Second Imagination Research Network Annual Meeting Held
20-21 May 2025 saw the second annual meeting of the Imagination Research Network. Over 2 days and across 4 workshops, Network members and guests discussed the theory and history of imagination.
The meeting focused on four broad themes:
- historicising the image;
- imagining justice;
- imagining nature;
- imagining lives.
Speakers and discussants came from many different disciplines, including History, English and Drama, Film, Art History, Classics, Economics, and Law.
The first workshop, on ‘Historicising the Image’, explored the entangled histories of real, material images as well as the images in the mind’s eye. Discussion ranged from Ancient Greece and Rome and thus pre-modern practices of encountering images through to Renaissance images and their afterlives, and well into the contemporary moment in which we are saturated with images, especially digital and moving images, as found in advertising, social media, cinema, news, and propaganda. The conversation starters, who came from disciplines such as classical archaeology and film philosophy, were: Lucy Bolton; Anat Rosenberg; Thalia Allington-Wood; Julie Stone Peters; Michael Squire; and Caroline van Eck.
The second workshop, on ‘Imagining Justice’, explored the visual history of personifications of the virtues, with a particular focus on the virtue of Justice. Inspired by Valerie Hayaert's Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory, speakers from a range of disciplines – including medieval history and comparative literature – related personifications of virtue to personifications of Ecclesia and Synagoga as well as Geometry and Rhetoric. Discussion also included the pedagogical opportunities and challenges of inviting students to invent new versions of Lady Justice. Chaired by Julie Stone Peters, the speakers were: Valerie Hayaert, Miri Rubin, Delfi Nieto-Isabel, Isobel Roele, and Piyel Haldar.
Opening the second day was a workshop on ‘Imagining Nature’. Here, the group examined various traditions of imagining the natural world, including particular aspects of it (such as its economic dimension). Discussion ranged from Bacon’s New Atlantis to Lucretius and his cosmic poetry, through to the use of natural law arguments to justify occupation of space, and all the way to representations of ecological disasters in Haiti and the invention of hydraulic machines to help imagine economics as a system. Chaired by David Colclough, the conversation starters were Andrew Fitzmaurice, Renisa Mawani, Kasia Mika, and Mary Morgan.
The final event turned to the politics of the imagination – both in terms of the promises and challenges of the biographical imagination, but also by way of examining the imagination of Enlightenment planters. Reading together Catherine Hall's Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, commentators spoke of the historical relations between racism and capitalism and how this historical critique might inform present and future change. Discussion ranged from the historical roots of the imperial imagination to the prospect for reparations. Chaired by Suvir Kaul, the speakers were: Catherine Hall, Renisa Mawani, Gaiutra Bahadur, Sarah Keenan, and Priyamvada Gopal.
The Imagination Research Network is a multidisciplinary community devoted to conversations on the history and theory of the imagination. The Network, and the above events, were organised by the Convenor of the Network, Maksymilian Del Mar. The Network welcomes new members. Please email m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk to register your interest. Future events planned include a seminar on 8 October 2025 on Liz Swann’s Science as Child’s Play – a new history of 17th century science as a mode of imaginative play.