Enfilade

From ASECS:

2020 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hyatt Regency at the Arch, St. Louis, 19–21 March 2020

Proposals due by 15 September 2019

Proposals for papers to be presented at the 51st annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, in St. Louis, are now being accepted. Proposals should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 15 September 2019. Along with our annual business meeting, HECAA will be represented with the Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session, chaired by Susanna Caviglia. A selection of additional sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members is included below. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here.

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Anne Schroder New Scholars Session [Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture]
Susanna Caviglia (Duke University), susanna.caviglia@duke.edu

This is an open session for advanced graduate students and early career scholars in the art and architectural history of the eighteenth century.

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Presidential Session: Fostering Eighteenth-Century Studies in Unwelcoming Places (Roundtable)
Michael Yonan (University of Missouri), yonanm@missouri.edu

The contemporary American cultural landscape poses challenges to scholars of the eighteenth century. While our research engages with Enlightenment ideals, we often conduct it while living and working in places seemingly opposed to those ideals. Recent political developments in multiple states (including Missouri) promise to impact the future development of our field significantly. This roundtable offers a forum for discussing these concerns. How can scholars, especially younger scholars, negotiate the tricky world of contemporary politics as they pursue their scholarly agendas? Topics may include: accepting a job in a state whose political mainstream differs from one’s own; contemporary reproductive rights and eighteenth-century studies; queering the eighteenth century in queerphobic settings; ideological fundamentalism and eighteenth-century scholarship; eighteenth-century antecedents to the contemporary political climate; and other subjects.

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Innovative Course Design
ASECS, asecsoffice@gmail.com

ASECS invites proposals for a new course on eighteenth-century studies or a new unit (1–4 weeks of instruction) within a course. Proposals may address a specific theme, compare related works from different fields (music and history, art and theology), take an interdisciplinary approach to a social or historical event, or suggest new uses for instructional technology. The unit/course should either have never been taught or have been taught recently for the first time. Applicants should submit a 750–1500 word proposal that focuses sharply on the leading ideas distinguishing the unit/course. The proposal should indicate why particular texts and topics were selected and (if possible) how they worked; ideally, a syllabus will be provided. The competition is open to current members of ASECS. Up to three proposals will be selected for presentation during the Innovative Course Design session at the Annual Meeting; a $500 award will be presented to each of the participants, who also will be asked to submit an account of the unit/course, a syllabus, and supplementary materials for publication on the ASECS website.

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The Sister Arts in Eighteenth-Century Ireland [Irish Caucus]
Scott Breuninger (University of South Dakota), Scott.Breuninger@usd.edu

During the eighteenth century, the sister arts of painting and poetry in Ireland were often linked to notions of political or social authority. Working in a society divided by religion, gender, and race, Irish artists were faced with the uncomfortably stark nature of political power and the (mis-)attribution of meaning(s) to their work. In this context, many of the themes explored by Irish poets, playwrights, musicians, and artists (among others) were necessarily grounded in discourses that tried to walk a fine line between personal expression and social expectations. Some of these creative works explicitly drew from Ireland’s past to inform their meaning, others looked toward the future with varying degrees of optimism and pessimism. In this nexus of aesthetic creativity, artists were forced to negotiate with a wide range of pressures that were unique to Hibernia. This panel welcomes proposals that address how issues of artistic representation related to questions of political and social power within eighteenth-century Ireland. Of particular interest are proposals that investigate how politically disenfranchised groups in Ireland addressed the connection between artistic representation, political power, and/or historical memory along lines associated with religion, gender, and race.

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Eighteenth-Century Italian Economies of Exchange [Italian Studies Caucus]
Irene Zanini-Cordi (Florida State University), izaninicordi@fsu.edu

The European Grand Tour destination, a center of port commerce for Europe and the Levant, and an ambitious participant in the Enlightenment Republic of Letters via an array of scientific and literary academies, prolific periodical publications, and the epistolary exchange of individual lights, Italy in the eighteenth century is especially fertile terrain for examining European and wider exchange economies. We seek papers on innovative networks in eighteenth-century Italy that sought to circulate, trade in, and trade on knowledge and ideas, material and cultural goods, and human beings. These may include but are not limited to the circulation of periodical literature; commercial ports of trade; Grand Tour networks; the trade in natural philosophical texts, instruments, specimens, and knowledge; fashion; the art market; culinary arts; and musical and theatrical production.

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Representations of Nature in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Science of Eighteenth-Century Italy [Italian Studies Caucus]
Francesca Savoia (University of Pittsburgh), savoia@pitt.edu

In a period of burgeoning knowledge about the natural world, how did artists, writers, philosophers and scientists—working in or visiting Italy in the eighteenth century—respond to the wondrous and/or dreaded manifestations of Nature? How fruitfully did the artistic, figurative and literary representations, interpretations and/or re-creations of natural objects and phenomena intersect with philosophical speculation and scientific research? This session seeks contributions that address these questions from the widest range of disciplinary perspectives: ecocriticism; eco-critical art history; eco-musicology; environmental history; history of science; cultural studies.

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Repairing the Eighteenth Century
Katarina O’Briain (St. Mary’s University), kobriain@gmail.com; and Allison Turner (Columbia University), acturn@gmail.com

In a special issue of Studies in the Novel from 1996, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick introduced the idea of reparative reading as a tool for replenishing (and repairing) literary studies. Whereas “paranoid” criticism sought to expose a damaging ideological substratum at every turn, Sedgwick’s reparative method would approach cultural objects with a sense of their potential for meaning-making: “this is the position,” she writes, “from which it is possible . . . to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part objects into something like a whole—though, [she] would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole.” To repair, Sedgwick implies, is not to restore some object or environment to a pastoral original; it is rather a way of doing anything at all with inevitably broken or mixed materials. If “the eighteenth-century origins of critique,” in Simon During’s phrasing, have been well established, this panel asks whether and how the notion of repair might offer new ways of thinking about our period. How, for instance, might repair complicate or contradict traditional narratives of capitalist accumulation and the rise of the consumer society? What sorts of repair are offered in response to political, environmental, and social crisis? Are there ways of thinking about repair outside of conventional notions of improvement, innovation, or progress? We invite proposals that approach repair in diverse ways—as a material process, methodological position, aesthetic operation, or conceptual tool. Proposals for papers that speak to the limits of repair or that suggest ways we might move beyond it are also welcome.

