relating to both the fabrication and perception of colour.
- to highlight the importance of chromatic materiality in Victorian literature, by confronting writers' and artists’s actual practice of colour with the list of pigments and dyes as well as the ancient recipes which they referred to in their lectures, correspondence or poetry.
- to analyse the complex relationship the Victorians entertained with the past – in particular two key colourful periods: Antiquity and the Middle-Ages.
Throughout her Fellowship, Charlotte Ribeyrol has also been fully engaged in various outreach activities in order to disseminate her results to a wider, non-academic audience. In Novembre 2017, she was, for instance, interviewed to answer the following ‘big’ societal question ‘Do we all see colour in the same way ?’ by the OXPLORE team, a new digital outreach portal sponsored by Oxford University encourages 11 to 18 year-olds to address questions that go beyond what is covered in the classroom.
Moreover, as a direct outcome of her Fellowship, she plans to organise a major exhibition on Victorian colour at the Ashmolean Museum in 2022 which will further strengthen the societal implications of her research on colour.