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Spectacle, the Public and the Crowd: Pageants and Exhibitions in 1908’

This is an invited contribution to an inter-disciplinary publication funded by the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). The book brought together leading scholars from the US, the UK and Australia from History of Art, Architecture and Design, Geography, English Literature and Film Studies. The contributors were funded to attend two workshops at the V&A Museum in London and one at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. The book’s contributors then advised the YCBA exhibition, ‘Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century’. My essay was funded by a grant from Paul Mellon and critically examines a range of visual spectacles staged in 1908 including exhibitions, pageants and suffragette parades.

The volume has been favourably reviewed in Journal of British Studies, Reviews in History, Burlington Magazine, Art History and Journal of Design History and in broadsheet newspapers. The majority of reviewers who discuss my essay comment on the originality of my work in its conceptualisation of Edwardian notions of spectacle as relentlessly modern and my attendant focus on interactions between audiences and spectacles.