Call for Papers | Death: The Cultural Meaning of the End of Life
From LUCAS:
Death: The Cultural Meaning of the End of Life (LUCAS Graduate Conference)
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, 24–25 January 2013
Proposals due by 15 November 2012
Keynote Speakers: Joanna Woodall (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Rosi Braidotti (University of Utrecht)
Death is a defining factor in the explorations of our subjectivity, art, history, politics, and many other aspects of our social interactions and perceptions of the world. In the modern age, conceptions of death have continued to shift and evolve, yet our perceptions are still fueled by an instinctive fear of the end of life.
In recent decades, we have rebelled against the threat of death by inventing new technologies and medicines that have drastically increased our life expectancy—diseases and disabilities are gradually disappearing. Some believe that one day we will completely conquer the aging process, and ultimately death. Life can now be seen as a new form of commodity, a material object that we can trade, sell, or buy.
Despite our attempts to shut-out death or overcome its inevitability, the end of life has remained a visible and unavoidable aspect of our society. From antiquity to the present day, perceptions of death have been represented through various different mediums: visual culture, art, literature, music, historical writing, cinema, religious symbols, national anniversaries, and public expressions of mourning.
This conference aims to explore how death has been represented and conceptualized, from classical antiquity to the modern age, and the extent to which our perceptions and understandings of death have changed (or remained the same) over time. The wide scope of this theme reflects the historical range of LUCAS’s (previously called LUICD) three research programs (Classics and Classical Civilization, Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Modern and Contemporary Studies), as well as the intercontinental and interdisciplinary focus of many of the institute’s research projects. (more…)
Conference | Global Commodities Conference
The early registration deadline has been extended until Monday, 5 November. From Warwick:
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Global Commodities: The Material Culture of Early Modern Connections, 1400-1800
Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick, 12-14 December 2012
Tilly Kettle (1734-1786), “Portrait of Two English Boys in Asian Clothing,” 1780s (Peabody Essex Museum)
Material culture created and was created by connections with ‘others’ in the era before the global exchange of people, political ideas and economic processes intensified through industrialization. The exchange of goods and the culture of commodities played central roles in forging enduring and transformative global connections.
This conference seeks to explore how our understanding of early modern global connections changes if we consider the role material culture played in shaping such connections. In what ways did material objects participate in the development of the multiple processes often referred to as ‘globalisation’? How did objects contribute to the construction of such notions as hybridism and cosmopolitanism? What was their role in trade and migration, gifts and diplomacy, encounters and conflict? What kind of geographies did they create in the early modern world? What was their cultural value vis-à-vis their economic value? In short, we seek to explore the ways in which commodities and connections intersected in the early modern world.
This conference wishes to bring together scholars with expertise across a range of disciplines and geographic areas that came into direct contact in the early modern period, by which we mean the world between ca. 1400 and 1800. Of course many areas of the humanities and social sciences have expanded their enquiries in disciplinary and spatial terms, but truly global and interdisciplinary approaches still have to rely heavily on dialogue and collaboration between scholars. We hope that this conference will present an opportunity to bring together scholars from very different geographical and disciplinary backgrounds, who all share an interest in exploring commodities in global contexts.
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13.00 Registration
14.00 Welcome by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick)
14.15 Plenary Lecture 1
Dana Leibsohn (Smith College), “Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific: Oceanic Exchange and the Visual Cultures of Colonial Latin America.”
