Paula Rego, Women and Witches
This talk explores Paula Rego’s depiction of strong women, including witches, in her artwork. Specific attention will be paid to her subversive reinterpretation of how witches are represented in Italian baroque painting and also through her illustrations of Blake Morrison’s poetry book, Pendle Witches. Parallels will be made between that dark history of the persecution of so-called female witches and the repression of women during the dictatorship of Salazar in Rego’s native Portugal.
Bio
Marie Mulvey-Roberts is a Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol and her research interests are in radical women’s writing, Gothic and gender. She is the author, editor and co-editor of over thirty books including Dangerous Bodies (2016), which won the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Women’s Writing on historical women writers before the twentieth century and is a Series Editor for Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing. Her most recent publications are a scholarly edition of Caroline Norton’s Love ‘in the World’ (2023), with Ross Nelson and Angela Carter’s Pyrotechnics (2022) with Charlotte Crofts and she co-curated the exhibition Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter at the RWA, Bristol (December 2016-March 2017) in which she exhibited the work of Paula Rego.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
