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SUMMARY:Sodom and Gomorrah in Archaeology and Cultural Imagination - Dr As
 trid Swenson\, Darwin College\, Cambridge
DTSTART:20091020T121000Z
DTEND:20091020T130000Z
UID:TALK21016@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Hilary Powell
DESCRIPTION:'Go where we will\, at every time and place Sodom confronts\, 
 and stares us in the face’\, the writer Charles Churchill exclaimed in 1
 764. For centuries\, the biblical cities of  Sodom and Gomorrah have been 
 invoked to talk about forbidden urban pleasures. This paper will investiga
 te the role of Sodom and Gomorrah in Western European and American culture
  during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Part of a collaborative proj
 ect that investigates how a group of biblical cities came to play signific
 ant new cultural roles in nineteenth-century Britain\, it examines why Sod
 om and Gomorrah were such powerful signifiers and how the archaeological s
 earch for the biblical cities (resulting in more than a dozen ‘identific
 ations’ of the ruins in different location around and under the Dead Sea
 ) enmeshed with an older cultural imagination. It analyses how and why the
  city was imagined and reclaimed by a diverse groups including\, archaeolo
 gist\, artists\, biblical scholars\, western imperialist governments\, fun
 damentalist Christians and the emerging gay rights movement. 
LOCATION:Entertaining Room\, Darwin College
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