15.15 Coffee Break
15.45 Session 1 | Mixed Media
Chair: Glenn Adamson (V&A Museum)
• Christine Guth (Royal College of Art / V&A Museum), “Towards a Global History of Shagreen”
• Tim Stanley (V&A Museum), “Gloss Goes Global”
• Anna Wu (V&A Museum), “Chinese Painted Wallpaper: The Life-cycle of a Global Aesthetic”
15.45 Session 2 | Consuming Conflicts and Resistance in Iberian Empires
Chair: Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (European University Institute, Italy and Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain)
• Bethany Aram (Universidad Pablo de Olavide), “The Fortunes of Caribbean Hides and Ginger, c. 1559-1650”
• Igor Pérez Tostado (Universidad Pablo de Olavide), “Attraction and Resistance: The Borderline Effects of New Atlantic Products on the Island of Hispaniola”
• Rebecca Earle (University of Warwick), “Indigenous Reactions to Old-world Foods from Rejection to Adoption”
17.30 Reception
T H U R S D A Y , 1 3 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 2
9.00 Session 3 | Migration and Material Culture: Confronting East India Company Service
Chair: David Garrioch (Monash University, Australia)
• Helen Clifford (University of Warwick and University College London), “Objects, Movement and Concepts of Home in Eighteenth-Century England”
• Kate Smith (University College London), “Arranging Home and Understanding India in East India Company Households”
• Stephanie Barczewski (Clemson University), “Commodities, Collecting and Cosmopolitanism: Three Discourses of Empire in British Country Houses, 1750-1800”
• Ellen Filor (University College London), “Books as Global Objects: Reading Communities in India and Scotland”
9:00 Session 4 | Gifts, Luxuries and the Diplomacy of Material Exchange
Chair: Marta Ajmar (V&A Museum)
• Antonia Gatward Cevizli (Sotheby’s Institute of Art), “Portraits, Turbans and Cuirasses: Material Exchange between Mantua and the Ottomans in the 1490s”
• Corinne Thepaut-Cabasset (V&A Museum), “En Route: The Travels of Royal Gifts and Luxury Goods in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”
• Claudia Swan (Northwestern University), “Birds of Paradise for the Sultan: The Exchange of Rarities in the Early Modern World”
• Michael Talbot (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), “The Culture of Diplomatic Gift-Exchange in Eighteenth-Century British-Ottoman Relations”
• Nuno Senos (CHAM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa), “The Empire in the Duke’s Palace. Portugal, c. 1563”
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Plenary Lecture 2
Michael North (University of Greifswald), “European and Chinese Art Objects in the Indian Ocean: Cross Cultural Connections”
12.30 Lunch
14.00 Session 5 | Immaterial Commodities: Exchanging Knowledge in English Networks Overseas, 1590-1650
• Edmond Smith (Magdalene College, University of Cambridge), “A Global Exchange: Trading Experience in the East India Company”
• John Gallagher (Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge), “Languages of Exchange: The Role of Communication in Establishing International Trade”
• Richard Blakemore (Selwyn College, University of Cambridge), “Ships and Seafaring: Understanding the Infrastructure of Maritime Trade”
14:00 Session 6 | Precious Commodities: Jade, Diamonds and Coral
• Yulian Wu (Stanford University), “Seeking Black Jade from China’s New Territory: Technology, Musical Instrument, and the Construction of Qing Empire in Eighteenth-Century China”
• Karin Hofmeester (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam), “Diamonds and Global Connections in the Early Modern Period”
• Pippa Lacey (University of East Anglia), “The Coral Network: The Trade of Red Coral to the Qing Imperial Court in the Eighteenth Century”
15.30 Coffee Break
16.00 Session 7 | Bad Habits: Tobacco, Coffee and Sugar
Chair: Ghulam Nadri (Georgia State University and LSE)
• Matt Romaniello (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), “Influencing Habits of Consumption: Tobacco in the Russian Empire”
• Louise Carson (University of Nottingham), “Outlandish Confections’: Exoticism, Sugar and Power at the Court of Henry VIII”
• Christine Fertig and Ulrich Pfister (Universität Münster), “Coffee, Mind and Body: Stories of Globalization and Consumption: Hamburg in the Eighteenth Century”
• Urmi Engineer (Colby College, Waterville, ME), “Sugar Revisited: Sweetness and the Environment in the Early Modern World”
16.00 Session 8 | Rarities World Wide: Early Modern Objects between the Global and the Local
• Mariana Françozo (Leiden University), “The Case of Brazilian featherwork in Northern European Court Festivals”
• Anna Grasskamp (Leiden University), “Foreign Objects as In-Betweens: The Case of Coral in Ming Dynasty China and Renaissance Europe”
