| Art History Information Exchange - Calls for Papers, Posters and Proposals | |
People, committees and even
acronyms are all out there seeking valuable input from you. Each time
a pertinent Call for Papers crosses my inbox, it will be posted here, the most
recent request being placed first.
If you are in charge of posting a Call of interest to art historians,
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presenters, I will not post any CFP if its stated deadline is less than two
weeks from the time it was submitted to me.
Posted: 07/05/09
Call for Papers:
Sculpture and the Medieval City
Session to be held at the 2010 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 13-16 May
Sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)
Organizers: Mark Rosen (University of Texas at Dallas) and Ittai Weinryb (Bard Graduate Center, NY).
This session aims to explore the role, meaning, function, and even dysfunction of sculpture in the medieval city. From the ontological value of their being objects occupying space, sculpture has always been part of an environment. This session invites papers that ask how the use and re-use of sculpture shaped the medieval city's definition of itself, how sculpture illuminated medieval daily life, and how meaning was generated through the performance of sculpture, its interaction with its site, and its adaptation of pictorial themes resonant to local populations. Church facades, governmental buildings, antique monuments, fountains, and even wellheads are all suitable topics for this session.
Disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments in scholarship over the past forty years have resulted not only in the transformation of our understanding of sculpture and its function within civic space but also our understanding of what medieval space and specifically medieval civic space meant in the Middle Ages. We are seeking papers that will illuminate, revisit and even rephrase old notions of the relationship between the place, the media and the materiality of sculpture within the medieval city. Papers on issues of centrality and marginality of sculpture around sacred or secular spaces within the medieval city are also welcomed.
DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: 15 September 2009
Paper proposals should consist of the following:
1. Abstract of proposed paper (300 words maximum) 2. Completed Abstract Cover Sheet (available at:
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions.html#ACS
3. CV with home and office mailing addresses, e-mail address, and phone number 4. Statement of ICMA membership status (note: all participants in ICMA sponsored sessions are required to be members of the ICMA)
ALL PROPOSALS AND INQUIRIES SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO:
Mark Rosen
Arts and Humanities
University of Texas at Dallas
Mailing Station JO 31
800 W. Campbell Road
Richardson, TX 75080
medieval.sculpture.city@gmail.com
For information about the ICMA: http://www.medievalart.org
For information about the International Medieval Congress:
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/
Posted: 06/28/09
Call for Papers: Special Session
Northern California Art Historians
at the
College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Wednesday, February 10–Saturday, February 13, 2010, the Hyatt Regency, Chicago
ECOART:
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Sustainability Panel Chair: Anthony Raynsford, San Jose State University
The current wave of interest in the concept of "sustainability" calls for reflection on the specifically aesthetic implications of this wider social movement. This panel seeks to historicize and theorize the intersections between aesthetic practices and such ethical imperatives as environmental responsibility, ecological balance, biological diversity, recycling of waste, and environmental justice. What are the historical precedents for such intersections? How can one begin to discuss the aesthetics of sustainability beyond "content" for art or "function" for design? Is the aesthetic merely a means to an end – raising "awareness" or drawing consumers toward "eco-friendly" design – or can a more structurally necessary connection be established between particular forms of aesthetic experience and particular modalities of sustainable practice? How might one begin to distinguish an aesthetic of sustainability from an aesthetic of consumerism or commodity fetishism?
Topics might include: the role of the sublime in 19th century romantic representations of nature; ecological and organic metaphors in early 20th century architecture and design; earth art of the 1970's; contemporary, site-specific art or design that seeks actively to change environmental behavior; or theoretical reflections on the tensions between aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic interestedness in the values of sustainability.
Please send a one page abstract, CV, and letter of interest to:
Anthony Raynsford (NCAH Submission)
School of Art and Design
College of Humanities and the Arts
One Washington Square
San Jose, CA 95192-0089
Submission deadline: August 31st, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: September 30th, 2009 Full Draft of Paper Due: December 15th, 2009
Posted: 06/28/09
New Approaches to British Art, 1939-1969
A conference organised jointly by The Courtauld Institute of Art's Research Forum and the University of York, to be held at The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
Friday 4 - Saturday 5 June 2010
Call for Papers
Keynote Speakers: Alex Potts (Michigan), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain), Anne Wagner (Berkeley)
British art has benefited from an extraordinary growth in scholarly studies over the last decade but the rich history of the years between
1939 and 1969 remains relatively underexplored. Despite the buoyancy of the market, the large audiences for modern art internationally, and the significance of monographic exhibitions devoted to a few select names (Nicholson, Caro, Bacon, Freud), there is still a dearth of younger scholars working in this period and little thematic and analytic study in comparison to scholarship on the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. This conference is intended both to stimulate further study of the art of these years and to provide a forum in which new work and fresh approaches can be discussed and developed. We encourage proposals on sculpture; on art and photography; on trans- nationalism and immigration; on austerity and Americanisation; on the institutional field including art education, cultural policy, exhibitions, criticism and the market; and especially on topics that lie outside or cut across categories already established in histories of the period.
Please email initial proposals, of 300 words in the first instance, to both organisers, by 7 August 2009: Prof. David Peters Corbett, dmpc1@york.ac.uk ; and Prof. Lisa Tickner, lisa.tickner@courtauld.ac.uk.
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml
Posted: 06/28/09
Call for Papers:
The Artist at Work in Early Modern Italy (c. 1450-1700): Methods, Materials, Models, Mimesis
Association of Art Historians Annual conference, Glasgow, April 15-17 2010.