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Amateur or Professional? Reconsidering the Language of Artistic Status
Paris Spies-Gans (Harvard Society of Fellows), pspiesgans@gmail.com; Laurel Peterson (The Morgan Library & Museum), laurel.o.peterson@gmail.com

The categories of ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ have long been used to demarcate artistic activity. However, these classifications are frequently anachronistic, and do not reflect the language that was used at the time—they are often inflected as much by historiography as by the lives that people lived. Indeed, ‘amateur’ did not enter the English language until the late eighteenth century. Our panel seeks to challenge the distinction of amateur vs. professional, asking instead what these terms meant in the eighteenth century, to artists as well as to their publics. We hope to suggest that a reevaluation of these terms can reorient, expand, and, perhaps, reshape our study of this period. We invite papers that explore the concepts of ‘amateur’ and/or ‘professional’ across artistic fields. Topics might include materiality, media, gender, social class, travel, and public exhibitions or displays. Presenters might challenge the binary of amateur vs. professional as it is applied to drawing vs. painting, to fine vs. decorative arts, to female vs. male artists, to private vs. public activity, to academic training vs. self-teaching, etc. Where did one cross over from being an amateur to being a professional, or vice versa? To what degree are these retroactively applied categories helpful to the study of the eighteenth-century world, and to what degree might they be delimiting?

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The Rise of the House Museum: Domestic Curatorial Practices
Kirsten Hall (The University of Texas at Austin), kirstenahall@utexas.edu; and Teri Fickling (The University of Texas at Austin), terifickling@utexas.edu

When Elizabeth Bennet and the Gardiners are led on a tour of Pemberley by housekeeper Mrs. Reynolds, Elizabeth owns, “Mrs. Reynolds could interest her on no other point. She related the subjects of the pictures, the dimensions of the rooms, and the price of the furniture, in vain.” As the Pemberley tour proves, the rising popularity of country house tours as a leisure pursuit suggests that the gentry had become captivated by the prospect of seeing up close how others—especially the rich, powerful, or famous of the present and past—lived through their catalogues of “fine carpets and satin curtains.” On one hand, “great house” tourism shored up class hierarchies, celebrating the prestige of the aristocracy. On the other hand, the case of Mrs. Reynolds seems to show how the practices of archiving and exhibiting were increasingly open not just to the elites of clubs and universities but also to women and, to some extent, the working class. This panel invites papers that address the popularity of domestic curatorial practices in the long eighteenth century, inviting a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that may consider topics such as: collecting, curating, and housekeeping in the public vs. private spheres; the relationship between literary genres like biography, the novel, the travel guide, and the encyclopedia and house tours; taxonomic and empirical methods in the arts and sciences; tourism and secular pilgrimage; women and museums; historic preservation, antiquarianism, and historical consciousness; current scholarly practices in historicizing ordinary life in the eighteenth century; and the status of eighteenth- century historic house museums today.

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Mineralogy and Artful Metamorphosis
Tara Zanardi (Hunter College), tzanardi@hunter.cuny.edu; and Christina Lindeman (University of Southern Alabama), clindeman@southalabama.edu

The burgeoning field of mineralogy in the eighteenth century not only pointed to the increase in the scientific study and mining practices of minerals, such as amethyst and emeralds, but also to their greater manipulation by artisans, architects, and artists in the creation of decorative objects, textiles, jewelry, interiors, and garden grottoes. Since antiquity humans have analyzed and contemplated minerals for their beauty, intricate structures, purported mystical and therapeutic powers, economic benefits, and spiritual and chemical properties. In the 1700s, they were avidly incorporated in elite and amateur collections and displayed in natural history cabinets, and this interest became more systematic and rigorous, aided by a constellation of institutions and governing bodies that funded expeditions and fostered scientific inquiry. This session invites papers to consider the multiple and complex roles of minerals in artistic and natural history contexts. How did the raw materials, mined at home or abroad, relate to nationalistic and imperial pursuits and the kinds of terrestrial bounty boasted by nations? How were such materials then catalogued, displayed, wielded, or molded in their new, ‘civilized’ environments? How were such natural objects sources of pleasure, instruction, wonder, spirituality, and the exotic? Ultimately, how did these minerals undergo metamorphosis in new and artful ways that embodied an individual’s or collective taste, knowledge, and identity? We also welcome papers that address the explorative methods of quarries and the labor used to extract minerals.

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Art Professions
Carole Paul (University of California, Santa Barbara), paul@arthistory.ucsb.edu

The eighteenth century seems to have been a watershed in the emergence and evolution of various different kinds of work involving the visual arts, some of which were established as professions during the period. This session aims to trace the development of some of these types of work, considering not only how they evolved over the course of the century, but also how they were related and, concomitantly, what factors—cultural, economic, social, etc.—engendered their growth or professionalization. How, or were, those who did this kind of work remunerated? How did they identify themselves professionally, if they did so at all? Examples include museum curators, directors, and guards, tour guides, art and architectural critics, dealers, restorers, landscape architects, interior decorators, art historians, connoisseurs, and antiquarians. Papers that address these types of work are encouraged; if they discuss individual figures, they should do so in relation to the broader context.

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On Mimesis (Roundtable)
Edmund Goehring (The University of Western Ontario), egoehrin@uwo.ca

Robert Pippin, taking up Hegel’s claim that art had become a “thing of the past,” proposes that, with Modernist French painters, representational art ceased “to compel conviction, to arrest attention, to maintain credibility” (“After the Beautiful”). Wye Allanbrook, in laying out a poetics of the music of Mozart’s era, is still more emphatic that something irrevocable happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By her account, a curtain came “down on habits of thought about music’s nature”—that is, the mimetic tradition—“that had been sustained in one mode or another since antiquity” (“The Secular Commedia”). These observations (and similar ones could be added) indicate how the question of representation in the arts is still a lively one and how much it is sustained by eighteenth-century thought and practice. This roundtable welcomes contributions, from across disciplines, that probe this topic further. Responses might consider (but need hardly be limited to) narrative approaches beholden to thresholds or tipping points, the social/political dimensions of these changes in poetics, the persistence of mimesis into modernity, or challenges to mimesis—in the theory or practice of art—that appeared well before the nineteenth century.

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Colonial Matter
Kaitlin Grimes (University of Missouri-Columbia), krgxb6@mail.missouri.edu; and Danielle Ezor (Southern Methodist University), dezor@mail.smu.edu

The long eighteenth century witnessed a freer and faster movement of increasingly diverse goods around the world than had ever existed before. New objects, materials, and consumables traversed oceans and crossed over lands to serve new global marketplaces. These material goods travelled not just from or to Europe as much recent scholarship has suggested, but between global metropoles well outside of Europe, as for example between China and New Spain or India and East Africa. However, colonialism facilitated the movement of these goods, and so colonialism also marked these objects, materials, and consumables. Studies of traded materials provide a greater understanding of relations between colonizer and colonized as well as illustrate how particular materials were received and perceived in an eighteenth-century colonial context. This panel seeks to explore the connection between material culture and colonialism and to decentralize Europe as the main purveyors of these materials. Such topics could include but are not limited: colonial materials, objects used to house, contain, or exhibit colonial goods and consumables and their display; the trade and/or market of colonial goods in the long eighteenth century; and colonial interpretations of such objects and consumables. The goal of this panel is to develop an ongoing conversation on the relationship between material culture and colonialism within the long eighteenth century and how colonialism’s role in spreading objects aids in the comprehension of eighteenth-century material and visual culture.