• Ching-fei Shih (National Taiwan University), “The African Ivory in the Qing Court and Canton”
• Ulrike Körber (University of Evora, Portugal), “A Special Production for the Portuguese, Involving Different Manufacturing Centres, and Even Asian Lacquer Coatings”
F R I D A Y , 1 4 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 2
9.00 Session 9 | Material Encounters between Local and Global
Chair: Luca Molà (European University Institute, Italy)
• Paula Bessa (University of Minho, CITCEM/Portugal), “Eastern Algarve Parish Churches and the Empire”
• Kévin Le Doudic (University of South-Brittany / European University of Brittany), “Encounter Around the Object: French and Indian Consumers in the Eighteenth-Century Pondicherry”
• Nadia Fernandez-de-Pinedo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), “Dress, Eat and Show Off in the City: Consumption in Madrid, c. 1750”
9.00 Session 10 | Material and Artistic Exchange
Chair: Adam Clulow (Monash University, Australia)
• Natasha Eaton (University College London), “Art, Colour and the Mana of the Commodity in Britain and India”
• Christina Hellmich (de Young Museum, San Francisco), “ ‘… a Royal Robe…’ and its Journey from the Hands of a Unangan Seamstress to a Hawaiian King and a New England Sea Captain in the early Nineteenth Century
• Sabitha Thekke Prakkottuthody (University College London), “Globalizing the Souvenir: The Album as Commodity in Colonial India”
10.30 Coffee Break
11.00 Session 11 | Objects and Colonial Encounters in the Early Modern World
Chair: Christina Anderson (Oxford University)
• Susan Broomhall (University of Western Australia), “Beads, Mirrors and Tobacco Boxes for Giants, Gold and Water: The Dutch East India Company’s Aspirational Encounters with Indigenous Peoples in Australia”
• Jacqueline Van Gent (The University of Western Australia), “Cultural Geographies, Elite Consumption and the Swedish East India Company”
• Mårten Snickare (Stockholm University), “Displaying the Others: Non-European Objects at Skokloster Castle”
11.00 Session 12 | Tradesman’s Objects: Goods, Sailors and Traders
Chair: Karina Corrigan (Peabody Essex Museum)
• Eugénie Margoline-Plot (University of South-Britanny / European University of Brittany), “Appropriating a Part of Asia in Brittany: The Sailor of the French East India Company, a Middleman between Bretons and Asian Commodities in the Eighteenth Century”
• Caroline Mawer (Independent Scholar, London), “An Armenian Merchant and the Vasa Tapestries”
• Marieke Hendriksen (Leiden University), “Treasure Troves: Eighteenth-Century Ship’s Surgeons’ Medicine Chests”
12.15 Lunch
13.15 Session 13 | Global Objects from Enlightenment to Revolutions
• Ashli White (University of Miami), “The Material Culture of Counterrevolution in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic”
• Kee Il Choi Jr (New York), “Father Amiot’s Cup, Henri-Léonard Bertin and Fashioning ‘Antiquity’ at Sèvres”
• Richard Flamein and Philippe Romanski (Université de Rouen), “‘Voltaire en son meuble’: Material Economics in the Age of Enlightenment”
13.15 Session 14 | Textiles, Trade and the Material Culture of Appearances
Chair: Evelyn Welch (Queen Mary College)
• Colette Establet (IREMAM, Aix en Provence), “Indian textile consumption in the Ottoman Empire at the End of the Seventeenth Century ”
• Suraiya Faroqhi (Bilgi University, Istanbul), “All over the Ottoman Central Provinces: The Acem Tüccarı in the Early Eighteenth Century”
• Kirsten Toftegaard (Designmuseum, Copenhagen), “Lost in Translation – A Chinese Interpretation of a European Motif”
14.45 Coffee Break
15.15 Plenary Lecture 3
Pamela Smith (Columbia University), “Itineraries of Matter and Knowledge in the Early Modern World”
16.15 Final Discussion
Chairs: Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello
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If you have any further questions, please contact: Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello at: ghcc.conferences@warwick.ac.uk
Organising Bodies and Sponsors
The Arts and Humanities Research Council
The AHRC ‘Global Commodities’ International Network
The Warwick Global History and Culture Centre
The ERC ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries’ Project
Adam Matthews Publishing
The Economic History Society
The University of Warwick
The Victoria & Albert Museum
Bilgi University, Istanbul
Peabody Essex Museum
New Title | Art & Visual Culture 1600–1850: Academy to Avant-Garde
From The Open University:
Emma Barker, ed., Art & Visual Culture 1600–1850: Academy to Avant-Garde (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 384 pages, ISBN: 9781849760966, $32.
