On Wednesday, 27 May 2020, I was privileged to give a seminar to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University on my aerial theatre research -- via Zoom, as is the current fashion. I really enjoyed giving it, and I think it was a great success (and thanks to everyone who listened in and especially those to took the time to ask questions). Because the seminar pulls together some of the different things I've been working on in some kind of coherent way, I wanted to make it available to a wider audience, and so yesterday I post-tweeted my own seminar. And to make it less (?) ephemeral, now I'm embedding the entire 51-tweet thread here in a blog post. It is of course very much a condensed version of what I said, but it's always surprising how much of the essence gets through in tweet form. (Well, I understand what I'm trying to say, but then I would, wouldn't I?)

The seminar title is 'History from below, looking up: aerial theatre, emotion and modernity'. The abstract is:

In the early 20th century, the aeroplane was the symbol of modernity par excellence. Technological change is an essential part of this sense of modernity, and few technological changes have been as dramatic or as unmistakable as the conquest of the air. For the first few decades of the twentieth century, flying was the object of intense popular fascination, and yet few people actually flew themselves, even as passengers, before the tremendous expansion of aviation during and after the Second World War. Even so, their experience of flight was often intensely exciting, since one of the most common ways to encounter flight was through seeing it, as an aviation spectacle in the form of aerial theatre such as air displays and air races. People flocked to aerodromes in their cumulative millions to watch aircraft in flight, performing aerobatics or fighting mock battles. This was a mass form of popular culture, which explicitly and implicitly made claims about the present and -- even more so -- future ability of technology to change the world, for better or for worse. In this talk I will sketch out an emotional history of aerial theatre, focusing on how it helped to construct popular ideas about modernity, primarily in Britain and Australia.

[tweet id="1265825214488707074" conversation=false]

[tweet id="1265825220520144897" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825222604668928" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825224525635585" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825227952451584" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825230997450752" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825233539219458" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825236340969472" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825238387789824" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825240279470081" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825242309472256" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825246554148864" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265825249125216258" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265856108461056000" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265856110675648519" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265856113829752832" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265856116480593920" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265856118418313218" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867219742777346" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867222020354048" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867224624947201" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867227170877440" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867229561679872" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867232824840192" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867235135873024" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867237165985792" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867239141474304" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265867240999534598" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265872223874633728" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265872226168889347" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265872230556164099" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265872232586211328" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265872235106988033" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265872237334163456" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888032936259584" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888035264032768" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888037730279425" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888039617753094" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888041584881665" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888043493281793" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265888045653389312" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895567621648384" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895570062708736" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895572789051397" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895575511134214" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895577557938176" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895579462234114" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895581248942080" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895583216091136" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895585367769088" conversation=false]
[tweet id="1265895597342519296" conversation=false]

I'm very grateful to Bart Ziino for the invitation to speak, and to Deborah Lee-Talbot, Jacquelyn Baker and Clare Corbould for making it happen.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://airminded.org/copyright/.