Finding Hogarth in the Humanities

Finding Hogarth in the Humanities

Join us with St. Mary’s for this one-day interdisciplinary conference which analyses the impact of artist and social critic William Hogarth.


Renowned in his lifetime as one of the most significant artists of his generation, Hogarth’s influence continues to inspire artists, authors and the media from the eighteenth century to the present day.

10:00-10:15 Welcome

10:15-11:30 Key Note – Justine Hopkins, ‘A publick spirit to mend the world: Hogarth’s Human Art

We are pleased to announce that Justine Hopkins will be our keynote speaker for our Finding Hogarth in the Humanities symposium. Justine read English and drama at Bristol University and took an MA at the Courtauld Institute, and, after a year in Belize as an archaeological illustrator, she took a PhD at Birkbeck College exploring the impact of scientific and religious controversies on landscape painters from 1800-1860. An accredited lecturer for the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS), Justine is also a freelance speaker at cultural institutions across the UK, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tate, the National Gallery, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s, and has lectured in Art History courses at Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol Universities. Her biography of her step-grandfather, painter and sculptor Michael Ayrton, was published in 1994; in 2020 she edited and wrote Picture Notes for Ideas, Images, Reflections: Michael Ayrton, published this year to celebrate Ayrton’s centenary.

Further information about Justine, her works, and her lectures, can be found via her website here.


11:30-11:45 Coffee Break

11:45-13:15 Panel 1: Aesthetics

Professor Malcolm Quinn, ‘The Best of Moralists’: Hogarth, Bentham and the Anti-Aesthetic

Joyce Goggin, Hogarth’s Hollow Men: Modernity, Finance, and Aesthetics

Dr Wendy McGlashan, John Kay ‘Scoto-Hogarthiarian’: the aesthetics of exchange in late eighteenth-century Edinburgh

13:15-14:15 Lunch & Hogarth House Tours

(Lunch and refreshments will be provided to all delegates; please do provide any dietary needs when prompted during booking process)

14:15-15:45 Panel 2: Literature and Material Culture

M.A. Katritzky, Don Quixote, Hudibras and 18th century British book culture: the impact of William Hogarth.

Dr Ruth Larsen, Stuff Hogarth! Using Hogarth’s works to understand the material culture of the eighteenth century.

Angela Platt, Jane Austen, Hogarth, and the Unhappy Marriage

15:45-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Panel 3: Moral Subjects & Politics

David Albert Jones, Gothics bioethics: Human dissection as education or entertainment from Hogarth to Dragon’s Den

Dr Rebecca Anne Barr, “Modern Immoral Subjects”: Coldwar Steve’s Hogarth and British Permacrisis

Glenn Richardson, “The Noisie, Empty, Fluttring French”: Hogarth and Nationalistic Satire’.

17:30-17:45 Closing Comments