Jill Burke, University of Edinburgh (Jill.Burke@ed.ac.uk)
Genevieve Warwick, University of Glasgow (G.Warwick@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk)
We invite proposals of up to 250 words on the following area by 9 November 2009. Thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, some funding is available for speakers' travel costs where institutional funding is not possible.
This session will examine the figure of the artist at work through a plurality of perspectives to probe issues of artistic labour in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The period threw up competing models through which to constitute the artist's working environment: as workshop, studio, academy for teaching, and cultural space for the production of artist-patron relations. Artistic practice was contingent on changing techniques and technologies, methods and materials, yoked to theories of imitation and invention. This intersection between working tools such as mirrors and lenses and an early modern theorisation of art as mimesis, may be traced through preparatory works as the residue of practice. The changing deployment and rendering of the artist's model bears witness to this history. Portraits of artists also embody these developments in their changing occlusion or display of the artist's studio, models, and working tools. The session convenors would welcome papers in any of the following areas:
- Institutions: The Workshop, the Studio, the Academy
- Materials and Methods
- Techniques and Technologies: Tradition and Innovation
- Preparatory Methods: drawings, sketches, bozzetti, modelli
- The Artist's Model
- Artists' Portraits
- Imitation: Theories and Practices
- Invention: Art and Science.
Posted: 06/21/09
MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTRÉAL
CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
Max and Iris Stern International Symposium 4
April 15-17, 2010
ART + RELIGION
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, in collaboration with Concordia University, is pleased to present the fourth Max and Iris Stern International Symposium, a three-day conference which will take place April 15-17, 2010. Following the increasing media attention given to the issue of religion within the current social context and the anxiety over its alleged "return," as well as an expanding "post-secular debate" in the field of contemporary philosophy and social and cultural theory, a number of efforts towards cross-disciplinary exchange in the academic world have recently come to the fore. Yet to a great degree, and despite the important role of theology within postmodern philosophy—see, for instance, the work of Derrida, Levinas and Ricoeur— the world of contemporary art seems to have preserved a form of discursive inhibition vis-à-vis the issue of religion. There have been some efforts aimed at addressing the situation, which have mostly originated from art institutions and museums, but the issue has found little echo within the fields of art theory and history. In fact, the methodological difficulties that were recently encountered in one particular instance generated such pessimism that the dialogue between contemporary art and religion was deemed by some a near impossibility (see James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment, Routledge, 2009).
This symposium seeks to expand on previous groundwork by bringing together eminent international specialists belonging to a variety of disciplines—artists, art historians, curators, anthropologists, educators, historians, media scholars, philosophers, psychoanalysts, political analysts, religious scholars, social scientists, theologians—to pursue the charting of theoretical points of contact between the worlds of contemporary art and religion. Although participants should feel free to see this event as an experimental ground, we do suggest that "contemporary art" be understood from an institutional standpoint, meaning that which is referred to/labelled as "contemporary art" by its agents, specific networks, objects, institutions, and so on. It is therefore not the totality of "visual/material culture" which is being addressed here.
Possible areas of inquiry include:
-Typologies of historical interactions between art and religion; hermeneutics
-Post-modern philosophy and contemporary theology; resonances in art practice/theory
-Religious foundations of modern political systems as theoretical subtexts in contemporary art
-Polity, pedagogy and denominationally based university fine arts/media arts programs
-Relevance of the "return of religion" and the "post-secular debate" for contemporary art institutions; questions of inclusion/exclusion
-Aspects of iconoclasm, blasphemy and censorship; recent crises and litigations
-Private/public spheres; religious/artistic experience and institutional mediation
-Eschatological narratives in modern or contemporary art/theory
-Psychoanalytical readings, symbolic economies
-Specificity of religious traditions, history of media, techniques and models of representation
-Regimes of visuality, Western pictocentrism and the fate of the image in modern times
-Religion, contemporary art and the spectacle
-Art and religion in Québec and Canada
Posted: 06/14/09
Art and the Artist in Society
Collection of Critical Essays
(Deadline: September 21, 2009)
The Caribbean Chapter of the College English Association (CEA-CC) is preparing a collection of critical essays to be published on the topic of the 2009 Annual Conference, Art and the Artist in Society. The 2009 Conference of the CEA-CC was a multidisciplinary conference that included presentations on literature, the fine arts, and even the performing arts from scholars from the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin American.
We are looking for essays to supplement the works presented in the 2009 conference. The essays should discuss and/or explore the relation between the artist, his / her art, and the different social agents that they are in constant interaction with (from the government, academia, and the church to the entertainment industry, the general public and/or particular communities in society). Some of the specific topics that we are interested in within the general topic of art are:
* Art and the High-brow and Low-brow Cultures *
* Public Spaces and Art *
* Re-enactment of Culture as Art *
* The Body and Art / Art and the Body *
* New Medias and the Democratization of Art *
* Adaptation and Reinterpretation of Classical Works *
(Adaptation and Reinterpretation of Classical Works in the New Media)
* The Struggle for Meaning between the Artist and the Audience/Reader *
* The Multiplicity of Canons in Literature *
* National Identity and the Literary Canon *
* The Exiled and Expatriate Artists *
* The Relation between the Performer, the Art Work/Text, and the Artist *
* The Artist as Craftsman, Genius, and/or Celebrity *
* The Artist and his/her Characters *
* The Artist in Fiction *
Posted: 06/14/09
ATROCITY EXHIBITIONS: RE/Reading RE/Search
2010 Association of Art Historians Conference Session - Call for Papers (Glasgow, 15-17 April 2010)
The avant-garde journal RE/Search, edited by V. Vale and published in San Francisco since 1980, has consistently explored the limits of cultural practices in relation to theories and traditions of artistic expression.
