Alumni

About this program
The vast collections of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) were the foundations of three national institutions: the British Library, the British Museum, and the Natural History Museum. A royal physician and natural philosopher of insatiable curiosity who was secretary and president of the Royal Society, Sloane attempted to encompass the world and its knowledge through the creation of an encyclopedic collection to be left to the nation. This talk will briefly examine recent efforts to reconstruct his collections—physically and virtually—with particular reference to his “miscellaneous” catalog, before providing an overview of Sloane’s “paper museum” of one hundred albums of more than 20,000 drawings.

About Kim Sloan
Kim Sloan was the curator of British drawings and watercolors at the British Museum from 1992 to 2020. She is the author of A Noble Art, a study of amateur artists and drawing masters, as well as monographs on Alexander and John Robert Cozens and on J. M. W. Turner. Her exhibitions and publications at the British Museum included The Intimate Portrait (with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery), A New World (also shown at the YCBA), Places of the Mind: British Landscape Watercolors and Drawings, 1850–1950, and Vases and Volcanoes. She edits the Beckford Society’s annual journal. As the principal curator of the Enlightenment Gallery since it opened in 2003, she has been researching Sir Hans Sloane’s collections on and off for the past two decades.

Art in Context
Presented by faculty, staff, student guides, and visiting scholars, these gallery talks focus on a particular work of art in the museum’s collections or special exhibitions through an in-depth look at its style, subject matter, technique, or time period.

Join a YCBA student guide for a tour of In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art.

While the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) is closed for building conservation, more than fifty major collection works, spanning four centuries of British landscape and portraiture traditions, are on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. Join our student guides to learn more about the exhibition, as well as architecture, collection, and history of the YCBA.

Join a YCBA student guide for a tour of In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art.

While the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) is closed for building conservation, more than fifty major collection works, spanning four centuries of British landscape and portraiture traditions, are on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. Join our student guides to learn more about the exhibition, as well as architecture, collection, and history of the YCBA.

Ayse Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of IR and historical sociology, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualizations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective.

Cosponsored by the Fox International Fellowship

Movie screening on Thursday, April 13th, 2023 (25mn) followed immediately by Q&A session (35mn).

We have lost 75% of the world’s global seed diversity. Restoring seed biodiversity is important to ensure our food systems are resilient to climate change and protect our cultural diversity – recipes using ancient, diverse, heirloom varieties that enrich our lives here on planet Earth with one another. The film Frø - Nordic Seed Heroes explores the intersection of people and seeds, from all the way up to the Arctic Circle at the Svalbard Global Gene Vault to the middle of a wheat field in rural Denmark.

The film features the following seed heroes based in the Nordic regions (in order of appearance): the Brinkholm Andelsgaarde farm, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center and Crop Trust’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, Frøsamlerne (the Danish Seed Savers), Kørnby Mølle, Grønt Marked, Losæter urban farm, Drys Nu, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.

The documentary is a research initiative by Charly Frisk, a student at Yale School of Environment, and a collaborative initiative with the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, funded by the Garden of Club of America, the Scandinavian Seminar, the Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses at Yale, and the Danish Heritage Society.

The Q&A will be led by Ulla Kasten, Council on Middle East Studies Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center at Yale and former Associate Curator and Museum Editor of the Yale Babylonian Collection.