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“Too political, too big, no good”: Picturing Politics
Jessica L. Fripp (Texas Christian University), j.fripp@tcu.edu

“Too political, too big, no good” were the words Kim Sajet, director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, reportedly used to turn down Julian Raven’s gift of his propagandistic/fan-art portrait of Donald Trump, Unafraid and Unashamed. Inspired by this amusing, if somewhat absurd, event, this panel seeks papers that address political art in the long eighteenth century (1660–1830) that was celebrated at the time but is now maligned, or vice versa. Topics might include: official commissions celebrating events that have fallen out of favor due to changing understandings of histories of power (for example, colonial or imperialistic endeavors); works that have been positively or negatively affected by the vagaries of taste for a style or an artist; works taken up independently by artists that were well-received or rejected; or works that demonstrate the conflict between the needs of a political regime and the public. What did it mean for a work of art to be ‘too political’, ‘too big’, or ‘no good’ in the eighteenth century? What impact do these value judgments have on our understanding of political art, then and now?

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Built Form
Janet R. White (UNLV), janet.white@unlv.edu

Architects, landscape architects, interior designers, and historians of these disciplines are invited to submit abstracts to this interdisciplinary session dealing with the built environment of the long eighteenth century. Subjects might include analysis of individual eighteenth-century buildings, interiors or landscapes; discussion of eighteenth-century treatises that has an impact on built form; analysis of the work of individual designers; and discussion of movements such as Neo-Palladianism or French Structuralism.

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Do-Overs: Repetition and Revision
Elizabeth Mansfield (Penn State), ecm289@psu.edu

François-André Vincent’s painting Arria and Paetus (1784), now in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, provides an occasion to revisit the significance of repetition in the long eighteenth century. As is well known, the practice of creating copies was not only a standard part of academic training, it was also a means of enhancing professional reputations and commercial success. A related but distinct phenomenon was the creation of variants. Vincent’s Arria and Paetus exemplifies this phenomenon. The painting in Saint Louis was exhibited at the 1785 Salon near a likewise fully finished but utterly different conception of the scene, also by Vincent. Both paintings represent the same encounter between the defeated Roman general and his wife, intent on mutual suicide to preserve the family’s honor. Whether the variants were presented at the Salon together to show the artist’s range, to illustrate a particular narrative theory, to create a quasi-cinematic visual effect, or were merely artifacts of artistic indecision remains uncertain. What is certain is that Vincent’s interest in repetition and variation is not unique. To gain a better understanding of this and other instances of authorial variation, it is necessary first to consider this phenomenon as a practice, as a mode of cultural expression and interchange. Toward this end, this session will address repetition and revision with priority given to papers that discuss variants in the visual arts.

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Collecting, Antiquities, and Eighteenth-Century Art
Lauren DiSalvo (Dixie State University); lauren.disalvo@dixie.edu; and Katherine Iselin (University of Missouri), ktp.iselin@gmail.com

The influence of the Greco-Roman world permeated eighteenth-century visual and material culture following the excavations that began at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Demand for large-scale sculpture and their copies, Greek vases, and the many Neoclassical paintings that were influenced by antiquity rose in the wake of eighteenth-century excavations as collectors passionately sought such objects. Likewise, more portable souvenirs such as prints, micro-mosaics, fans, gems, and architectural models also found their way into collectors’ hands. This panel seeks papers that examine the intersections of collecting, antiquities, and eighteenth-century art. What new perspectives can be used to explore how Greco-Roman art functioned in collecting during the long eighteenth century? This panel looks to examine collecting more broadly, including collections of specific collectors, types of popular collectibles, or reworked Greco-Roman artifacts. Papers focusing on non-traditional or little-known objects and collectors are particularly welcome.

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Experiencing the Past: Bringing Collections to Life through Experiment and Reconstruction
Al Coppola (John Jay College), acoppola@jjay.cuny.edu

Scholars such as Richard Sennett, Paola Bertucci and Pamela H. Smith of Columbia University’s Making and Knowing Project have drawn new attention to early modern crafts-people and artisanal practices in order to enrich our understanding of the bonds between making and knowing. In order to explore the embodied knowledge of historical actors, this cross-disciplinary scholarship brings together experts working in fields like technical art history, history of science and medicine, and food studies with modern scientists and artisanal practitioners. Insofar as this work promises to lend new insights into the ways life was experienced in the eighteenth century, this panel seeks participants who have undertaken—or plan to embark on—projects involving the recreation of historic recipes, experiments or related historical material. It seeks to understand the challenges, rewards, and unexpected findings that emerge when historical documents or objects are put into active use. Relevant projects might have to do with the recreation of historic recipes for medicines, food, drink, or pigments, the re-enactment of experiments with historical instruments, or other engagements. The panel especially welcomes projects that reach into the public realm, and it hopes to feature a special format in which a roundtable discussion will be enriched by tastings, demonstrations or other kinds of experiences. This panel has already secured interest from a collaboration between the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Wangensteen Historical Library at the University of Minnesota, and the Tattersall Distilling Co. that explores the culture of distilled spirits in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world: https://bit.ly/2HcTtxI .

Note: Once papers for this session have been selected, the authors will consult with the panel chair, the Program Committee, and the Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity and Accessibility Committee regarding food allergies, scent sensitivities, etc.

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Herbarium: Illustration, Classification, Exchange
Sarah Benharrech (University of Maryland), sbenharr@umd.edu

This session proposes to focus on the cultural practices and on the literary and philosophical representations associated with herbaria and herbarium-making in the eighteenth century. It is inspired by the works of A. Cook who has demonstrated the importance of herbarium-making in the botanical activities of J.-J. Rousseau, of M. Flannery who highlighted their aesthetic value, and of S. Müller-Wille who examined their taxonomic and nomenclatural significance in the building of organized knowledge. As a collection of pressed plants, a herbarium replaces drawings, engravings, or textual descriptions of plants, with actual specimens. Herbaria might be bound and display a systematic classification; but when left unbound like decks of cards they allow for a flexible and temporary arrangement of plants. At the same time herbaria involve issues related to (re)presentation through the manner in which dry specimens are placed on paper. And last, herbaria were treated as commodities in the transactions among botanists and amateurs engaged in the social practice of gift exchange. As trophies brought back by colonialists and their supporters, herbaria captured the many ambiguities of naturalistic exploration and colonial exploitation. Presentations on material culture, networks and diffusion of knowledge, empire and botanical knowledge, imaginary and literary herbaria, or on other cultural practices associated with plant collection and preservation are welcome. Please send a 200-word abstract in English or in French.