Part 1: City and Country
Part 2: New Worlds of Art
This investigates the art and visual culture of the period from roughly 1600 to 1850. This was the period in which a distinctly modern art world began to appear, with its own institutions and associated ideas about art and artists. The book assesses the significance and value of the labels traditionally used to define the art of this period, notably Baroque, Neo-classical and Romantic. In addition, it explores the ways in which art and visual culture were shaped by the ruling elites of different European countries, as well as considering the impact of socio-economic change and growing engagement with the world beyond Europe.
The first part addresses the period from around 1600 to about 1760. Rather than attempting a broad survey of artistic developments, this part of the book highlights the way in which the relationship between the country and the city helped to shape different cultures of visual representation in different national contexts. Material covered includes: the embodiment of religious power in the restructuring of Rome by Bernini; seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the thorny problem of realism; the development of urban London; and the new culture of British landscape parks.
The second part is concerned with the period from around 1760 to 1850. It explores some of the ways in which art and other visual forms responded to changing societies and contributed to the emergence of a recognisably modern world. It covers: the emergence of public exhibitions in Britain and France and the codification of genres and types of art; the representation of the body in Canova’s sculpture; the meeting of western travellers with Pacific islanders, as reflected in images; and the emergence of the Romantic ‘genius’.
Exhibition | Loutherbourg: Torments and Chimeras
From the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg:
Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg: Torments and Chimeras
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, 17 November 2012 — 18 February 2013
Curated by Dominique Jacquot and Olivier Lefeuvre
This exhibition in his native city marks the bicentenary of the death of the “Anglo-French” painter Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg. It will be the first retrospective of this artist in France and the only one since the exhibition which took place in London in 1973.
With more than a hundred works, both paintings and works on paper, from public and private collections in France, Britain and the United States, it aims to show all the facets of his art. In Paris, the artist was successful at a very early age, from 1763, and was acclaimed by Diderot, who regarded him as a prodigy. In 1771 he settled in London and adapted perfectly to the English environment. He became a member of the Royal Academy, had his portrait painted by Gainsborough and was acknowledged by his peers and the public alike as one of the most important painters of his time.
His private life was hectic. After working in Paris with the painter Casanova (the brother of the famous adventurer), he quickly fell out with him and, after a brief, stormy marriage, dropped everything to go and settle in London. There he gave up painting for a while, dispensing medical care by the “magical” laying on of hands, echoing the experiments of the famous Cagliostro, with whom he shared a brief friendship, and of Mesmer.
In London, Loutherbourg was in touch with the world of the theatre, the source of a fascinating aspect of his work. While he is known mainly for his pastorals and his landscapes, in which he at times depicts the perilous or sublime aspects of Nature, he was also a strikingly original historical painter, drawing his subjects from the Bible or from modern history, and his most memorable qualities are thus his versatility and great technical facility.
The approach of the exhibition is chronological, while keeping to certain thematic threads :
. Pastorals
. Shipwrecks
. Historical Painting (the Bible and Battles)
. English Landscapes
. Nature’s Perils
The artist’s graphic output is another of the revelations of this exhibition, which includes the considerable collection from the Strasbourg Prints and Drawings Cabinet.
An Alsatian by birth but with the talent of a European, Loutherbourg had the makings of a character from fiction. He embodied the Enlightenment while at the same time wholly prefiguring Romanticism.
