Williamsburg Conference: Working Wood in the Eighteenth Century
From Colonial Williamsburg:
Working Wood in the Eighteenth Century: Furniture of George and Martha Washington
Colonial Williamsburg, 22-25 and 26-29 January 2012
George Washington’s Mount Vernon will partner with Colonial Williamsburg and Fine Woodworking to present the 14th annual Working Wood in the 18th Century conference at Colonial Williamsburg. Mount Vernon curators and restoration staff will explore Washington’s home and the furniture he and Martha acquired to furnish it. Cabinetmakers from Colonial Williamsburg’s Hay Shop will build two pieces at Mount Vernon today: a lady’s knee-hole dressing table made in Williamsburg at the Peter Scott shop, sold to Daniel Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s first husband, in 1754, and brought by Martha to Mount Vernon after she married Washington in 1759; and, an elaborate sculptural candle stand, or torchère, that George Washington purchased for £ 3.10 on December 2, 1759, from the Scottish cabinetmaker James Allan who was then working in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Guest cabinetmakers Dan Faia of The North Bennet Street School and Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton of Mack S. Headley and Sons will lead us into the Federal period. Jeff and Steve will reproduce one of the Washingtons’ dining chairs made by John Aitken of Philadelphia in 1797, and Dan will construct a delicate, inlaid Pembroke, or breakfast, table. Colonial Williamsburg’s joiners will demonstrate sash construction by reproducing the famous bull’s-eye window in the pediment of the Mansion.
Along with the conference in Williamsburg, Mount Vernon is planning special interest Mansion, museum, and behind-the-scenes tours for conference participants on January 26 and 30. More information to come as details are in place. If in the meantime, you want to take a look at some of the pieces, they can be viewed at the Mount Vernon website: www.mountvernon.org
Note: The program is the same number of days as previous years but is scheduled later in January and session one runs Sunday through Wednesday and session two Thursday through Sunday.
An event brochure is available here»
Call for Papers: Spaces of Work
From Warwick:
Spaces of Work, 1770–1830
University of Warwick, 28th April 2012
Proposals due by 1 December 2011
Spaces of Work, 1770-1830 will address the relationships between workers and spaces in Britain. We aim to showcase current research and are particularly interested in interrogating under-analyzed types of work and space. For example, we hope to develop the theorization of types of work that critics have not conventionally understood as ‘work’ (the performance of music as practical activity, for instance). We also aim to bring attention to under-analysed spaces. For example, due to Romanticism’s traditionally rural focus, literary critics of this period have only recently begun to interrogate urban spaces; interdisciplinary discussion of urbanism in this period would therefore be particularly valuable. We aim to analyze the interfacing of work and space as two factors that fundamentally shape everyday life in order to gain a greater understanding of material life in the period. To these ends, 500 word abstracts are invited which attempt to answer questions such as the following:
• How do workers and their work uniquely shape space?
• How does space facilitate or hinder workers and their work?
• How does the social relationship among workers and between them and their supervisors/masters alter according to the work they are doing and the spaces in which they perform it?
• How does gender, race, and/or class inform workers’ relationship to each other in different contexts of space and work?
Possible approaches could include, but are not limited to: genteel work and the city; work in spaces of ‘leisure’; work and (sub)urban domestic spaces; men’s work in the home; space and female accomplishment; work and emergent manufacturing/industrial spaces. Please send submissions to the conference organizers, Kate Scarth & Joseph Morrissey, at j.morrissey@live.co.uk by 1/12/2011. Papers at the conference will be thirty minutes in length, with a generous allocation for questions.
Confirmed keynote speakers: Karen Harvey (University of Sheffield) and Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent)
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