Professor Donna West Brett is the 2026 Oliver Smithies visiting lecturer, at Balliol College, Oxford. She will be delivering two lectures during her residence. The first looks at Zeppelins.
‘Disaster, Sensation and the Zeppelin Sublime’.
Zeppelins played a significant role in shaping the British home front experience during the First World War, which Trudi Tate characterised as ‘a fantasmatic, infantile, and pleasurable relationship to the war and its objects.’ In September and October 1916, three German airships were shot down over Essex, events that drew tens of thousands of spectators, including journalists, who collected souvenirs or photographed the wreckage. Despite widespread disillusionment with the war, the presence of zeppelins elicited a paradoxical mix of intoxication, exhilaration, and horror (Freedman, 2004), a response reflected in the broader public imagination. Photographs and illustrations of burning airships and bombed houses, reproduced in the illustrated press, formed part of the burgeoning visual culture surrounding these spectacular events. This lecture examines the public emotional response, the extensive visual culture, including media narratives, and the mass consumption of wreckage souvenirs and postcards that emerged from these spectacles, thereby constituting what became known as the ‘Zeppelin Sublime.'
12 February 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/february/12/oliver-smithies-lecture
‘Stasi Surveillance: Photography’s Material and Residual Traces’.
This lecture examines the entanglement of photography with the past and its potential future within a post-archival context. Specifically, it examines photographs taken by the East German Stasi from the 1960s to 1989, highlighting the extensive material and photographic residue that serve as tangible traces of surveillance activities. Through key case studies, the lecture considers photography’s multiple registers as a tool for covert surveillance and as an evidential record, which nonetheless become haunting traces of unseen surveillance forces and a testament to photography’s unsettling potential.
5 March 2026, 5.15pm (drinks reception in the Buttery from 6.15pm)
Gillis Lecture Theatre, Balliol College, Broad Street, Oxford.
https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/march/05/oliver-smithies-lecture
All are welcome. Please RSVP to the college: office@balliol.ox.ac.uk if you would like to attend.
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