Keynote speaker announcement!

We are delighted to announce that this year's keynote speech will be delivered by Dr Eva Miller (UCL), who will speak on "Hormuzd Rassam: Portraits of an Agent of Empire".

Please find the abstract below.

Hormuzd Rassam: Portraits of an Agent of Empire

Hormuzd Rassam, one of the earliest excavators of ancient sites in Iraq, is associated with more than 50,000 objects currently in the British Museum catalogue, possibly more than any other individual—including tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, and some of the most spectacular art from sites in Assyria and Babylonia. A Chaldean Christian and native of Mosul, Rassam began his excavation career as a teenager in the 1840s, working under Austen Henry Layard, who became his lifelong friend and supporter. He would eventually lead digs for the British Museum himself, in the 1850s and in the 1870s-80s with one of the most generously defined remits the Ottomans would ever grant. Between these two great periods of excavation, Rassam served in the British diplomatic service, where he played a pivotal role in one of the great incidents of Victorian empire, spending years as a rescuer and then hostage in Ethiopia in a crisis that revealed the apparent limits of British power abroad, and provoked a violent response to reassert that power.

In this talk, I want to consider how we might begin to build a picture of Rassam as a man who served the British Empire and came to identify fiercely with Britain–even while many of his Victorian fellows struggled to see beyond his ‘Asiatic’, ‘Oriental’, ‘Turkish’, or ‘Eastern’ background. I will take us through paper archives and images of Rassam in watercolour, oils, ink, and photographic plates. I will consider how these images, and the material legacy Rassam left behind in British museums, can contribute towards a story of his life, and a story of empire.