A double presentation about the intersection between art and new technologies in early modern visual culture with further discussion moderated by Maria Loh, Professor in the School of Historical Studies and Joan Scott, Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science. Richard will speak about his new book, Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth Century France, and Iris will speak about her new exhibition "Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie".

Richard Taws, former Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, specializes in European visual cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. In 2012 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, in 2018 a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and in 2022 a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. He is the author of Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025) and The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (with Iris Moon; Bloomsbury, 2021) and Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (with Genevieve Warwick; Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). As a member of the ‘Multigraph Collective’ he co-authored Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). 

Iris Moon joined the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Met in 2017 and is responsible for European ceramics and glass. Her research on European decorative arts and architecture has been supported by the Decorative Arts Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Clark Art Institute. Alongside curatorial work at The Met, where she is currently organizing an exhibition on Chinoiserie, women, and the porcelain imaginary, she teaches at The Cooper Union. She is the author of Melancholy Wedgwood (2024), Luxury after the Terror (2022) and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (2021). She earned her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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