The Almost Infinite Possibilities of Nineteenth-Century French Audio Description
Thursday 19 November 2026, 5.15pm
Maison Française d'Oxford, 2-10 Norham Road, Oxford OX2 6SE
Maison Française d’Oxford
Thursday 19 November 2026, 5.15pm
All welcome
Speaker: Hannah Thompson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Audio Description didn’t technically exist in nineteenth-century France, but what would it have looked like if it had? Hannah Thompson describes herself as a partially blind academic and activist. In this talk she combines her research into nineteenth-century French prose with her work on creative audio description to ask what happens when we bring literary and journalistic descriptions of paintings into dialogue with the ‘official’ audio descriptions made by the custodians of these works. Drawing on examples by Courbet and Monet, this talk makes the case for a radical reappraisal of so-called ‘access’ provision and shows what all museum visitors might gain from the existence of co-created and inclusive ways of engaging with art.