Developing out of dada and surrealism and based on the surrealist call to explore the 'irrational shadow of official culture', RE/Search addresses contested and subversive aesthetic practices and cultural interventions.
Its range of thematic and theoretical concerns (from Angry Women to Industrial Culture) defines the parameters of contemporary conceptions of the acceptable, the permissible and the desirable; its constant willingness to challenge conventions has made it a major feature of the theoretical landscape of contemporary art practice. RE/Search has furthermore been instrumental in promoting and analysing work by major contemporary artists and writers, including William Burroughs, Genesis P. Orridge, Gee Vaucher, Annie Sprinkle, Russ Meyer, Valie Export, and J. G. Ballard.
This session will mark the 30th anniversary of RE/Search and invites papers addressing and re-reading pertinent concerns and aspects of / related to the journal. These may include, but are not restricted to:
- artistic and cultural precursors and inheritors of RE/Search
- RE/Search in contexts: San Francisco, contemporary and avant-garde art movements, alternative cultures
- how RE/Search facilitates or emphasises particular practices, theories and modes of analysis, interaction and engagement
- the contributions of key figures to the RE/Search project
- special issues of RE/ Search and their influence on contemporary artistic and cultural practices
- RE/Search and interdisciplinary, inter-media and inter-art practices
- contributions on individual RE/Search articles and themes, from youth cultures to body art, industrial cultures to cut-ups, incredibly strange music to incredibly strange films and beyond.
Please submit 250 word proposals to the session convenors, Patricia Allmer and John Sears, at P.Allmer@mmu.ac.uk and J.Sears@mmu.ac.uk before 09 November 2009.
Dr Patricia Allmer
MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University Righton Building, Cavendish Street Manchester M15 6BG
Dr John Sears
Dept of Interdisciplinary Studies, MMU Cheshire Crewe Green Road Crewe, Cheshire CW1 5DU
Posted: 06/14/09
International Medieval Congress at Leeds, July 12-15, 2010
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) seeks proposals for sessions to be held under the organization’s sponsorship in 2010 at Leeds. Session organizers and speakers must be ICMA members. Proposals for ICMA sponsorship should consist of a title, an abstract, a CV of the organizer, as well as the names of 3 speakers. Thanks to a generous grant from the Kress Foundation, funds may be available to defray travel costs of sponsored session participants. Please direct all session proposals and inquiries by Sept. 15, 2009 to the Chair of the Programs Committee: Kirk Ambrose, Department of Art & Art History, 318 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0318, email: kirk.ambrose@colorado.edu.
Posted: 06/14/09
The Story of Things: reading narrative in the visual
PLACE: Manchester Metropolitan University
DATE: Friday 29th January, 2010
The production, consumption and interpretation of narratives in visual form is central to contemporary cultures. Within this context, the notion of narrative finding expression in the visual can be traced, for example, in the growth of the graphic novel form, the positioning of cinema as subject matter for art practice and the persistence of the artist's book as an art form. Visual narratives demand specific forms of readerly interaction and critical response. They require a shift of reading focus from text to text-and-image or to image-only, and therefore require different critical apparatus and analytical skills.
This one day conference will investigate the reading of narrative in visual contexts, encouraging interdisciplinary approaches in addressing the following specific clusters of concerns:
- Authoring and reading the sequential narrative: linear and non-linear approaches.
- Visualising the remembered narrative: archetype, biography, autobiography.
- Object as catalyst: the potential for narrative within the artefact.
These areas of related interest will facilitate aesthetic and theoretical interrogations of visual narrative.
Papers are invited which explore or respond to issues of visual narrative production, consumption and interpretation in relation to these and other connected areas of concern. We encourage contributions from artists, academics and other practitioners. Please send proposals (250 words) for papers (20 mins) to: Jonathan Carson at j.carson@salford.ac.uk by Tuesday 1st September, 2009.
Posted: 06/07/09
Call for Papers
The Semiotics of Shipwreck:
A Symposium on the Representation and Resonance of Maritime Disaster
19th-20th November, 2010
To be held at the National Maritime Museum, London (subject to final confirmation: another UK venue will be arranged if the NMM is unavailable)
Ever since human beings first began seafaring, they have been fascinated, and haunted, by shipwrecks. For maritime societies especially, these tragedies at sea have been a constant source of anxiety, since they are disasters that potentially devastate not only individuals but also the community or nation as a whole. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that shipwreck is also one of the oldest motifs in art and literature. It can be traced as far back as the second millennium BCE, when a fragmentary Egyptian papyrus tells of a sailor shipwrecked on an island that is home to a giant snake. Thereafter it becomes a key topos in the romance genre, from Heliodorus to Shakespeare and beyond, and recurs frequently in poetry, from Homer?s Odyssey and Horace?s Odes through to Byron?s Don Juan and Hopkins?s ?The Wreck of the Deutschland?. It has a Biblical presence, for example in the account of St Paul?s shipwreck. In painting, meanwhile, shipwreck and its aftermath have been taken up by artists ranging from Vernet and Gericault to Sydney Nolan. And the shipwreck scenario may fairly (if a little paradoxically) be said to have launched the modern novel, in English at least: shipwrecks are of course central to both Defoe?s Robinson Crusoe and Swift?s Gulliver?s Travels. This fascination with the shipwreck scenario continues right down to the present day, notwithstanding the fact that shipwrecks are today much more infrequent than they were in the past. Although air crashes may have replaced shipwrecks as a key instigator of action in many narrative forms (as in Golding?s Lord of the Flies or the TV series Lost), ours is still a culture obsessed, for example, with the mythology of the 1912 Titanic disaster, and James Cameron?s 1997 treatment of this tragedy remains the highest-grossing film of all time.
