Enfilade

From the H-WRBI:

Materializing the Spirit: Spaces, Objects, and Art in the Cultures of Women Religious
Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London, 5-7 September 2013

Proposals due by 1 February 2013

The History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland Annual Conference will be hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, on 5-7 September 2013.

Paper proposals are now invited. Presentations should be 20 minutes in duration, and should address some element of the conference theme, with reference to British and/or Irish contexts. The devotional and vocational activities of women religious sculpted the physical space of religious houses in unique ways. Patterns of use were etched into the fabric of buildings, guiding structural design and interior decoration. But buildings also shaped practice: whether the formal monastic sites of early or revived enclosed orders or the reused secular buildings of active congregations, women both adapted and adapted to their material surroundings.

A growing body of literature has addressed itself to convent art, exploring nuns as patrons, consumers and manufacturers of material and visual culture. These practices span the history of women’s religious life – from the early Middle Ages to the present day – and suggest a hidden but dynamic tradition of artistic enterprise. This conference explores the creative output of women religious including but not limited to textiles and the decorative arts, illuminated manuscripts and printed books, women’s patronage of painting and architecture, the commercial production of ecclesiastical textiles in the nineteenth-century, production of liturgical and devotional art in recent periods, and the development of unique convent and institutional spaces by and for women religious.

Key aims of the conference will be to highlight the scholarly value of these under-researched and little known spaces and collections and also to raise awareness and discuss the threats that they face as communities decline, buildings close, artefacts and archives are dispersed.

This conference will take a broad and diverse view on what constitutes ‘material culture’, emphasizing the conception, production, and meanings of the many material outputs of convents and monasteries. Papers are welcomed from a diverse range of disciplines: scholars from social and religious history, art and architecture, theology, anthropology, psychology and beyond are invited to offer fresh and innovative perspectives in order to illuminate ways in which women religious in Britain and Ireland created and were formed by material histories for over a thousand years.

Please send 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers to conference conveners Kate Jordan (kate.jordan.09@ucl.ac.uk) and Ayla Lepine (ayla.lepine@gmail.com) by no later than 1 February 2013.

Encounters, Affinities, Legacies: The Eighteenth Century in the Present Day
University of York, 28-29 June 2013

Proposals due by 19 April 2013 (extended from previous due date of 1 March 2013)

As the field of eighteenth-century studies continues to boom within the academy, the eighteenth century – invoked around names like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith – is becoming an increasingly frequent interlocutor in contemporary debates in the international media about society, democracy, human rights, and the economy. Whilst social and political commentators are reading our present in dialogue with our eighteenth-century past, cultural appetites for the eighteenth century on page, stage, and screen continue to grow: powerful suggestions that intertwined discourses like (E)nlightenment and modernity, central to so much eighteenth- and twentieth-century thought, remain vital to the social, political and cultural construction of our contemporary moment. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the complex webs of interconnection between the long eighteenth century and the ‘long’ twentieth century, from 1900 to the present.

Keynote speakers: Donna Landry (University of Kent) and Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London)

The conference will take place at the heart of a festival of public engagement events including public lectures, fashion, music, performance, and photography. Any proposals for involvement in the festival would also be received with interest, and should be emailed to Adam Perchard at agkp500@york.ac.uk by the end of January 2013.

The conference organisers welcome submissions for presentations in the following formats:

• Pre-formed panels, approximately one hour in length. Panels can contain two, three or exceptionally four speakers, and should identify an appropriate panel chair. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary panels.
• Individual papers, approximately 20 minutes in length.

We welcome presentations in original and innovative formats, such as interactive demonstrations, Q&A/debating sessions, or exhibitions. These should be no longer than 30 minutes per contributor. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• intertexts/intersects: engagements between eighteenth- and twentieth-century texts, images, and performances
• the eighteenth century on the twentieth-century stage, page and screen
• nostalgia and rejection: twentieth-century historiographies of the eighteenth century
• global centuries: (post-)empire, race, and cosmopolitanisms
• legacies and disconnects: constructing and reforming society
• print culture and satire: resistance, radicalism, and freedom of speech
• ‘the rise of the novel’: literary grand narratives
• place and space: architecture between centuries
• Romantic Modernisms/Modern Romanticisms

Panel submissions: Please send a 250-300 word abstract for each paper in the panel, along with a panel overview of 300 words, explaining how the individual papers relate to one another. Include the name and contact details for your chair, as well as each of the contributors.

Individual paper submissions: Please send a 250-300 word abstract outlining your paper. Include your name and contact details.

Alternative format submissions: Please send a 300-350 word outline of your presentation, outlining the content and format. Where presentations are made by more than one contributor, longer proposals will be considered. Include the names and contact details of all contributors.

Please send abstracts to encounters.2013@gmail.com no later than 1 March 2013.