Jeanne Clegg

Please describe yourself and your areas of interest.

I was born in Cornwall and studied at the Universities of Bristol, York (Canada) and Oxford, where I completed my D.Phil. thesis on Ruskin and Venice under the supervision of Rachel Trickett; this was published as a book by Junction Books in 1981. Also in 1981I selected and wrote the catalogue for the "John Ruskin" Arts Council exhibition which welcomed the Guild Collection back to Sheffield in 1981. With Paul Tucker I selected and wrote the catalogue for the "Ruskin and Tuscany" exhibition which was sponsored by the Guild and held in London, Sheffield and Lucca in 1993. In the meantime I had begun teaching English literature first at the University of Calabria, then Pisa, Aquila and finally Ca' Foscari, Venice, from where I retired in 2016. For some years my main research interests have been in the history of the culture of eighteenth-century England; I have written on the telling of the Glorious Revolution, and on relations between judicial practice and literature, fictional and non-fictional. I am now in the throes of finishing a book provisionally entitled Catching Thieves: Defoe's Stories of Law Enforcement. Since 1988 I have made Rome my home, and recently made a study of the city's place, at first on the fringes of, later central to, Ruskin's cultural geography of Europe. I continue to work with Emma Sdegno on Ruskinian/Venetian topics, and am a member of FoRS, the Centre for Ruskin Studies of the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies of Ca' Foscari University. In my spare time I have developed an interest in music, have joined a local choir, am learning to play the piano and am president of an association that brings live classical chamber music to the peripheral area of Rome where I live. I am a volunteer with the branche of "Retake" which helps take care of the Parco degli Aquedotti, one of the "meraviglie d'Italia".

Why did you become a Companion of the Guild?

At the time of the "Ruskin and Tuscany" exhibition held in London, Sheffield and Lucca in 1993 under the auspices of the Guild, the then Master, Anthony Harris, invited myself and Paul Tucker, who had selected the exhibition and wrote the catalogue, to become companions.

Web links: unive.academia.edu/JeanneClegg, www.researchgate.net/search.Search.html?query=Jeanne+Clegg&type=publication, www.unive.it/data/search?q=Jeanne+Clegg#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Jeanne%20Clegg&gsc.page=1, www.andanteconfuoco.it, retake.org/roma/gli-speciali-del-parco-retake-roma-parco-degli-acquedotti-i-volontari-della-bellezza