Exhibition curators : Dominique Jacquot, Head Curator of the Strasbourg Fine Arts Museum, Olivier Lefeuvre, art historian.
Book Talk | Simon Werrett on Fireworks
Simon Werrett, The History of Fireworks
Ealing Central Library, 8 November 2012
Simon Werrett will give talk on his book Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Science in European History at the Ealing Central Library on November 8, 2012 at 6:15pm. Enjoy a free glass of wine courtesy of Waterstones. Green Room, Ealing Central Library, Broadway Centre, Ealing W5 5JY. The event is free, but please book in advance at reading@ealing.gov.uk or in Ealing Waterstones.
New Title | Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China
From The University of Michigan Press:
Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-0472118182, $65.
This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called “antiquarian.” As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landmass between 1500 and 1800. As a historiographical project, the book challenges the received—and often very much under conceptualized—use of the term “antiquarian” in both European and Chinese contexts. Readers will not only learn more about the range of European and Chinese scholarship on the past—and especially the material past—but they will also be able to integrate some of the historiographical observations and corrections into new ways of conceiving of the history of historical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance, and to reflect on the impact of these European terms on Chinese approaches to the Chinese past. This comparison is a two-way street, with the European tradition clarified by knowledge of Chinese practices, and Chinese approaches better understood when placed alongside the European ones.
Peter N. Miller is Dean and Professor at the Bard Graduate Center. François Louis is Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
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This volume is the first to juxtapose the autochthonous traditions of antiquarianism of Early Modern Europe and Late Imperial China. Rather than asking only what the West might be able to learn about China, it self-consciously and quite successfully seeks to open up new perspectives on both sides of the comparison. It moreover breaks important ground in suggesting historically traceable links between evidential learning in China and European traditions of ‘Herodotean’ historiography. —Lothar von Falkenhausen, University of California, Los Angeles
This splendid collection of essays is at once a major addition to the literature on the history of scholarship in Western Europe, a burgeoning field in its own right, and a model effort at comparative cultural history . . . The collection as a whole sheds light on areas little known even to erudite scholars. —Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Fellowship | Poulet Curatorial Fellowship at The Frick
From The Frick:
Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellowship 2013–15
The Frick Collection, New York
Applications due by 18 January 2013
The Frick Collection is an art museum consisting of more than 1,100 works of art from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century displayed in the intimate surroundings of the former home of Henry Clay Frick. The residence, with its furnishings and works of art, has been open to the public since 1935. It is considered one of the world’s most perfect museums; its sister research institution, the Frick Art Reference Library founded in 1920, is of equal distinction. The Library is an internationally recognized research library that serves as one of the world’s most complete resources for the study of Western art.
Position Summary
The Frick Collection is pleased to announce the availability of a two-year predoctoral fellowship for an outstanding doctoral candidate who wishes to pursue a curatorial career in an art museum. The fellowship will offer invaluable curatorial training and will provide the scholarly and financial resources required for completing the doctoral dissertation. Internationally renowned for its exceptional collection of Western European art from the early Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century, The Frick Collection, complemented by the equally significant resources of the Frick Art Reference Library, offers a unique opportunity for object-based research. The fellowship is best suited to a student working on a dissertation that pertains to one of the major strengths of the Collection and Library.
The Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow will have an opportunity to work with curatorial and educational staff on research for special exhibitions and on the permanent collection. Other curatorial training responsibilities include participation in the organization of the annual Symposium on the History of Art, a two-day event co-sponsored with the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; the preparation, in coordination with a curator, of a focus exhibition around a work of art in the Collection; and participation in the daily administrative routines of a small museum. The Fellow will have a place of study, access to the collections and library, as well as introductions to New York City museums and libraries. Frick curators and conservation staff will be available for consultation on the dissertation. The Fellow will be expected to give a public lecture on his or her topic. The Fellow will divide his or her time between the completion of the dissertation and activities in the curatorial department.
Qualifications and Application Process
Applicants must be within the final two years of completing their dissertations. The Fellow will receive a stipend of $35,000 per year and a travel allowance. The term will begin in September 2013 and conclude in August 2015.