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Political Revolutions and Art Historical Exile
J. Cabelle Ahn (Harvard University), jahn01@g.harvard.edu; and Elizabeth Saari Browne (MIT), esbrowne@mit.edu

In recent decades, scholars have investigated the revivals, echoes, and continuities of eighteenth-century artistic styles into and beyond the nineteenth century. Taking their lead, this session questions the effects that the presumed links between style, genre, medium and politics have had on our understanding of eighteenth-century artists whose oeuvres traverse the centuries and political regimes, but whose works, for the most part, remain unchanged. The turning of the century in France, for instance, was particularly marked by the colossal fragmentation in historical consciousness owing to the French Revolution. While scholars have recently challenged the transformative role of the Revolution as creating neat breaks in cultural consciousness that directly align with shifts in governance, the spotlight has remained firmly on ‘revolutionary’ artists whose production primarily sought to create an explicitly public and political effect. This approach leaves the visual productions of artists active during this tumultuous period—such as Clodion (1738–1814), Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818), and Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810)—in limbo, as seemingly oblivious to the gradual liberation of intellectual and cultural vision in the revolutionary period. Through this session, we aim to address the continuities of artistic production in moments of profound political change and historical segmentation (roughly 1776–1815), and we welcome papers that take on such ‘defiantly anachronistic’ artists as case studies, topics that examine similar divisions in other European and American schools, and proposals that offer methodological solutions for addressing these erasures.

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Global Animals
Adela Ramos (Pacific Lutheran University), ramosam@plu.edu; Gabriela Villanueva (UNAM: National Autonomous University of Mexico), g.villanueva.noriega@comunidad.unam.mx; and Bryan Alkemeyer (The College of Wooster), balkemeyer@wooster.edu

With some exceptions, the groundbreaking work of eighteenth-century scholars in animal studies over the last two decades has focused on English and French histories and literatures. The trend could appear symptomatic of what Karen Stolley has identified as the “partial diversification” of eighteenth-century studies, which even as it strives to account for “peripheral” or “global” enlightenments, tends to overlook the Spanish American eighteenth century. Africa, as Wendy Laura Belcher has pointed out, has likewise been under-studied. This panel seeks to address how animal studies might avoid the “methodological nationalism” (Ulrich Beck) of the traditional Humanities that Rosi Braidotti critiques in The Posthuman in order to “unthink Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism” with animals. How did other literatures and worldviews that might be regarded as outside of the center respond to the animal question and engage in the debate concerning the human/animal divide during the eighteenth century? Presentations from all fields (art history, history, literature, political theory) that provide an overview of how methodological and/or theoretical approaches might expand the national focus of animal studies, case studies which situate a text, event, or figure in a global context, or which investigate animals in underrepresented national literatures or histories are all equally welcome.

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The Visual Gothic
Kristin O’Rourke (Dartmouth College), kmo@dartmouth.edu

The burning of Notre Dame cathedral made clear how present the Gothic still is today in everyday life in Paris and throughout much of Europe: as tourist attraction, as spectacle, as nostalgia, as cultural or religious symbol. This panel strives to think about how the visual image of the Gothic impacted contemporary art and literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ‘new’ Gothic fantasy of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, Gilpin’s picturesque tours, the Troubadour style in French art, and the restoration and completion of centuries-old cathedrals, for example, demonstrate how the Gothic re-gained a hold over architecture, painting, and literature at a time of political and social change throughout Europe. Was the Gothic revival a rejection of the classicism spurred on by the Grand Tour and Napoleon’s empire, or one aspect of a nascent Romanticism? How do politics and religion figure into an aesthetic focus on the vernacular and idiosyncratic aspects of the Gothic as opposed to the universalizing rationality of the classical tradition? Can we read an anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment reaction in the art of the time, or was the Gothic just another form of exoticism?

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Sight and Seeing in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
John Han (University of Tennessee – Knoxville), jshan111@gmail.com

The development of the microscope and telescope drastically changed the way people used sight to interface with the world in the eighteenth century. But between such major shifts in modes of seeing—from the cellular to the cosmic—the most basic mode of sight itself changed. Manifested in technical uses—such as the technique of surveying, the practices of landscaping, and the art of engravings—vision became a formal site of practical epistemology. Sight, therefore, became the subject across a variety of texts, such as William Stow’s survey Remarks on London, William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, and William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. Related to but apart from the scientific and technical arena, the eighteenth-century literary world—reliant on images, imagination, and imagery—portrayed the act, the process, or the object of seeing in its poems, dramas, and novels. From descriptions of characters looking at one another, to mirrors, and toward an outside environment, eighteenth-century writers allegorized the act of seeing. What do fictional accounts of sight tell us about the relationship between sight and imagination, ocular proof and illusion, material visibility and internal subjectivity?

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Rethinking Turquerie: New Definitions and Approaches
Ashley Bruckbauer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), albruckbauer@gmail.com

A vogue for all things ‘Turkish’ spread throughout Europe during the eighteenth century. Trade and travel between the Ottoman Empire and European states enabled Ottoman goods, including coffee, textiles, and costume albums, to flow into Europe. Likewise, artists living in the Levant, such as Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, produced numerous prints and paintings of Ottoman society for European audiences. Such objects inspired Turkish-themed masquerades in Rome, London, and Paris as well as portraits of European elites dressed à la turque. French nobles built cabinets turcs furnished with divans, sophas, and ottomans, while British and Polish monarchs erected Turkish-style tents and kiosks. Despite its immense popularity, European visual and material culture related to the Ottoman Empire remains underanalyzed. Like other forms of exoticism, turquerie has often been trivialized as a ‘decorative’ style lacking both veracity and substance. This panel aims to critically rethink eighteenth-century objects and images categorized as turqueries. In line with recent reassessments of chinoiserie and the rococo, it seeks to explore new definitions and approaches that recognize the diversity and complexity of these works of art. Is turquerie a useful term? What are its characteristics and strategies? How do objects expand or challenge traditional understandings of turquerie? How is it similar to and different from other types of exoticism? Proposals addressing any aspect of the engagement of visual and material culture with real or imagined Ottoman forms, styles, and subjects are welcome.

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From Tabula Rasa to Terra Incognita: Landscape and Identity in the Enlightenment
Shirley F. Tung (Kansas State University), sftung@ksu.edu

Enlightenment philosophical discourse situates travel as both the navigation of the literal terra incognita and the figurative terra incognita of the self, conflating geographical bodies with the bodies of the travelers crossing the terrain. In turn, eighteenth-century travelers seized upon this metaphor of embodied earth to depict the ever-expanding borders of personal and national identity. The historical transition of how landscape was conceived—from prospects offering a ‘blank slate’ to places inscribed (and re-inscribed) with meaning—speaks also to its growing importance as a material and symbolic site where the potentiality of traveling subjects and the nations they represent could be explored on a global stage. Enlightenment era travel writers employed landscape as a means of actively shaping the dominant paradigm by conveying to their readership the perceived incommensurability between what their nation was becoming and what they, as self-reflexive subjects, might be. Such reconciliatory expressions of shifting selfhood anticipated solutions to particular sets of challenges commonly associated today with imperialism. The attempted resolution of these dynamic and oft-burdened relationships between individuals, homelands, and distant places lent a particular structure to eighteenth-century accounts of landscape which are evident across various genres and media. Accordingly, this panel welcomes proposals on landscape and identity in relation to Enlightenment literature, visual art, philosophy, geography, and science, and from within or across various national perspectives. Papers might focus on travel literature (both fictional and non-fiction accounts), loco-descriptive poetry, visual representations of landscape, cartography, tourism, scientific experiments and discoveries, philosophical treatises, and colonialism and/or empire.