Over the years, accounts and metaphors of shipwreck have taken diverse forms and served various purposes; the iconicity that attaches to the shipwreck motif has also varied significantly across time and between different cultures. Thus in some forms it is fused with Protestant traditions of spiritual autobiography, and comes to denote a cataclysmic, transformative event in the life of an individual. In others, meanwhile, the topos is informed by Horace?s famous metaphor of the ship of state, and becomes associated with an act of collective memorialization and mourning. The aim of this symposium is to explore the shifting and multiple semiotics of shipwreck; to trace the evolution of the shipwreck motif over time and across different cultures; and to trace the circulation of accounts and representations of specific shipwrecks (eg the Titanic, the Grosvenor and so forth) through culture.
To this end, we invite papers that address the question of the representation of shipwreck from any disciplinary angle, and with regard to any time period or culture. We are especially interested in papers that address the following themes (to supplement papers that have already been
confirmed):
- The shipwreck poem (eg Falconer, Hopkins etc)
- Shipwrecks in classical literature and art
- Shipwrecks in non-Western cultures (eg Chinese and Japanese culture, or in traditional, tribal cultures).
- Shipwrecks in popular culture and in oral traditions
- Shipwreck in the visual arts
For more information, or to offer a paper, please contact Dr Carl Thompson at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University
(email: carl.thompson@ntu.ac.uk).
Posted: 06/07/09
Call for papers
In the Image of Asia: Moving across and between locations
Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University, Canberra
Dates: Tue 13 - Thu 15 April, 2010
http://rsh.anu.edu.au/events/2010/imageofasia/index.php
This interdisciplinary conference explores how 'Asia' has been imagined, imaged, represented and transferred visually across linguistic, geopolitical and cultural boundaries. It aims to challenge established assumptions (and consumptions) of cultural products of 'Asia', from arts, artefacts and film to performance. Despite the constant movement of people and objects in the globalized world, 'location' still remains an important reference point in identifying images of/from 'Asia'. The particular focus is on the role of 'long-distance cultural specialists'(Harris 2006) - understood in this context as artists, writers, anthropologists and intellectuals, whose works have the distinctive feature of bridging or traversing different worlds. These members of the Asian diasporas, subaltern intellectuals and transnational cultural workers use their artistic and intellectual mobility to represent their 'native culture' in the 'host culture' or elsewhere. Hence a critique on authenticity, indigeneity, hybridity and inter-cultural influence and borrowing - all of which inevitably leads to questions on power and agency - can benefit from a dialogue between theories in art history, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and anthropology.
Effectively a globalised examination of localized cultural 'Asia', this conference is an interdisciplinary dialogue along the following themes: 1) 'Locations of cultures'; 2) Identity and images; 3) Representation of culture as translation and 4) Hybridity and agency.
It seeks to develop an analytical apparatus to capture the complex positioning of 'cultural translators' and 'cultural products' across borders. As such, this conference will shed fresh light on the diverse, polyphonic cultural productions of 'Asia' against the backdrop of shifting power dynamics between 'east' and 'west', 'north' and 'south' in a transnational era.
Keynote addresses
Dr Clare Harris, University of Oxford (To be confirmed).
Provisional speakers include;
Professor Chihiro Minato, Tama Art University Professor John Clark, University of Sydney Dr. Morgan Perkins, State University of New York College at Potsdam Dr Jan Mrazek, National University of Singapore
Call for papers
The deadline for submissions is 11 September 2009.
We invite proposals for papers dealing with any of the themes of the conference.
Please send proposals of 250 words max, with your name and affiliation to Fuyubi Nakamura (fuyubi.nakamura@anu.edu.au) or Ana Dragojlovic (ana.dragojlovic@anu.edu.au) by 11 September 2009.
Posted: 05/31/09
AAH (Association of Art Historians) Annual Conference, University of Glasgow
15-17 April 2010
Deadline for applications: 9 November 2009
PICTURING THE SENSORIUM IN ART FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1800
In recent years, scholarship has become increasingly sensitised to the fact that historical human interaction with the material world, as it still does today, engaged not only the visual, but also the spectrum of the sensory and affective. The result has been a raft of histories of tasting, smelling, touching and hearing all of which, directly or indirectly, work with and extend Baxandall¹s concept of the ³period eye². Then, as now, these oral, aural, visual, olfactory and haptic practices were not only culturally determined but also often communicated without written explanation or in transitory form. We welcome papers that explore the performance of the senses in art from Antiquity to 1800 (for example hearing music, touching sculpture, smelling flowers, stroking animals, tasting food) as well as affective responses, such as pleasure or disgust.
Papers might discuss sensorial engagement with art and/or its materials in contexts such as the artist¹s studio, domestic interior or gallery/ museum.
They could also consider how art reflects the contingent medical and social contexts of the senses or how artistic media, for example tapestries or objects to be handled, were viewed in times when contagion was feared.
