Book at Lunchtime: Iconoclasm as Child's Play

Dr Joseph Moshenska, Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at
University College, discusses his new book, Iconoclasm as Child's
Play. Drawing on a range of sixteenth-century artifacts, artworks,
and texts, as well as on ancient and modern theories of iconoclasm
and of play, Iconoclasm As Child's Play argues that the desire to
shape and interpret the playing of children is an important
cultural force. Formerly holy objects may have been handed over
with an intent to debase them, but play has a tendency to create
new meanings and stories that take on a life of their own. Joe
Moshenska shows that this form of iconoclasm is not only a
fascinating phenomenon in its own right; it has the potential to
alter our understandings of the threshold between the religious and
the secular, the forms and functions of play, and the nature of
historical transformation and continuity. Panel includes: Dr Joseph
Moshenska is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at University
College. Joe grew up in Brighton, and as an undergraduate he read
English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After graduating he
went to Princeton, initially for a year as the Eliza Jane Procter
Visiting Fellow, and stayed there to complete his PhD. From 2010 to
2018 he was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity
College, Cambridge. Joe joined the Oxford Faculty in 2018. In 2019
he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Professor Lorna Hutson is
the Merton Professor of English Literature and Director of the
Centre for Early Modern Studies. She was educated in San Francisco,
Edinburgh and Oxford and has repeated that pattern in her career,
having taught at Berkeley, St Andrews and now Oxford. Professor
Hutson is a Fellow of the British Academy and works on English
Renaissance literature. She has written on usury and literature, on
women’s writing and the representation of women, on poetics and
forensic rhetoric and, most recently, on the geopolitics of
England’s ‘insular imagining’ in the sixteenth century.” Professor
Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University
of Cambridge. She currently serves as Chair of the Faculty of
History. She was an undergraduate and Masters student at the
University of Melbourne before coming to Trinity College,
Cambridge, for her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel
College, she taught at the University of Exeter for fourteen years
before returning to Cambridge in 2010. She was elected a Fellow of
the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities in 2013. She was appointed a CBE for services to History
in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2017. Professor Kenneth Gross is
Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
His critical writing ranges from Renaissance literature, especially
Shakespeare, to modern poetry, theater, and the visual arts. His
books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise,
Shylock is Shakespeare, and most recently Puppet: An Essay on
Uncanny Life, winner of the 2012 George Jean Nathan Award for
Dramatic Criticism. He’s also the editor of John Hollander’s 1999
Clark Lectures at Cambridge, The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening
Trope in Poetic History. Gross has held fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Bellagio Study Center, the Princeton
Humanities Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. Gross has
held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bellagio Study
Center, the Princeton Humanities Center, and the American Academy
in Berlin. Professor Matthew Bevis is Professor of English
Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Keble College. He is the author
of The Art of Eloquence, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, and,
most recently, Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago University Press, 2019).
His recent essays have appeared in the London Review of Books,
Harper's, Poetry, and The New York Review of Books. He’s currently
working on Knowing Edward Lear for Oxford University Press, and a
book On Wonder for Harvard University Press.