Victoria's Self-Fashioning: curating the royal image for dynasty, nation, and empire

维多利亚女王的名字用来标识一个时代。在她的长期统治中，大英帝国覆盖了地球的四分之一。摄影的诞生，以及印刷文化和新闻界的爆炸式增长，使她的形象得以触及最远的地方。她的绘画和雕刻形象仍然主导着遍布各大洲的公共空间。自维多利亚去世以来，关于她一生的叙述一直在不断地被重复，这证明了她的遗产具有持久的意义。然而，这些叙述并没有使她成为文化政治研究的焦点。相反，正统的方法将她塑造成一个奇怪的惰性人物，脱离了公共生活和君主制的政治塑造。该项目挑战了这些正统观念，将维多利亚本人视为积极主动的政治代理人，为十九世纪君主政体塑造形象，因此直接涉及后来的维多利亚女王现象。我们汇集了来自学院、研究机构、博物馆和收藏以及遗产组织的国际学者团体，提议举办三个相关的研讨会和一次会议。第一个研讨会将讨论维多利亚对自己形象的塑造，以及她如何处理自己矛盾的角色，既是女王，又是妻子和母亲。通过考虑她幸存的礼服、皇家摄影收藏以及维多利亚自己的业余艺术作品，它将评估这幅图像如何形成实体形式，并由她测试、磨练和发展，以满足她统治七十四年的君主政体的需要。 第二个研讨会将描绘这一自我策划的图像从维多利亚私人领域到公共领域，特别是整个大英帝国的旅程。它将探索她参与委托和购买绘画、雕刻和摄影图像的过程，以庆祝她的家族及其王朝的野心。它将调查它们通过印刷文化和新兴媒体的传播，以及它们在本地和全球多种环境中的运动和使用。这将包括使用该图像来反击对女王和皇后的批评反应，试图在仪式活动中扑灭对英国统治的殖民怨恨之火，或挑战宪章派等团体的共和情绪。本次研讨会还将探讨维多利亚作为策展人如何在庆祝活动的首次博物馆展览中向公众观众展示她的生活资料，以及这些资料如何被接受。第三次研讨会将讨论当今如何在数字领域策划维多利亚的形象：如何不仅向学者而且向对维多利亚着迷的全球公众提供这些材料。这将涉及设计在全球范围内多个机构开展项目的方法，为国内和国际上的进一步项目提供方法和实用模板。研讨会将考虑“数字博物馆”如何挑战与这位全球重要人物相关的物质文化的实体所有权概念，并允许更广泛、更多样化的观众进行策展。我们将在2018年底启动这个项目，并在2019年维多利亚女王诞辰二百周年的会议上结束这个项目，这将带来特殊的共鸣。会议将综合研讨会辩论，对整个项目进行考虑和测试。周年纪念日还将使我们能够授权试点数字项目，我们将设计这些项目，目的是在她的形象仍然以雕刻形式存在的地方，或者以她的名字命名的地方，接触当代国际观众，并利用它们来询问现在如何理解维多利亚有争议的遗产。

Queen Victoria's name is used to identify an era. Over her long reign the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe. The birth of photography, and an explosion in print culture and the press, allowed her image to touch its furthest reaches. Her image, painted and sculpted, still dominates public spaces scattered throughout every continent. The narrative of Victoria's life has been rehearsed continuously since her death, testament to an enduring significance of her legacy. However, these narratives have not cast her as the focus of a culturally political study. Instead, orthodox approaches have set her up as a curiously inert figure, detached from public life and from the political shaping of the monarchy. This project challenges these orthodoxies by examining Victoria herself as a pro-active political agent in the construction of an image for nineteenth century monarchy, and therefore directly implicated in what would become the Queen Victoria phenomenon. Bringing together an international group of scholars from the academy, research institutes, museums and collections, and heritage organisations, we propose three related workshops, and a conference. The first workshop will discuss Victoria's creation of her own image, and the ways in which she managed her conflicted role, as a Queen Regnant, but also a wife and mother. Through a consideration of her surviving dress, together with the royal photographic collection, and Victoria's own amateur art works, it will assess how this image took physical form and was tested, honed, and developed by her, to serve the needs of the monarchy over the seventy-four years of her reign. The second workshop will map the journey of this self-curated image from Victoria's private sphere to the public realm, and particularly across the British Empire. It will explore her involvement in the commissioning and purchase of painted, sculpted and photographic images to celebrate her family and its dynastic ambition. It will investigate their dissemination through print culture, and a burgeoning press, and their movement and use through many contexts, locally and globally. This will include the ways in which the image was used to counter critical responses to Queen and Empress, in attempts to quench the flames of colonial resentment at British rule in ceremonial events or to challenge republican sentiment from groups like the Chartists. This workshop will also explore how Victoria, as curator, presented the material of her life, for a public audience, in the first museum displays in her celebration, and how these were received. The third workshop will discuss how the image of Victoria might be curated today in the digital sphere: how this material can be made available not only to scholars but to a wide, global public fascinated by Victoria. This will involve devising ways in which a project can be undertaken across a set of institutions around the globe, providing a methodological and practical template for further projects nationally and internationally. The workshop will consider ways in which the 'digital museum' can challenge the notion of the physical ownership of the material culture associated with this globally important figure, and can allow curation by a wider and more diverse audience. We will inaugurate this project in late 2018, and bring it to a conclusion with the conference in 2019, the bicentenary of Queen Victoria's birth, which will bring it a special resonance. The conference will consider and test the project as a whole, synthesizing the workshop debates. The anniversary will also allow us to empower the pilot digital projects, which we will devise with the aim to touch a contemporary international audience in locations where her image still presides in sculpted form, or which are named after her, for instance, and use them to ask how Victoria's contested legacy is understood now.