Equally, contributions could relate to the inhibition or loss of the senses, such as the depiction of blindness or the deterioration of an artist¹s own faculties of sight and/or colour as revealed in his/her writings or work. This panel welcomes contributions that provide fresh interpretations of existing knowledge, or presentations of new material emerging from research, conservation, or archival discoveries.
Contributions will be limited to ca 25 minutes in length.
To submit a paper, please send a 250 word abstract to the two session convenors (e-mail addresses as below) before 9 November 2009. Your name, your institutional affiliation and full contact details should also be included in the abstract.
Rachel King
Art History and Visual Studies
The University of Manchester, U.K.
r.king@cantab.net
Christopher Plumb
Centre for Museology and CHSTM (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine)
The University of Manchester, U.K.
christopherplumb@gmail.com
Posted: 05/31/09
ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL
CALL FOR PAPERS
VISUAL ARTS AND PRACTICES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Deadline: 28 August 2009
The last decade has seen tremendous changes in the Arab and Middle Eastern artscape(s). These changes have played out on numerous levels. Regionally, there has been a mushrooming of "independent" art spaces, artist-run initiatives, and large-scale annual festivals. In terms of international exposure, artists from the Middle East have gradually been gaining access to Western art capitals‹albeit under the guise of large, all-encompassing regional shows‹and are making increasingly regular appearances on the biennale circuit. Most recently, the region has witnessed the burgeoning of a Gulf-based art market, supported by an impressive infrastructure of commercial galleries, individual collectors, and world-class museums. Such transformations have of course been the subject of numerous art publications, in attempts to consolidate a growing audience base and generate a critical discourse surrounding art practices in the region.
Scholarship on the Middle East, however, has largely neglected artistic practices and aesthetic concerns as socially, politically, and culturally formative sites worthy of examination. Similarly, the field of art history continues to restrict scholarship on artistic production from the region to the pre-modern era under the rubric of Islamic art.
The Arab Studies Journal is soliciting scholarly contributions that critically assess the visual arts and art practices in Middle East from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. We seek papers that consider the relationship between art practices and art institutional imaginings, in either an historical or a contemporary sense. We are particularly interested in cross-regional comparative approaches that consider the possible interplay of visual arts and art practices outside the Middle East.
Submit manuscripts online at: www.arabstudiesjournal.org
Posted: 05/31/09
1763 and All That: Temptations of Empire in the British World During the Decade After the Seven Years' War
Call for papers for a conference to be held on February 25th and 26th, 2010, at the University of Texas at Austin, sponsored by the Department of History's Institute for Historical Studies.
The focus of the conference is the British Empire during its "decade of crisis" between the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 and the passage of the Tea Act ten years later. Over the course of this decade, Britons drastically transformed the way they viewed themselves and their empire.
For the first time, British imperial policy extended to the governance of the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, the Native people of the trans-Appalachian interior of North America, Africans in the new colony of Senegambia, and the twenty million inhabitants of Bengal subject to the authority of the East India Company. In Britain itself, the governance of this vastly extended empire engendered an enormous amount of bitter debate and anxious discussion in the halls of power as well as in the popular press. Among historians of each of the different parts of the British World, this decade has long been seen as one of crucial importance.
However, while invaluable work has been done to examine British and indigenous relations and exchanges in specific colonial contexts, as well to examine connections between the metropolis and specific colonial regions, there has been as yet few attempts to interrogate the links across and between the colonial regions and to set developments in particular regions into the context of the transformation of the British Empire as a whole. We aim to address this need by bringing scholars working on various aspects of the British World into dialogue and debate over the causes and character of the imperial transformation of the 1760s and early 1770s.
We invite submissions for individual papers on these themes. Please note that the conference will be organized around the discussion of pre-circulated papers. Accepted papers must be submitted for circulation to participants no later than February 1, 2010. Each proposal should include a brief précis of the paper topic and a clear indication of how the paper will undertake to connect the specific research subject to larger
events and processes taking place across the British Empire. The deadline for receiving proposals is September 1, 2009.
Paper proposals (as well a brief C.V.) should be submitted via e-mail to the conference organizers, Robert Olwell and James Vaughn, at:
historyinstitute@austin.utexas.edu. Please send all queries to the same address.
For more information on the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, see: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/historicalstudies/
Posted: 05/31/09
On the occasion of the AAH (Association of Art Historians) Annual Conference, 15-17 April 2010, University of Glasgow, a session on the following topic will be held:
ART IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE, PUBLIC SPHERES IN ART. MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
Art has helped to define spaces for communication in the public sphere since the middle ages, and its own basic concepts have been shaped by these processes. Correspondingly, genres and themes, methods and tasks have had constantly to be adapted to changing habits of communication in the political communities of European cities. Our aim is to address art in the public sphere from ca. 1200 to ca. 1600 with a focus on visual discourse and aesthetic experience. We are interested in papers that address the impact of political discourse on the community's self-fashioning; stylistic norms and social distinction through art; the creation and negotiation of spaces for art and for visual communication; as well as visual communication shaped and restricted by public regulation. We are also interested in the spacial and intellectual frameworks in which works of art were beheld, discussed, and made accessible to different audiences. Last but not least, we are interested in how these issues are visually reflected or subverted in the works themselves. We especially invite contributions that go beyond the established text-based readings of political iconography.
If you would like to submit a paper, please send a 250 word abstract to the two session convenors (e-mail addresses as below) before 9 November 2009.
