Reading as Art: Turning the Pages of Victorian Psychology A performance event in Senate House Library, University of London Convened by Sharon Kivland and Mura Ghosh

Evoking a wind that blows through a library, opening books, prompting unexpected stories, this evening of readings, performances, and art engages with the library collections of Victorian psychology. Staged in three rooms of the Senate House library, the event is convened by artist and writer Sharon Kivland, in collaboration with psychology librarian Mura Ghosh. There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us. William James, 1904 This event is part of the Bloomsbury Festival, and is held in association with a symposium of the British Psychological Society taking place earlier on the same day. The theme of the symposium, entitled Stories of Psychology, reflects some of the many ways that the arts (music, literature, visual arts) have influenced the development of psychological understanding and vice versa. [http://hopc.bps.org.uk/hopc/symp/symp_home.cfm] The Library's Historic Collections holds important early psychological texts dating back to the nineteenth century and earlier; books by well-known Victorian psychologists, such as Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, Henry Maudsley, Herbert Spencer, and William James (quoted above), all of whom had an enormous influence on writers (and vice versa) like George Eliot, the Brontes, Browning, taking up concepts of hallucinations, madness, loss and mourning, hysteria, the absence of mother. The periodicals collection of the Psychology Collection is especially strong. There is a collection of psychological tests and manuals.Key areas of the collection include: animal behaviour, biological, child and adolescent psychology and psychiatry, cognitive, developmental, forensic psychology, health psychology, historical, hypnosis, mental health, methodological, occupational, parapsychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy. The Library also houses the special collection of the British Psychological Society.