Oh hello, scholars. This week we take a look at some dead people heads, share some relationship advice, and offer an Instagram account to spice up your feed. Read on!
- Over at Stanford University, celebrations of the 200-year anniversary of Jane Austen’s death continue as a professor and two doctoral students take a look at “one of the biggest literary figures in English,” focusing on her popularity, her place in the literary canon, and her style of prose.
- The Laurence Hutton Collection, located at Firestone Library at Princeton University, contains the death masks of iconic figures like Walt Whitman and Isaac Newton as well as a cast of Goethe’s right (write) hand. This funerary practice was especially popular during the 19th and early 20th centuries, during which celebrity cults and physiognomy saw their rise in American and European culture.
They saved Whitman’s brain (uh, head). Cast by Samuel Murray with the help of Thomas Eakins. Via the Laurence Hutton Collection.
- Foolproof way to force someone to love you: Co-star with them in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So say the four starring actors of Shakespeare in the Park’s production of the Shakespearean play, which runs from July 11 to August 13 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park (for free!). As the actors discuss the chemistry that they “make” if it does not exist naturally, New York Times contributor Alexis Soloski notes “how strange and funny it is that actors’ bodies have to substitute for the bodies of their characters…”
- Fun fact: Emily Dickinson, in addition to her love of poetry, had a passion for botany, visible in her herbarium in which 424 flowers had been carefully arranged by the poet’s hand. Today, the fragile book is held/guarded by Harvard University’s Houghton Library.
- Similar to the Twitter account Tabloid Art History (@TabloidArtHist), which we covered in an earlier Weekly Round-Up, Instagram account @youngthugaspaintings compares hip hop artist Young Thug to such works in the art historical canon as Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Rembrandt van Rijn’s Nicolas Berghem, among others.
That’s all for this week! Don’t forget to check back next weekend for moooooreneeeews.