Your name and your institutional affiliation with full contact details should also be included in the abstract. Contributions will be limited to ca
25 minutes in length.
Wolfgang Brückle
Department of Art History and Theory
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
UK Colchester CO4 3SQ
wbruckle@essex.ac.uk
Jules Lubbock
Department of Art History and Theory
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
UK Colchester CO4 3SQ
lubbj@essex.ac.uk
Posted: 05/24/09
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, 15-17 April 2010, University of Glasgow.
Session:
Images of Corporal Mortification and Corruption, Martyrdom and Mercy:
1250-1550.
"The psychological implications of the new religiosity with which the devotional image was in accord are just as complex as the social conditions from which the religious individual developed his self-awareness. What took place in the thirteenth century was one of the most comprehensive transformations European society ever underwent.
While the symptoms were often only visible in images at a later date, the impulses to modify images reach back to the thirteenth century."
Hans Belting (trans. M. Bartusis and R. Meyer), The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion (New Rochelle, New York: 1990), p. 7.
This session will explore images which illustrate the mortification of the flesh, bodily corruption, disfigurement, disease, decay, physical degradation and death. Such images have been used to convey messages of strength, the triumph of faith over fear and pain, the incorruptibility of the spirit, salvation, celebration and optimism. Images of suffering are often coupled with those of compassion and protection. Issues surrounding the role of gender within images of martyrdom and mercy will be investigated. Papers are invited which engage with related imagery (e.g. depictions of justice, punishment, vengeance, restraint and clemency) from both religious and secular contexts and which explore the relationship between text and image. We encourage submissions illustrating examples from a wide range of media (panel and wall painting, manuscript illumination, sculpture, architectural structures and contexts, decorated household, religious and civic objects and textiles) and originating from a variety of geographical locations.
Session convenors: Emily Jane Anderson (University of Glasgow) and Robert Gibbs (University of Glasgow).
E.Anderson.1@research.gla.ac.uk
R.Gibbs@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk
Posted: 05/17/09
Call for ROUND TABLE PARTICIPANTS
European Architectural History Network, 1st International Meeting Guimaraes, Portugal June 17-20, 2010
Medieval Architectural Heritage: What is real?
2010 brings the eleven-hundredth anniversary of the Abbey of Cluny's foundation in 910. This ruined monument of a pan-European medieval institution stands as a model for the exigencies of heritage endeavors. Mostly demolished after the French Revolution, excavated Cluny later became the subject of heated debates about original form and dating. Today, as in the Middle Ages, it supports the economy of the small town in Burgundy through historical tourism. Extrapolating from Cluny's example stimulates us to reevaluate our current understanding of medieval monuments as cultural patrimony. We have seen two centuries of rising awareness to the historical importance, cultural meaning, and tourism potential of medieval structures in Western Europe. They have changed from outdated and neglected ruins past fashionable appreciation to picturesque relics claiming large investments toward their restoration. Many were altered throughout their history: to embody the stylistic messages of past or foreign influences, to reflect the aspirations of patrons or nationalist ideologies, or to adapt as the buildings housed changing functions.
Yet some countries have too many historical monuments to maintain and the oldest represent the largest resource drain. How relevant are medieval building sites today and why should modern architects continue to devise ways to restore and maintain them? How do national administrations justify marketing them as "authentic" representatives of culture when so much of what we think we know about their past has been deconstructed as romantic formulae initiated in the nineteenth century? Of what use to understanding medieval structures are traditional categories such as stylistic divisions based on time period, regional location, or anonymous master-builders? Who determines popular views of the past in our society today? Why are we still commemorating anniversaries of medieval complexes when very little for which they stood remains relevant?
In two sessions at the July 2009 International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, an international panel of scholars will study specific medieval sites in order to begin to formulate approaches that inspire further critical study. This panel at Guimaraes continues that dialogue and invites proposals toward participation in a discussion of medieval heritage sites, their reception and commemoration, in order to investigate how we continue to shape notions of their past and value for the future.
Please send proposals for 10-minute presentations/discussion positions and 2-page CVs via email by October 30, 2009 to: Prof. Janet Marquardt, Eastern Illinois University, College of Fine Arts and Humanities, Charleston, IL 61920 USA; 1 217 581 3968 (office), 1 217 581 6199 (fax): email: jtmarquardt@eiu.edu. Complete details on the conference can be found at: www.eahn2010.org
Posted: 05/03/09
Call for paper Idearte Journal 2009
Idearte is an online Journal committed to innovative critical work in art history, analysis of visual art and material representation from a variety of theoretical perspectives and publishing articles with themes about ancient to contemporary visual art.
In November 2009 a new volume of Idearte Journal will be available at http://www.idearte.org.
We are currently seeking articles for the 5th volume of Idearte Journal to be published in November 2009. We consider theoretical and scientific articles covering any art history topic from antiquity to the present, museology, conservation, etc.
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2009.
All submissions should be sent to: mail@idearte.org
Posted: 04/26/09
Workshop / 11th Mediterranean Research Meeting (MRM)
ADRIATIC FRONTIERS:
COMMUNICATIONS ACROSS CULTURES, SPACE AND TIME
Deadline for abstracts: July 15, 2009.