Applications must include the following materials:
· A cover letter explaining the applicant’s interest in the fellowship and his or her status in the Ph.D. program. The letter should include a home address, phone number, and email address
· An abstract, not to exceed three typed pages double-spaced, describing the applicant’s area of research
· A complete curriculum vitae of education, employment, honors, awards, and publications
· A copy of a published paper or a writing sample
· Three letters of recommendation (academic and professional)
Please submit application materials to pouletfellowship@frick.org. Letters of recommendation may be mailed directly to the address below. Please note that any additional materials sent by post must be submitted in triplicate to the following address:
Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow Search
Office of the Chief Curator
The Frick Collection
1 East 70th Street
New York, NY 10021
The application deadline for the fellowship is January 18, 2013. Finalists will be interviewed. The Frick Collection plans to make the appointment in early April.
Benefits in Employment with The Frick Collection
The Anne L. Poulet fellow is considered a fulltime temporary employee for the duration of his/her fellowship and may access all benefits associated with fulltime employment status. Such as eligibility to participate in group life, health, and dental insurance plans. Employees contribute to the cost of their health insurance based on income level and the type of coverage they select. Other benefits include: short and long term disability insurance; employee contributed tax deferred annuity; flexible spending plans for health, dependent care and commuting costs; 13 paid holidays; and accrual of 12 vacation days the first year of employment (25 days second year). Additionally, The Frick Collection provides a dining service for all employees and volunteers.
Call for Papers | The Louvre before the Louvre
From The Wallace Collection:
The Louvre before the Louvre: Artisans, Artists, Academies
The Wallace Collection, London, 5 July 2013
Proposals due by 15 January 2013
Pedestal clock, ca. 1712- 20. Attributed to André-Charles Boulle. Jacques-Augustin Thury, movement maker (Wallace Collection)
Now one of the world’s best-known museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. The Louvre before the Louvre will delve into the fascinating but little known period of the Louvre’s history from 1643 to 1793, exploring the role this space played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.
Even before Louis XIV moved the Court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre had already become the centre of artistic, creative, and intellectual energy in Paris. Artists and artisans of all trades – from watch-makers to history painters – were given lodgings and studio space in the same wings and corridors that accommodated cultural organs like the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for state festivities and spectacles), the royal printing press, and the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions, Science, and the Académie Française). As the palace expanded over the next two centuries, the Louvre complex (the building and surrounding streets) came to be dominated by this growing community of artists, artisans, men of letters, and their aristocratic patrons, inhabiting this space and living out their daily lives together.
The Louvre before the Louvre will reconstruct and re-evaluate this space of artistic sociability. As dust billowed and paint dripped in artists’ studios, theoretical debates were thrashed out in the academies, and groundbreaking technologies were designed in artisans’ workshops, the Louvre became a fertile ground for collaboration, the results of which are evident in many objects (e.g. by Boulle, Oppenordt, Oeben, Boucher, Oudry, Girardon, Coysevox, to name a few) now in the Wallace Collection where this conference will take place.
Seeking a more intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual ‘neighbourhood’ of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period, we invite papers that explore the Louvre’s rich history, art, material objects, spaces, and social interactions during the 17th and 18th centuries. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:
• Artistic and intellectual circles — The workings of the Royal Academies and their academicians
• Living in the Louvre — Artists’ logements/studios; social order and daily life; professional/social interactions; individual and collaborative practice
• Form and function of Louvre spaces — Key sites: Galerie d’Apollon, Salon Carré, Grande Galerie, theatres, chapels, etc.
• Patronage networks — Patrons and collectors in the Louvre
• Decoration and display — Furnishing and decoration by Louvre inhabitants; displays of collections; exhibitions
• Louvre experiences — Written and visual descriptions of life in the Louvre
• Finding boundaries — Where did the artistic communities of the Louvre begin and end? How did one ‘belong’ to the Louvre community? What did it mean to do so?
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to amelia.f.jackson@gmail.com (Queen Mary University of London) and hannah.williams@hoa.ox.ac.uk (University of Oxford) by 15 January 2012.
