Flesh Made Word
The Tattooed Body as Script and Signature
Jane Caplan
Fellow, St. Anthony's College
University Lecturer in Modern European History
University of Oxford
Presented by the Penn Humanities
Forum and the
University of Pennsylvania Museum
Thursday • March 30,
2006
Lecture: 5:00-6:30
pm
Museum Tour: 3:45-4:45 pm
(Tour Registration Closed as
of March 22nd)
Rainey
Auditorium, Penn Museum
3260 South Street, Penn
Free. Public invited.
Tattooing is one of the oldest and most
widespread forms of irreversible body art. The practice
has been found at some point in nearly every major culture
throughout history. Its storied development in Western
culture mixes text and images in complex ways that are
not as common in other forms of bodily inscription,
such as cosmetics, painting, and scarification.
Join Oxford historian Jane Caplan as she
explains what tattooed European bodies of the late 19th
century reveal about western body ornamentation today.
Historian Jane Caplan
joined the faculty of Oxford University in 2004 following
over two decades at Bryn Mawr College. Before that she
helped establish one of Britain's first university courses
in women's studies and was instrumental in the development
of feminist scholarship at Bryn Mawr.
Her primary research interests are the
history of Nazi Germany and the documentation of individual
identity in 19th-century Europe, especially the written
and visual marks of identity on and off the body. As
the editor of Written on the Body: The Tattoo in
European and American History (Princeton 2000),
Caplan received widespread attention from the press
and became a frequent contributor to popular broadcasts
and publications on the topic of tattoo.
Her selected other works include "'One
of the Strangest Relics of a Former State': Tattoos
and the Discourses of Criminality in Europe 1880-1920,"
in Criminals and their Scientists: The History of
Criminology in International Perspective, P Becker,
RF Wetzell, eds. (Cambridge Univ Press, 2006); The
Women's Camp in Moringen: A Memoir of Imprisonment in
Germany 1936-1937, ed. (Berghahn Books,
2006); Government Without Administration: State
and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Clarendon
1989); Reevaluating the Third Reich, with T
Childers, eds. (Holmes & Meier, 1993); Nazism,
Fascism and the Working Class, with TW Mason, eds.
(Cambridge 1995); and Documenting Individual Identity:
The Development of State Practices in the Modern World,
with J Torpey, eds. (Princeton 2001). She is currently
researching the early history of Nazi concentration
camps.
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MUSEUM TOUR
Before the lecture, join us for a specially
arranged gallery tour at the Penn Museum of Cultural
Body Ornamentation. Space is limited for the
tour, so register early.
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