CONCEPT
The workshop "Adriatic Frontiers: Communications Across Cultures, Space and Time" seeks to provide a forum for the study of the multifaceted history of a region that has remained on the margins, despite the increased interest in the Mediterranean. Although Fernand Braudel had early upheld the study of interactions of Catholic, Muslim, Christian Orthodox, and Jewish cultures on either side of political borders as a promising field of study, few efforts have been made since then for a greater understanding of the Adriatic, specifically, as an intercultural space. This zone of multiple frontiers has suffered from the fact that it is also on the periphery of specializations of Ottoman/Middle Eastern, Italian/European, and Balkans/South Slavic histories and their respective sources and literatures. Scattered efforts in recent scholarship, resulting in somewhat astonishing findings, have demonstrated that we are still far from understanding the workings of this space between, broadly, the 14th and 19th centuries. The proposed workshop seeks to bridge this gap by bringing together an international group of scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds who nonetheless share a common interest in intercultural aspects of the Adriatic space in the past.
The proposed workshop will reframe earlier efforts in the quest to further future scholarship on the matter. The organizers strive to achieve a mixture of established scholars who have already made a lasting contribution to the field and younger historians who would benefit from the meeting in their future endeavours.
(Please also see the full concept [3 pages] at http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2010/desc_pdf/MRM2010_Ds11.pdf)
COSTS
There will be no registration fee. Most selected participants are eligible for a bursary. This will be a lump sum, unrelated to your actual costs, and fixed according to your country of residence/departure. Participants from Southeast Europe, Turkey and Middle Eastern countries will receive a lump sum of 550 euros to cover their expenses (airfare, accommodation). Participants from Western Europe, the USA and Canada will receive a lump sum of 130 euros. Participants from within Italy are not eligible for a bursary.
For details, please see http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2010/pdf/MRM2010-InfoParticipants.pdf#page=3
TRAVEL
Participants are expected to arrive in Montecatini Terme on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, before 6PM and depart on Saturday, March 27, 2010, after lunch (i.e. after 1PM). Shuttles from the nearby airports of Florence and Pisa to the conference venue will be provided (on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, as well as on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning). Montecatini Terme is located in a distance of approximately
45 km from Florence and Pisa.
ACCOMODATION
Participants will be accommodated in one of the hotels in Montecatini Terme booked for the MRM. All hotels are within walking distance of each other and offer the comforts of a 4-star hotel. The discount rate prices per night at these hotels range from ca. 35 to ca. 75 euros, hence totaling 100-250 euros, according to your preferences, for all three nights. The participants will be required to pay for their rooms themselves (see also section "Costs") upon check-out. Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners are provided for, save for the dinner on Thursday, March 25.
WORKSHOP, SCHEDULE AND VENUE
The workshop "Adriatic Frontiers" is one of approximately 20 workshops organized simultaneously in the framework of the 11th Mediterranean Research Meeting. Each workshop will comprise of 10-16 participants and will begin with an inaugural lecture at 7PM on Wednesday. Presentations will be held on Thursday and Friday between 9AM and 5:30PM, as well as on Saturday from 9AM-1PM. Preliminary versions of papers to be presented will be made available (to participants only) prior to the event and must be submitted by January 15, 2010. The seminar rooms are within walking distance of the hotels and are all equipped with data projectors.
APPLY
Paper proposals must be submitted online before July 15, 2009.
Abstracts of 500-1000 words are to be pasted in, CVs of max. 5 pages are to be uploaded to, the online form at http://www.rscas.org/medform.asp
TIMELINE
July 15, 2009: deadline for submission of abstracts.
September 15, 2009: results of selection process announced
January 15, 2010: deadline for submission of papers
CONTACT
The workshop is directed by Maximilian Hartmuth (hartmuth@su.sabanciuniv.edu) and Amanda Phillips (amanda.phillips@orinst.ox.ac.uk) and hosted by the European University Institute. Feel free to contact the workshop directors for thematic concerns, but note that any question pertaining to accommodation, transport, costs, etc. falls under the responsibility of the MRM. Frequently asked questions are addressed at http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2010
See also the official call for papers at http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2010/pdf/MRM2010-Paperscall.pdf
Posted: 04/26/09
Evaluation Practices in Art Worlds
International Workshop
Social Science Research Center Berlin
November 27-28, 2009
The notion of art worlds has proved to be extremely productive when studying the ubiquity and pervasiveness of collaborative practices in the production of artworks and other cultural products in architecture, design, film, television and the like. Conventions and decisions have been featured as key elements in these multiple art worlds. However, relatively little empirical work focuses on actual evaluation practices, which connect and transform both conventions and decisions within collaborative projects, and thus shape art worlds.
Evaluation practices, in the sense used here, are ways of establishing what counts as valuable and worthy. In art worlds this certainly involves dealing intensively with the elusiveness of aesthetic and artistic values, but also with a multiplicity of evaluation criteria for judging careers, teamwork, collaborations, social networks, artistic scenes, galleries, places of residence and work, the studio, outsourcing strategies, fabrication procedures, tools, materials, and so on. Practices and controversies regarding the valuable and the worthy are crucial not just regarding artworks and cultural products, but for the whole socio-material arrangements of art worlds.
The workshop on "Evaluation practices in art worlds" addresses these issues and seeks to bring together theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers in an international gathering. We welcome papers dealing with issues as the following:
- production and collaboration practices in cultural/creative industries, and the collective negotiation of what counts as worthy and as not-worthy,
- cultural scenes and their buzz as a type of worth,
- cultural institutions, and the intermingling of organizational dynamics and evaluation practices,
- artistic commissions, and the formalization of evaluation procedures,
- technological devices, and their use for evaluation,
- the specificity of evaluation practices at different sites, such as the studio, artistic commissions, galleries, museums, specialized magazines, and the like
All presentations will be held in English.
