School of Arts and Humanities at St Mary’s Plans Inauguration

The School of Arts and Humanities at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham has organised a public lecture as part of a series of events to celebrate its inauguration this semester. On Wednesday 9^th October from 6.30pm in the Waldegrave Drawing Room Professor Ruth Robbins, Head of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, will give a lecture titled ‘Bring on the Dancing Girl: Wilde’s Salomé, Oriental Fantasies and the Fin de Siècle.’ The figure of the dancing girl was extremely popular in late nineteenth-century culture: in the poems, paintings and posters, and the orientalist imaginations of many. The figure that recurs most is that of Salomé, a fashion inaugurated by Flaubert, but ably abetted by Mallarme, Oscar Wilde and a host of painters. The lecture will place Wilde’s Salomé in its historical context and draw upon the compendium of fin-de-siècle tropes of naughtiness, whilst discussing the more serious side of images, their limitations and their meanings which continue to speak to us in a period well beyond the 1890s. Prof Robbins is the author of Oscar Wilde (Continuum, 2011). This event is free and open to the public. For more information contact Wendy Bushnell on wendy.bushnell@stmarys.ac.uk