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The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture 2012
This years' Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture was held at 6pm on Thursday 29th November in the Faraday Lecture Theatre, followed by a drinks reception
Dr Tristram Hunt, MP
Ruskin, Engels and the City
The philosophies of Friedrich Engels and John Ruskin were both powerfully shaped by the Victorian city. In its filth, vulgarity, and rampant individualism, they found a telling symbol of all the failings of industrial capitalism. All that was wrong with laissez-faire society could be found in 1840s Manchester. But their competing visions of a socialist alternative entailed very different futures for city life: for Engels, modernity and suburbia; for Ruskin, preservation and urban density. In their blistering prose and inspiring polemics, they offered two ideals of civic socialism which continue to influence urban debate today.
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The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture
This memorial lecture was planned as one of the commemorative events of the tenth anniversary of the Ruskin Library of Tokyo in 1994. The Ruskin Library of Tokyo had three projects for the commemoration: firstly, a 'Ruskin Symposium' in Tokyo, secondly, the publication of Ruskin's Letters in the Mikimoto Collection, and, finally, setting up a special lecture in memory of Ryuzo Mikimoto in the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University (now the Ruskin Library and Research Centre). The Trustees of the Ruskin Library in Tokyo donated two million yen to the Ruskin Programme of Lancaster University to establish the Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture to be held annually, using interest accruing from the fund. James S. Dearden, the then Curator of the Ruskin Galleries, Bembridge School, gave the first lecture on "Ruskin To-Day" on 24th October 1995, referring to Mikimoto's Ruskin studies and the Ruskin Library of Tokyo. Since then, the lecture series has continued on ten occasions by internationally distinguished Ruskin scholars.
This lecture programme is nowadays an important legacy of Ryuzo Mikimoto at Lancaster University, along with the Mikimoto Gift at the Ruskin Library, and a symbolic event in memory of a man from the Far East, who devoted his whole life to John Ruskin without attachment to any wealth, which was inherited from his father, Kokichi Mikimoto, the 'Pearl King'
Previous Lectures
The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture 2011
The 2011 Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture took place on Thursday 1st December at 6.00 pm. 2011, in the Management School Lecture Theatre 1, Lancaster University. It was followed by a wine reception.
Speaker: Professor Michael Wheeler
Title: John's Gospel
The Lecture
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For the 2011 Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture we welcomed back the founding Director of the Ruskin Library project and research programme at Lancaster University, Professor Michael Wheeler. In 1999, when Michael published Ruskin’s God (CUP), he completed 26 years as an academic at Lancaster and moved to work on the Chawton House Library project in Hampshire. In his illustrated lecture, based on new research for his most recent book, St John and the Victorians (CUP, November 2011), he considered Ruskin’s imaginative response to some of the best known stories in the New Testament – the marriage at Cana, Jesus and the woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus – and works of art based on these stories. Ruskin’s personal motto was inspired by a verse from John’s gospel, and when he died in 1900 a working man sent a wreath with an epitaph taken from the prologue: ‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John’. The lecture complemented the theme of this term’s postgraduate Ruskin Seminar series, ‘Ruskin and the Sacred’.
The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture 2010
'No wealth but life': Ruskin and Cultural Value
Professor Robert Hewison (City University London)
18th November 2010, Management School LT1, Lancaster University.
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Ruskin's Unto This Last, Robert Hewison recalls the financial crisis that prompted Ruskin to begin writing about economics, explores his reading of orthodox economists, and traces the development of Ruskin's ideas about the true nature of value. The modern theory of Cultural Value, Hewison argues, has been developed as a response to the pressure on cultural institutions to justify themselves in utilitarian terms, terms that Ruskin would recognize - and deplore. Hewison suggests that the demands of modern public management, as represented by the proposed structure of the Research Excellence Framework, call for the development of a parallel theory of academic value.
The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture 2009
Ruskin and Rossetti: a queer friendship
Professor Barrie Bullen (Professor Emeritus, University of Reading)
4th November 2009, Management School LT1, Lancaster University.
The lecture detailed Ruskin's often demanding patronage of Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall, Prof. Bullen unpicking the strands of a complicated web woven around Rossetti's artistic development during the 1850s and 1860s, and revealing how the chronology of paintings and private lives were closely interlinked.
A recording of the lecture is available to download.
Download 2009 Mikimoto Lecture
(Please note this is a 13mb download).
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