In October 2005, Love Revealed, a major exhibition about the work of the Jewish and homosexual Victorian artist Simeon Solomon, opened at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the UK. To mark this important intervention in nineteenth-century British cultural history, the Yale Center for British Art is holding a symposium that takes the extraordinary career of Solomon as a starting point for an examination of marginality in late Victorian Britain and beyond. Papers will explore the social, sexual and political contexts in which he worked, and will address the nature of marginality. Sessions on aestheticism, on the classical tradition and sexuality, and on history and Jewishness will complicate our understanding of the relationship between margin and center in Victorian Britain and its Empire.

The keynote lecture on Friday 5 May at 5.30 will be given by Colin Cruise (University of Staffordshire), curator of the Solomon exhibition and editor of the accompanying publication. Other participants will include: Joe Bristow (UCLA), Jonathan Shirland (University of York), Elizabeth Prettejohn (University of Bristol), Morna O’Neill (Yale Center for British Art), David Feldman (Birkbeck, London), and Gayle Seymour (University of Central Arkansas).

The symposium is free and open to the public. Advance registration is required. To register or for more information, please contact Serena uerrette at 203.432.7192 or e-mail serena.guerrette@yale.edu.