Guest Lecture: „Exhibited Secrets: Sentimental Jewelry as a Medium of Death and Intimacy“ by Lin Xin
On Tuesday, 18.11.2025, we hosted a guest lecture by Lin Xin on the topic: „Exhibited Secrets: Sentimental Jewelry as a Medium of Death and Intimacy“
The talk defined sentimental jewelry as a medium that connects death and intimacy. Historically, it revisited Victorian death culture and traced later discourses surrounding sentimental jewelry; analytically, it explored how the concept helps articulate mediated death and the memory of loss. Across these layers, the materiality, indexicality, and modes of display—as “exhibited secrets” (Christiane Holm), ranging from hairwork to miniature portraits—reveal how mourning and intimacy are negotiated through material objects. Sentimental jewelry is marked by a double fragility, namely material and meaning, as well as by a value rooted in these fragilities and in intimacy rather than in price. The paper closed with the Chinese notion of Nianxiang 念想 as a cross-cultural lens.
Speaker LIN Xin
Doctoral Student, Department of Politics & Xueheng Institute for Advanced Studies, Nanjing University