The Modern Europe Colloquium presents Alice Goff, Professor, University of Chicago, on To Be Announced
Location: HQ (Humanities Quadrangle), Rm 107, 320 York St.
The Modern Europe Colloquium is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center
Bio: I am a historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the modern period, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. My research and teaching center on the history of art and politics, museums, cultural preservation, and the history of the humanities in German states and in the relationship between Germany and the world.
I am currently at work on a manuscript with the working title, “The God Behind the Marble: Transcendence and the Art Object in the German Aesthetic State, 1794–1848.” The book tells the story of artworks caught up in the looting, iconoclasm, and shifting boundaries of German states during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars and the consequences of these upheavals for German political, religious, and intellectual practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By examining the shifting fortunes of private collections, public museums, and church treasuries, this work examines the frictions that arose between the precarious fates of artworks on the ground and the assertions of art’s ideal autonomy in philosophy and criticism.