Venue: John Peek Conference Room,

The Birmingham & Midland Institute

Date: Saturday 21^st October 2006

10.00-10.30 Arrivals and Registration

10.30-11.30 Keynote Speaker

Professor Barrie Bullen (University of Reading)

‘From Ugliness to Beauty: The Curious Transformation of Jane Morris’

11.30-12.15 Break for refreshments

12.15-1.15 Panel 1: The Natural and the Ideal: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Beauty

Mark Frost (University of Portsmouth) ‘The Fellowship of Beauty: Tree Beauty and the Pursuit of the Good in the Work of John Ruskin’

Amelia Yeates (University of Birmingham) ‘“Twas Psyche’s face and yet ’twas not her face”: Beauty, Body and Soul in Victorian Versions of Pygmalion’

1.15-2.15 We will break for lunch. There is a wide range of food outlets within walking distance of the Institute.

2.15-3.15 Panel 2: The Art of Concealing and the Power of the Gaze

Sharon Hodgson (University of Hull) ‘Disfigured Faces: Nice Girls Don’t Wear Rouge’

Ryan Barnett (University of Central England) ‘Don’t associate any romantic ideas of invisible beauty with me: The (Non)Revelation of Beauty in Wilkie Collins’ The Two Destinies and George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil’

3.15-3.30 Break

3.30-4.30 Panel 3: Internal versus External: Masculine and Feminine Conceptions of Beauty and Identity

Louise Lee (Roehampton University) ‘”A grimacing distortion”: The Surprising and Unaccountable Unsightliness of Thomas Carlyle’s Portrait in Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Work’’

Lizzie Ludlow (University of Warwick) ‘Beyond the Looking Glass: Hermeneutical Understandings of True Feminine Beauty in the Work of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’

4.30 Close