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The Woman of Color in the Eighteenth Century
Regulus Allen (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo), rlallen@calpoly.edu; and Nicole Aljoe (Northeastern University), n.aljoe@northeastern.edu

The republication of the 1808 novel The Woman of Colour, A Tale; the debut of Belle, a film inspired by the 1779 portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle; the reissue of the 1767 text The Female American; a new edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s 1763 Turkish Embassy Letters; and work by scholars such as Lyndon Dominique, Felicity Nussbaum, and Sarah Salih have facilitated a greater focus on eighteenth-century representations of women of color, and have indicated that such depictions are more prevalent and complex than the criticism has previously suggested. This panel invites papers from all disciplines as we consider verbal and visual depictions of women of African, American, or Asian descent and their impact on eighteenth-century culture and society.

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Bringing Historical Maps into GIS (Workshop)
Kacie Wills (Illinois College), kacie.wills@gmail.com; and Erica Hayes (Villanova University), ericay.hayes@gmail.com

Interacting with historical maps in their proper geographic space allows for a more accurate representation of a particular place and the changes it has undergone over time. The study of historical maps is important to eighteenth-century scholarship, specifically as it deals with notions of globalization and attempts at de-colonizing empirical approaches to space. This workshop will provide participants with the technical skills to align geographic coordinates to a digitized historical map in the eighteenth—century in order to create a georeferenced historical map. Participants will learn how to use simple tools like Map Warper, an open source image georeferencer tool, in order to overlay the digitized historical map on top of a GIS modern basemap for comparison and use in an interactive web mapping application. This workshop is ideal for scholars working with historical maps or interested in learning digital humanities GIS skills. Workshop participants will need to bring their own laptops. No prior GIS or mapping experience is required.

Note: Please contact the organizers to secure your space in the workshop. Signups will be accepted on a first come, first serve basis; there is a limit of 30 participants. Workshop participants will not be listed in the program. If needed to secure travel funding, a letter from the ASECS Office formally inviting you to participate in the workshop will be provided.

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Visualizing the French Empire
Izabel Gass, izabel.gass@gmail.com; and Philippe Halbert (Yale University), philippe.halbert@yale.edu

In recent years, art history’s ‘global turn’ has worked to acknowledge the vital role that non- Western cultures and imperialism played in the formation of European art and material culture. This commitment to more inclusive narratives has had a pronounced impact on many fields that privilege and address eighteenth-century art and history. For example, the study of British culture in this period has in many instances been fully eclipsed by the emergence of a ‘British Atlantic World’ and a model of empire that no longer views colonies in isolation from metropolitan centers, and vice versa. This phenomenon is comparatively less pronounced among scholars of French art and those exploring the various legacies of France’s ‘first’ overseas empire, which at its height stretched from Cayenne to Québec and also included points in Africa, India, and the Indian Ocean. This panel seeks to address, and hopefully redress, this disparity as we meet in Saint Louis, founded by the French in 1764 and North America’s last French colonial settlement. We are interested in two lines of inquiry: first, historiographical and methodological papers that explore why, exactly, French visual culture (inclusive of canonical art and material culture) of the long eighteenth century has received less of a global perspective within art history; second, papers that take on this global perspective in exploring topics and themes within the visual culture of a larger, lived French colonial experience.

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Burneys and Stuff: Material Culture and the Visual Arts [The Burney Society]
Alicia Kerfoot (SUNY Brockport), akerfoot@brockport.edu

From the mechanical pineapple automaton in Evelina, to the pawnbroker’s shop in Cecilia, the locket in Camilla, or Van Dyke’s The Children of King Charles I of England in The Wanderer, Frances Burney’s novels, plays, letters, and journals are full of the material culture of eighteenth-century life. This panel calls for papers on any aspect of material culture or the visual arts in the works of Frances Burney or other members of the Burney family and their circle (including figures such as Frances Burney’s mother, Esther Sleepe, who was a fan-maker, or her cousin, the artist Edward Francisco Burney). Presentations might consider the relationship between objects as portrayed by any of the Burneys in art and literature (including novels, plays, letters, paintings, craft work, the needle arts, and music) and as surviving objects in archives and collections today. Papers might also focus on the historical and cultural networks that one object can conjure, the relationship between historical object and its textual representation, or on that which cannot be fully captured in the visual, textual, or material representation of stuff.

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“I Refute It Thus”: Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Objects (Roundtable) [Northwest Society for Eighteenth Century Studies]
Marvin Lansverk (Northwest Society for Eighteenth Century Studies), lansverk@montana.edu

Proposals invited on any aspect of encounters with eighteenth-century objects, then and now, whether personal, professional, or philosophical—whether in texts, or with texts, or without texts.

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Shorelines: The Enlightenment Experience of Beaches, Coasts, Harbors, Bays, Islands, and Riversides [South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies]
Kevin L. Cope (Louisiana State University), encope@lsu.edu

Transitions from water to land are everywhere in the long eighteenth-century experience. Both fictional and factual characters such as Robinson Crusoe and Philips Ashton wash up on beaches; history and portrait painters, including Benjamin West, deploy more than a few shoreline scenes; landscape daubers, whether Caspar David Friedrich or Claude Lorrain, juxtaposed sea against land, as did illustrators such as William Westall; eighteenth-century navies employed artist-navigators to sketch coasts; poets such as Abraham Cowley versified the edging of water along terra firma; explorers discovered assorted uncharted islands and new coasts; casual philosophers such as Margaret Cavendish imagined the arrival at utopian lands; geologists and paleontologists, including John Woodward and John Ray, wandered coasts in search of fossils; optical experts offered mariners ever-better spyglasses by which to sight faraway sands; even musical composers tried to capture the joys of making landfall. The artificial shore—the port; the harbor; the esplanade; the maritime supply infrastructure; even the boathouse—likewise bustled with international cultural, economic, and political activity. This panel will investigate the evocation, rendering, representation, uses, and influence of shores in the full range of long- eighteenth-century genres, disciplines, and pursuits. A special welcome is extended to authors of papers exploring the interaction of media, whether the interplay of early oceanography with imaging of seashores or whether the use of museum architecture to reorganize near-marine coastal artifacts.

From Penn Press:

Huntington Library Quarterly | Centennial Essay Prize
Essays due by 1 October 2019

The Huntington Library Quarterly invites submissions for the Huntington Centennial Essay Prize. Offered in celebration of the Huntington Library’s centennial in 2019–20, the prize aims to promote scholarship in British and American studies from the sixteenth through the long eighteenth centuries. The journal encourages interdisciplinary approaches and embraces research in all humanities fields. The competition is open to scholars at any stage. Essays need not be based on research in the Huntington Library’s collections.