Call for Papers | Imagined Worlds: Worldmaking in Arts and Literature
From the conference website:
Imagined Worlds: Worldmaking in Arts and Literature
University of Helsinki, Finland, 21-23 August 2013
Proposals due by 30 January 2013
The conference Imagined Worlds will focus on the imagined worlds created by artistic and literary works. To think of such works in terms of ‘worlds’ (or the mental representations they create in the minds of their audience) means concentrating on the representational dimensions of art and literature. The idea of worldmaking opens new perspectives in the study of art forms and their genres. It was formulated in philosophical terms by Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). His approach encompassed a broad spectrum of worldmaking across all art forms, sciences and cultural discourses and emphasized the idea that we create worlds on the basis of already existing ones. Worlds are built from the world(s) of our experience and cultural models or from already existing imagined worlds through various types of transformations.
Recent studies in cognitive narratology where questions related to how readers build up story worlds have opened a new field of study which can also function as a starting point for broader visions of the cultural imagining of worlds: ‘mapping words onto worlds’ to make sense of textual worlds can be more broadly understood as mapping signs onto worlds. Like texts, art and images do not merely mirror the world but also investigate ways of worldmaking.
Worldmaking also relates to the ideas of the works of art and literature we embrace. Asking the question ‘When is art?’ permits one to see different anachronisms and the messy temporalities of images. How an object or event functions as a work of art can explain how it may contribute to a vision and to the making of a world. (more…)
Conference | The Interior at European Courts
From the conference program (PDF). Also see the website: interior-unibe.ch.
Im Spiegel der Dinge – Objektkultur und Interieur an den Höfen Europas
Institut für Kunstgeschichte Universität Bern, 16 November 2012
Leitung: Birgitt Borkopp-Restle
Höfische Feste und Zeremonien der Frühen Neuzeit ereigneten sich in Räumen, die oft eigens für den gegebenen Anlass eingerichtet wurden. Die Konfiguration solcher Interieurs unterlag zumeist den Regeln des geltenden Zeremoniells; immer musste sie dem Repräsentationsanspruch eines fürstlichen Hauses, gelegentlich auch politischen Interessen oder Absichten Rechnung tragen. Das Symposium untersucht die Objekte, die als Konstituenten höfischer Interieurs zugleich komplexe Botschaften vermittelten – als Bildmedien konnten sie Geschichte vergegenwärtigen, durch ihre Materialität Rang und Reichtum sichtbar machen; sie konnten Tradition oder Innovation betonen und schliesslich auch dem Interesse an fernen Ländern Ausdruck geben.
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8:30 Willkommen (Kaffee)
9:00 Begrüssung: Christine Göttler (Universität Bern) / Einführung: Birgitt Borkopp-Restle, Universität Bern
Teil I
Moderation: Birgitt Borkopp-Restle
9:30 Michael Yonan (University of Missouri, Columbia/MO)
Keynote: Asian Objects and Interiors at the Habsburg Imperial Court under Empress Maria Theresia
10:30 Kaffeepause
11:00 Birgit Franke – Barbara Welzel (Technische Universität Dortmund)
Ereignis-Interieurs am Hof der Herzöge von Burgund
12:00 Hanns Hubach (Universität Zürich)
Empörende Bildteppiche – oder: Von der Kunst provokativer Diplomatie
13:00 Mittagspause
Teil II
Moderation: Christine Göttler
14:00 Ariane Koller (Universität Bern)
Objektwelten – Kartographie der Machtentfaltung am Hof des Kurfürsten Johann Georg I. von Sachsen
15:00 Alumni et Amici laden zum Afternoon Tea
15:45 Daniela Antonin (Hetjens-Museum Düsseldorf)
Zeremoniell und Porzellanbesitz am kurbayerischen Hof im 18. Jahrhundert
16:45 Birgitt Borkopp-Restle (Universität Bern)
Carpettes of sylke to ley upon the table – Oriental Carpets in European Court Ceremonies
17:45 Abschlussdiskussion
Enfilade 
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