On Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations: A Symposium Poised Between History and Sociology

Abstract

This paper acts as a prelude to, and putative enticement for readers to read, an interdisciplinary symposium. The symposium assesses Christopher Thorpe’s (2024) book Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations: Visions of Italy and the Italians in England and Britain from the Renaissance to the Present Day. The book is scrutinised from various perspectives, including history, art history, and sociology. The main intellectual contours of the symposium are set out, covering matters of conceptualising cultural representations, using sociological concepts from varied traditions to understand certain sorts of cultural phenomena, and the status of sociological claims about long-term trends in the eyes of historians. Some more unorthodox ideas are also floated.