The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 USD to the author, and the winning essay will be published in the journal. Entries must not have been published or be under submission elsewhere. In addition to appearing in the print publication and in Project MUSE for subscribers, the essay will be freely available on the journal’s Penn Press website and promoted there for the period of a year.

Application should be made via the HLQ’s online review and submission system. Submission deadline: October 1, 2019. Word limit: 10,000 words, including notes. Details are available here.

In the following list, I’ve maintained CAA’s ordering of the panels, but please pay close attention to the HECAA session on ‘Race Beyond the Human Body’, chaired by Danielle Ezor and Michael Feinberg, and to the ASECS session on ‘Rulers, Consorts & Mothers: Queens in the Long 18th Century’, chaired by Kristin O’Rourke. Also note that CAA’s employment of alphabetical order doesn’t disregard definite or indefinite articles. And finally, the full list is available here. –CH

108th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Hilton Chicago, 12–15 February 2020

Proposals due by 23 July 2018

The CAA Annual Conference is the largest gathering of visual arts professionals that celebrates and advances the accomplishments of members and provides opportunities to share research and creative work. Each year the conference offer a full breadth of sessions representing the vast range of scholarship and practice of our members, as well as professional development and art-making workshops, meetings, receptions, and more.

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Archive Unsettled: Indigenous Materials as Travellers, Ancestors, and Cultural Belongings
Gloria J. Bell (McGill University), gloria.bell@mcgill.ca

Drawing inspiration from Seneca historian Arthur Parker who described First Nations wampum as an “ancient archive” for Indigenous peoples in 1916, this session proposal invites historical and theoretical papers investigating Indigenous materiality and archival relations, beyond the colonial settler frame. Shifting from the margins of the art historical discipline, this panel will center Indigenous art and visual culture. How does engaging with Indigenous materials as ancestors as beyond-human kin, as travellers and cultural belongings, as mobile and sentient things, reframe our relationship with Indigenous artworks in colonial archives? For Indigenous and allied scholars, writing archival experiences into scholarship helps unsettle the expectations of colonial institutions and encourages respectful engagement with material things for Indigenous and settler communities. This session welcomes papers from a variety of disciplines with an engagement in Indigenous arts, Indigenous histories, and archival dynamics.

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Assembling a Mexican Past
Delia A. Cosentino, dcosent1@depaul.edu; and Barbara E. Mundy (Fordham University), mundy@fordham.edu

More than any other nation in the Americas, Mexico has confronted the enduring artistic legacy of past eras—be they Zapotec sculptures unearthed in Oaxaca, sorrowing Virgins in side chapels of Baroque churches, or Porfirian-era public monuments—and from this has built narratives about the past. The selection and sequence takes on particular pressure during anniversaries–favored opportunities to think about the shape of time past. Given that the year 2020 marks a set of Mexican anniversaries—the years 1520 (Spanish-Aztec War), 1820 (Independence), and 1920 (Revolution)—we invite papers that examine how Greater Mexico’s past has been configured and reconfigured over time through specific assemblages of and/or within objects and artworks. In seeking papers that address a diversity of subject matters and moments across time, we invite reflection on these questions: How do choices of such assemblages by artists, scholars, leaders, and/or patrons reflect and reshape the politics of a given moment? What is the relation between archeological assemblage and art historical narrative? What is the role of the context [or frame]—be it tomb, church, home, or museum—on Mexico’s assembled past?

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Barriers, Borders, and Boundaries in the Early Modern World
Luis J. Gordo Pelaez (California State University Fresno), luisgordopelaez@csufresno.edu; and Charles C. Barteet (University of Western Ontario), Cbarteet@gmail.com

Barriers are an ever present reality of human creation and they have often been used as a signifier of cultural evolution. From the creation of symbol embankments that served as foundations for early structures or to demarcate socially encoded spaces, barriers have served many purposes. In United States and Europe walls are used to establish clear binaries between the privileged ‘us’ and the demonized ‘other’. In both locations, thousands of miles of barriers have been built, or have been proposed, to define literally and symbolically boundaries that in turn are transforming the landscape of their borders.Whether ancient or contemporary, walls have contributed to create barriers and borders through the redefinition of spaces, creating a sense of place and identity, demarcating physical boundaries, and imposing socio-economic hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. In the context of early modern cities, borders and boundaries emerged as a consequence of expanding empires and colonizing efforts, the development of warfare technology and new systems of fortification, and the implementation of directives regarding the use of urban space.Whether materialized or not, barriers were a common occurrence in designs proposed by urban planners, and an instrument for defining borders and boundaries in the political and socio-economic plans of powerful regimes. This session aims to examine the relationship between barriers, borders and boundaries in the early modern era from a global comparative perspective. Papers that address this interplay in any of its manifestations (conceptualization and building, notions of agency and perception, narrative and representation, materiality) are particularly welcome.

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Between Truth and Persuasion: Images and Historical Narration from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century
Alessandra Di Croce (Columbia University), ad2516@columbia.edu; and Federica Soletta, (Princeton University), fsoletta@princeton.edu

While images have often been used in Western art as effective storytelling tools, from religious paintings to photographic portfolios, their documentary value has always been far more ambiguous. On the one hand, images have been recognized as reliable historical evidence—along with material documents—since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Additionally, the detailed vividness of a visual description was often perceived as more effective than a text. On the other hand, however, images could be simply dismissed as undecipherable records, relics of the past completely useless if not paired with written words. Moreover, images could be easily manipulated, through the use of specific visual and rhetorical strategies, and become instrumental in constructing and negotiating ideas of truth, ultimately shaping people’s beliefs. The uncanny power of images to create a tangible truth, or a convincing history has been always widely recognized—whether with fear (iconoclasm) or admiration (as in Plutarch’s admission that “the most effective historian is he who (…) makes his narration like a painting”). With the religious controversy and political disputations of the sixteenth century, the question of images as both historical evidence and powerful tool of narrative persuasions became intimately related with broader questions of historical method and historical narrative. This session welcomes papers that explore the agency of images and engage with the notions of truth, fiction and persuasion in the construction of historical narration and visual history (or histories), from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

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Black Artists in the Early Modern Americas
Rachel A. Zimmerman (Colorado State University – Pueblo), rachelz@udel.edu

People of African descent played a significant role in artistic production in the Americas in the early modern period. Their work ranged from personal creations to public commissions; their positions ranged from enslaved assistants in artists’ workshops to celebrated master artists. Despite their contributions to visual and material culture, black artists working in the Americas in this period have received relatively little scholarly attention. Furthermore, the few individuals to whom monographs and exhibitions have been dedicated are scarcely known outside the regions where they worked. This panel explores art-making by individuals of African descent throughout North and South America. Defining artistic production broadly and considering a wide geographic expanse elucidates parallels and divergences in these artists’ experiences. The artists had varying relationships with African cultures, indigenous peoples, religious, political, and commercial institutions, and lived in regions subject to distinct European cultures. Within these diverse contexts, black artists needed to navigate the complexities of creating within dominant cultures that viewed them as biologically destined for manual labor but largely incapable of intellectual labor. Even when born free, legal and social norms often restricted access to education, resources, and patronage. As a result, the herculean efforts necessary to acquire materials, develop skills, and produce art objects in the face of such obstacles were rarely acknowledged in their lifetimes.

