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

维多利亚女王的名字被用来标识一个时代。在她漫长的统治期间，大英帝国的疆域占了地球仪的四分之一。摄影的诞生，以及印刷文化和新闻界的爆炸，让她的形象触及了最远的范围。她的形象，绘画和雕塑，仍然主导着分散在每个大陆的公共空间。自维多利亚去世以来，人们一直在不断地讲述她的生活，这证明了她的遗产具有持久的意义。然而，这些叙述并没有把她作为文化政治研究的焦点。相反，正统的方法把她塑造成一个奇怪的惰性人物，远离公共生活和君主制的政治塑造。这个项目通过考察维多利亚本人作为一个积极的政治代理人在十九世纪君主制的形象建设，因此直接牵连到什么将成为女王维多利亚现象挑战这些正统。汇集了来自学院，研究机构，博物馆和收藏品以及遗产组织的国际学者，我们提出了三个相关的研讨会和一个会议。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作为女王、妻子和母亲的矛盾角色。通过对她幸存下来的服装，连同皇家摄影收藏，以及维多利亚自己的业余艺术作品的考虑，它将评估这一形象是如何形成的物理形式，并由她测试，磨练和发展，以服务于她统治的74年的君主制的需要。 第二个工作坊将描绘这幅自我策划的图像从维多利亚的私人领域到公共领域的旅程，特别是在整个大英帝国。它将探索她参与委托和购买绘画，雕塑和摄影图像，以庆祝她的家庭及其王朝野心。它将调查它们通过印刷文化和新兴媒体的传播，以及它们在当地和全球许多情况下的运动和使用。这将包括该图像被用来反击对女王和皇后的批评反应的方式，试图在仪式活动中熄灭对英国统治的殖民怨恨的火焰，或者挑战宪章派等团体的共和主义情绪。本次研讨会还将探讨维多利亚，作为策展人，如何提出了她的生活材料，为公众观众，在她的庆祝活动的第一个博物馆展览，以及这些是如何收到。第三个研讨会将讨论如何在数字领域策划维多利亚的形象：如何将这些材料不仅提供给学者，而且提供给对维多利亚着迷的全球公众。这将涉及设计如何在地球仪的一系列机构中开展项目，为国家和国际的进一步项目提供方法和实用模板。研讨会将探讨“数字博物馆”如何挑战与这一全球重要人物相关的物质文化的实体所有权概念，并允许更广泛和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200周年的会议上结束，这将给它带来特殊的共鸣。会议将综合研讨会的辩论，对整个项目进行审议和测试。周年纪念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塑形式主持的地方，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.