Please submit a 500-750 words abstract by July 20, 2009 to the organizers: Ignacio Farías (farias@wzb.eu) and Sophie Mützel (muetzel@wzb.eu).
We will send out notices of acceptance until August 7, 2009. To facilitate discussions at the actual workshop, we ask for short papers until November 2, 2009, which will be made available to workshop participants.
Some funding for travel expenses will be available.
Posted: 04/26/09
Article call for "American Periodicals and Visual Culture"
In Fall 2010 American Periodicals will be publishing a special issue on 'American Periodicals and Visual Culture', guest edited by Janice Simon (Art History, University of Georgia) with Jared Gardner and Steve Fink.
Although periodical scholarship has traditionally tended to emphasize the word, visual imagery of all sorts has been an important component of periodicals, even before our post-modern visual deluge. We are calling for essays that will address any aspect of visual culture in American periodicals from the colonial period through WW II, including but not limited to the intersections and ironies of text and image juxtapositions; the meaning of visual ephemera?frontispiece or margin illustrations, headings, advertisements, magazine covers, cartoons, photographic inserts; the role of a specific art editor, director, or reviewer; studies of periodicals devoted to the visual arts; the importance of the photographic or illustrated essay.
For consideration for the Special Issue on American Periodicals and Visual Culture, please submit your essay by January 1, 2010 to amper@osu.edu. For more information about the journal, including submission guidelines and style sheet, please see our website at: http://americanperiodicals.osu.edu
Posted: 04/12/09
Call for Papers
Spaces and Practices of Leisure in Early Modern Europe
European Architectural History Network, 1st International Meeting Guimaraes, Portugal June 17-20, 2010
Leisure was a concept fundamental to the practices and spaces of early modern European society. Authors identified books to be studied at leisure, while architects designed increasingly codified urban and rural social spaces. Since at least the fourteenth century, leisure suggested time unoccupied by often public duties and responsibilities time in which individuals could pursue entertainment, intellectual and spiritual enrichment, and physical relaxation. With the renewed fifteenth-century interest in Antiquity and the simultaneous shift from a landed feudal to a professional elite, the concept of leisure became both more formalized and more complex. It became associated particularly with wealthy elites, assumed learned connections to Antiquity, and encompassed more identifiable activities in particular spaces. Authors published books and poems describing the leisured elite life, while exclusive social circles moved in specific spaces from rural villas to urban pleasure grounds to late seventeenth-century royal palaces.
Intersections of shifting practices and spaces of leisure, however, have been studied primarily for the industrialized world and have remained split among leisure studies, cultural and social history, and analyses of building types. This session offers a more synthetic and interdisciplinary approach to early modern leisure; it invites papers concerning built spaces of leisure, landscape architecture, and visual and written depictions of villa life or other leisure activities. We particularly seek proposals that suggest new methodological approaches or that aim to re-evaluate long-standing approaches and arguments for instance, through a new variety of sources or a study of social alongside architectural context. Themes of especial inter est include:
city-country connections, the relationship of interior to exterior leisure spaces, the villas seemingly paradoxical role as working farm and site of elite leisure, practices of hospitality and their connections to architectural design, changing social and architectural relationships of public to private, the role of the renewed interest in Classical Antiquity (eg, villa culture, notions of negotium/otium, and philosophical claims about contemplative v. active life), the commercialization of leisure, the role of gender, varying ideas of leisure with social class, court culture, and the relationship of regional to international in circulating ideas of leisure.
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words (including applicant's name and affiliation), a short CV, and full contact information (email and postal addresses, telephone and fax numbers) by October 30, 2009 to:
Dr. Freek Schmidt, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, f.schmidt@let.vu.nl tel: 0031 205986372,
fax: 0031 205986500, and Dr. Kimberley Skelton, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA, 02453, USA, tel: 001-443-253-5529, fax: 001-781-736-2672, KCSkelton@aol.com.
Posted: 04/12/09
CALL FOR PAPERS: The Art Work between Technology and Nature
International conference at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 21-23 January 2010
Occasioned by the exhibitions Nature Strikes Back! and Impact: Living in the age of climate change, running in parallel to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, this art historical conference will explore the relationship between art, nature and technology. The present climatic crisis foregrounds the observation that during the last century human technology has come to play a crucial role in the overall behaviour of nature, both as a disturber of ecological balances and as a potential healer of them.
Parallel to this development, art seems to have become more closely involved with both nature and technology, challenging on the one hand conceptions of art contemplating nature as a distant landscape and, on the other, art as being foreign to the social interaction and physical dynamics of technology. These approaches often highlight art?s critical and reflective function, and yet in art?s very interchange with nature and technology there are certain reminiscenses from the ancient and medieval periods in which art and technology were aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods ? the Latin ars and the Greek technè ? and in which this area was thought to function according to principles imitating nature.
Papers are therefore invited which focus on these post-modern convergences or present a historical perspective in which their forerunners in the modern and pre-modern periods are exposed.
Potential questions to be addressed include: In which ways has art been related to the two domains of nature and technology in different historical epochs? Have they been coordinated to harmonising syntheses or rather placed in fields of antagonism? Do they share certain genetic principles or are they created according to different paradigms?
Send a proposal of no more than 400 words to:
Professor Jacob Wamberg kunjw@hum.au.dk
Deadline for abstracts: 4 September 2009
