Queer Ghosts and Vernon Lee’s Embodied Aesthetics

Friday, 6 November 2026 | 17:00 | Il Palmerino
Mikołaj Sobczak in conversation Anke Kempkes

A collaboration between Villa Romana and Il Palmerino.

Taking place in Vernon Lee’s former home in Florence, the Villa Palmerino, this lecture by Anke Kempkes explores the interrelations between the queer dimensions of her supernatural fiction and her pioneering theories of embodied aesthetic perception. Lee’s ghost stories are populated by revenants, displaced desires, ambiguous bodies, and forms of attraction that unsettle distinctions between past and present, self and other, presence and absence. At the same time, the theory of aesthetic perception she developed with her intimate partner and intellectual collaborator, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, most fully articulated in Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912), understood the encounter with art as profoundly corporeal: forms are not simply observed but registered through breathing, muscular tension, posture, rhythm, and imagined movement. In intriguing ways, their concepts prefigure contemporary theories such as Sara Ahmed’s focus on ‘orientations, objects and others’ in her influential study on Queer Phenomenology (2006).

Bringing these two strands of Lee’s work together, the lecture asks whether the ghost might itself be understood as a figure for embodied aesthetic experience—and for queer forms of historical transmission. Moving between Lee’s writings, her relationships and intellectual networks, and the Renaissance art and architecture that surrounded her in Florence, it considers how bodies can become haunted by desires and histories that refuse to disappear.

Followed by a screening of URANINO (9’30”), a gothic fiction film by Villa Romana Fellow Mikołaj Sobczak, filmed at Il Palmerino and haunted by the ghosts of Vernon Lee’s writing and the histories that refuse to disappear.

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