Texas scholar to explore cultural history of nudity in Nov. 14 talk
Philippa Levine
“Purity or Degeneration? The Cultural Modernity of Nudity, Art, and Activism,” is the title of a talk to be presented by Philippa Levine of the University of Texas when she visits Skidmore College on Friday, Nov. 14.
Free and open to the public, the talk will begin at 7 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain
Hall. Skidmore’s Department of History is sponsor of the event.
Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and co-director
of the Program in British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is best
known for her work in the history of British imperialism, but her work has spanned
the fields of gender studies, the history of science, and the history of medicine.
Her talk will be taken from the second half of a new book project on the cultural history of nudity. Tillman Nechtman, chair of Skidmore’s History Department, said, “Supposedly, Mark Twain once remarked that ‘clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.’ Academics have agreed, spending a lot of time studying the cultural, historical, political, and economic history of clothing. In this project, Professor Levine argues that the unclothed human form is as ideologically charged as the clothed form. From Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, to the unclothed ‘others’ of European colonization, being naked has never been a neutral condition.”
In her talk, Levine will look to the 19th and 20th centuries, a time when nudity became tangled in myriad conversations ranging from the question of nudity in avant-garde art to the policing of the female body in political debates about morality, health, and sexual equality. In each of these contexts, Levine will argue, nakedness figured as a problem in the historical conceptualization of modernity.
Levine is an award-winning scholar who grew up in the United Kingdom and came to the United States in 1987. She taught in her native Britain, in Australia and at the University of Southern California before joining the UT faculty in 2010. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship (2002), and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health. She earned a doctoral degree at St. Antony’s College of Oxford University.
