Archived news
05 May 2015: Punishment in the visual arts
Professor Eamonn Carrabine has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to research his project 'The Iconography of Punishment: From Renaissance to Modernity', which will run for three years and begins in September 2015.
The project will examine the ways in which punishment has been represented in the visual arts from the 1500s up to the present day, in an effort to track and make sense of continuity and change across different times and experiences. The approach will be multi-disciplinary, spanning criminology, history, philosophy and sociology, but is guided by the understanding that cultural processes should be seen as a whole, so that visual analysis is never an end in and of itself, but always has the goal of social and political explanation firmly in sight.
The analysis will develop over four thematic areas of enquiry to:
- Reveal the broader contextual settings surrounding artworks
- Forge new directions for understanding punishment
- Revive social science approaches to the arts.
The importance of analysing cultural representations is that they enlarge our imagination, so that we can better understand each and the kind of world we live in.
Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity. Every culture generates founding myths to account for society’s origins, typically situated in some dreadful primordial event.
The imaginary origins of Western civilization are to be found in tales of banishment, confinement, exile, torture and suffering. The theme of exclusion is symbolically rich and spaces of confinement – both real and imagined – have provided stark reminders of human cruelty and reveal just how thin the veneer of civilization can be.