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Decolonising Design History (Design History Society)
Daniel J. Huppatz (Swinburne University); dhuppatz@swin.edu.au; and Megha Rajguru (University of Brighton), M.Rajguru@brighton.ac.uk

Over the past two decades, the geographical spread of design history has become more inclusive of design from various parts of the world and practitioners beyond Europe and North America. While this represents some progress, it is only part of the promise of decolonial histories. The other part is a reassessment of historical methods and themes. Recent thinking on decolonising design has argued for a shift from the production of universalising narratives towards pluriversality (Arturo Escobar and Tony Fry) and the promise of a more inclusive and decolonial practice. For design historians, this challenge entails how to reframe the discipline, not only in its geographical reach but in its assumptions and foundations. This panel calls for papers that examine alternative approaches and critical perspectives towards canonisation, periodisation and designer-biographical work that have been the dominant frameworks for research and teaching in design history to date. We are interested in papers that explore new design historical methodologies and forms of knowledge that might create a more inclusive practice. In what ways can design history research and teaching undertake this task without being trapped in a traditional/modern binary framework? Does a decolonised design history require new periodisations, new artefacts, or new designers, or does it require challenging the core principles of design that are anchored to industrial modernity? We welcome critical and engaging papers that address these questions.

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Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art
Onur Ozturk (Columbia College Chicago), oozturk@colum.edu

In a time when divisive politics have become increasingly popular around the globe and white-supremacy, otherizing, and Islamophobia are on the rise, it is essential more than ever for scholars, curators, and artists to study, curate, and engage with incredibly rich and diverse historical and contemporary visual cultures of Islam. However, one major challenge is the fact that the term Islamic Art, an umbrella term used today to cover arts of many cultures and civilizations, is in fact a western construct originally created by European scholars. Many “exotic” objects brought by crusaders and travelers to Europe, were not even considered examples of Islamic Art until they were collected by the European museums. The continuous use of this term with its orientalist origins strengthens normative and homogeneous notions of Islam and Islamic Art. Yet today, the field of Islamic Art, with its own history for more than a century, has contributed to our understanding of the dynamic and diverse nature of cultures developed by various civilizations of Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Asia. This session invites papers addressing how universities, museums and other educational institutions can continue to challenge stereotypical notions of Islam and Islamic Art through scholarly research, special exhibitions, and art projects, while avoiding the creation of new myths and the encouragement of nationalistic and ethnic attitudes.

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Early Modern Women in the Streets? Women’s Visibility in the Public Sphere (Society for the Study of Early Modern Women)
Maria F. Maurer (University of Tulsa), maria-maurer@utulsa.edu

In light of the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States, this panel seeks papers that investigate women’s visibility in the early modern world. Religious and literary discourses often admonished them to remain hidden from public view, but early modern women were skilled at negotiating social and cultural strictures. As artists, patrons, beholders and actors, and as individuals and groups, women used visual and material culture in order to proclaim their presence. This session therefore seeks papers that explore the visibility and agency of women in the early modern world. What roles did women play in artistic production and consumption, especially in highly visible locations such as the church or city square? Or, conversely, what strategies did women use to publicize artistic projects that may have been less visible? How did women negotiate, and at times violate, the boundaries between domestic or conventual space and civic space? How did women participate in early modern ritual and ceremonial life? We seek papers from any area of the globe from approximately 1400 to 1800. We especially welcome papers that take a global or transcultural approach to the question of women’s visibility and agency.

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Emerging Subjects: Portrait and Type in the Nineteenth-Century Americas
Phillip Troutman (The George Washington University), trout@gwu.edu

Scholars exploring the ‘slave portrait’ in early modern Europe and colonial America reveal it to be more paradox than oxymoron, occupying vexed territory shaped not only by convention and stereotype, but also idiosyncratic interactions among artists, sitters, and audiences. This panel extends that inquiry into the nineteenth century Americas. The explosion of print culture and genre painting brought many marginalized groups into the visual arts for the first time, but also promulgated a suite of tropes delimiting the depiction of race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality. Could socially and politically vulnerable individuals break through those representational constraints and emerge as pictorial subjects in their own right? We seek papers exploring this question along the spectrum from portrait to type, a broad cultural space where the idiosyncratic and the generic blur. How could portraitists’ use of conventions empower or undermine the signaling of individual sitters’ subjectivity? How did artists, illustrators, and publishers exploit portraiture’s realistic gestures to produce stereotypes authenticating social prejudice? Could image makers instead work through or against generic types to invoke the subjectivity of real persons? When and how did subjects actively participate in this process, revealing an awareness of how they might be perceived as individuals or as representatives of a group? In what ways did they respond to finished works, whether commissioned by themselves or others? We welcome case studies pursuing these questions in nineteenth-century paintings, prints, drawings, illustrations, photographs, sculptures, or material culture objects produced or circulating in North, Central, South America, or the Caribbean.

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From the Ground Up: Geology, Mineralogy, and Materiality in Art and Design
Antonia Behan (Bard Graduate Center), antonia.behan@bgc.bard.edu; Julie Bellemare (Bard Graduate Center), julie.bellemare@bgc.bard.edu; and Colin Fanning (Bard Graduate Center), colin.e.fanning@gmail.com

The workers dig and cut to get some mountain bones,
A labor of many long days.
A thousand wonderful scenes come to life from the stone;
How ignorant can people be not to see nature’s art.1

In words that could equally have been uttered by John Ruskin in the nineteenth century, eleventh-century Chinese scholar Ouyang Xiu captures the complex connections between geology, physical labor, and aesthetic enjoyment. Building on the material turn in art history, this panel responds to broader scholarly interests in the agency of matter. We posit that a focus on geological substances can challenge art-historical and museological conventions; for instance, whereas stone and metal are often considered distinct mediums, mineral and metal ores share certain characteristics that may undercut common artistic taxonomies. We invite submissions of papers that explore historical intersections between geological materials and the arts across historical periods and cultural contexts, with a particular interest in decorative arts, craft, and design. Themes and questions might include, among others: What cultural roles have stones, ores, or minerals played in specific times and places? How have artisans, designers, or manufacturers made use of geological materials or conceptualized their importance? What kinds of mediation have such materials (or objects made with them) performed? How might they resist or complicate binaries such as natural/artificial, organic/inorganic, or static/dynamic? And what can the histories of mining, geology, or the collection and display of rocks and minerals contribute to art and design history?

1. Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), excerpted from Kemin Hu, The Suyuan Stone Catalogue (Weatherhill, 2002), 64.

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Landscape through a Sociopolitical Lens: Representing the Environment in Northern Europe, ca. 1430–1795 (Historians of Netherlandish Art)
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, (Harvard Art Museums), joanna@seidenstein.com; and Sarah Walsh Mallory (Harvard University), sarahmallory@g.harvard.edu

Scarcely a news cycle passes without discussion of national borders, climate change, natural disasters, and globalization. This discourse has prompted new questions about the visual representation of the physical environment, making this an apt moment to reassess the extraordinary production and consumption of painted, drawn, and printed landscapes in Northern Europe in the early modern period. This session seeks to complicate existing understandings of this material by focusing on its intrinsic but diverse sociopolitical content. How, for example, did pictorial tactics and conventions function as inscriptions of power, control, identity, and otherness? What was the role of these images in shaping contemporary conversations about social ecologies, about land ownership and labor? How has the vision of nature provided by Northern artists informed or shifted understandings of ‘space’, ‘nature’, and ‘environment’? Can we understand historiographical models—the advent of global art history, for example—as a product of the study of Northern landscape? How can we think of landscapes as agents that actively shaped the way in which individuals viewed and lived in the world? This session hopes to attend to the concept of ‘world’, integrating considerations of ‘the Northern landscape’ with those of the landscape imagery produced by artists working in overseas territories, like the Dutch East Indies. We seek papers on all forms of landscape, including cityscapes, marine views, backgrounds of religious paintings, garden design, and city planning, produced in, or in connection with, the Northern Netherlands, Southern Netherlands, or Germany between the 15th and 18th centuries.

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Lost in Translation: Early Modern Global Art History and the Digital Humanities (Digital Art History Society)
Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University), paul.jaskot@duke.edu; and Meredith J. Gill (University of Maryland), mgill@umd.edu

This session seeks to draw on two current art historical issues: 1) that many leading digital art historical projects are centered on examples from the early modern world; and 2) that there is a widespread need across art historical fields to look to strong exemplars to help model the inevitable acts of translation between and across humanistic and computational scholarship. This panel seeks papers that address any aspect of digital humanities work on an early modern topic. From Latin America to East Asia, from the Mediterranean basin to the Black Atlantic, outstanding work has been done in bringing data-driven methods to bear on art historical evidence. How have art historians negotiated the intellectual world of ‘technologists’, and do we have successful examples of new ‘languages’ and other outcomes collaboratively forged by art historians and technologists? What have computational scholars found interesting or challenging in working with art historical datasets and questions? And, more broadly, why is the early modern world such a fecund area for art historical and computational discovery? In proposing these questions, we particularly encourage submissions from collaborative presenters and/or about collaborative projects that represent both digital and humanities’ perspectives. Our goal is to invite papers engaging crucial questions in early modern art histories—thus appealing to a large area of CAA interest—and papers that, in the process, also address the incorporation of computational methods. Proposals that emphasize the communication (or failure of communication) between digital and humanities’ approaches are especially welcome.

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Open Session for Emerging Scholars of Latin American Art (Association for Latin American Art)
Ana Maria Reyes, amreyes@bu.edu; and Ray Hernández-Durán (University of New Mexico), rhernand@unm.edu

The aim of the ALAA-sponsored open session is to provide a platform at the annual conference to highlight work produced by advanced graduate students and recent Ph.D.’s, who concentrate on the histories of Latin American and U.S. Latinx arts and/or visual and material cultures. Papers may focus on any region, period, or theme related to the Latin American and Latinx experience, including, Pre-Hispanic/Ancient American art, colonial/viceregal art, art of the nineteenth century, modern art, and contemporary art, including folk/popular art and craft studies, from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. In reviewing submissions and selecting the papers for the session, the co-chairs will be looking for strong proposals that cover a range of subjects across each of the noted areas. Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) membership is not required when submitting a paper proposal; however, all speakers must be active members at the time of the annual meeting.

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Past & Present: Britain and the Social History of Art (Historians of British Art)
Meredith J. Gamer (Columbia University), mg3704@columbia.edu; and Esther Alice Chadwick, (Courtauld Institute of Art), estherchadwick@gmail.com

What’s British about the social history of art? This panel joins ongoing conversations about what the social history of art is and what its stakes might be for us today. Specifically, it takes a ‘localized’ approach to this model of art history as it developed in and out of Britain and its former colonial territories. Whether of an ‘activist’ Marxist or more general ‘art and society’ cast (Clunas 1996), it is striking that key protagonists of the social history of art—from Hauser, Antal, and Klingender to Baxandall, Clark, and Pollock—were born, trained, or based in the UK. At the same time, the social history of art has been a dominant frame adopted by historians of British art itself, beginning with field-defining studies of landscape painting by John Barrell, David Solkin, and Ann Bermingham. How do we account for the strength of this distinctive art historical mode in Britain? Has it received peculiarly ‘British’ inflections? What impact has it had on the study of British art and on the writing of art history more broadly, in Britain and elsewhere? What possibilities has it generated? What others has it foreclosed? Topics could include, but are not limited to: histories of émigré and expatriate scholars; institutional, public, and popular histories; the relationship with feminist, postcolonial, and/or visual studies approaches; the social history of art in and after recent turns to empire and the global.

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Race Beyond the Human Body in the Long Eighteenth Century (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)
Danielle Rebecca Ezor, dezor@smu.edu; and Michael Feinberg, mfeinberg@gm.slc.edu

Attempts to ossify conceptions of race by creating visual affinities between race and bodies emerged as a motif during the Enlightenment era. Our studies of art, visual, and material culture depend on racialized constructions and assumptions about the human form such as Winckelmann’s analysis of beauty that is grounded upon enwhitened sculptures of Greek boys. As Anne Lafont has recently argued, the study of visual and material culture is a “remarkably efficient tool” for understanding race. While Lafont’s research focuses primarily on depictions of the human, she also gestures toward the ways in which longer histories about color, light, shape, and depictions of fabrics played important roles in attempting to create race-based iconographies. Taking race less as a fixed iconography than as an elusive process that matters over time, this panel aims to investigate how objects and pictures that may not even be directly about race at all can problematize the relationship between race and the human form. How can the study of images and objects problematize or unsettle the triangulation about race, the human body, and the black/white binary? How does race matter, and how does it operate independently from the human figure?

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Rulers, Consorts & Mothers: Queens in the Long 18th Century (American Society for 18th Century Studies)
Kristin M. O’Rourke (Dartmouth College), kristin.o’rourke@dartmouth.edu

Judging by the success of films like The Favourite to TV series like The Crown and Victoria, contemporary viewing audiences are fascinated by the life and lifestyle of historical queens. These filmed portrayals fixate on sexual behavior and offer voyeuristic pleasure in sumptuous sets and costumes, whereas politics and power relations are figured primarily through sexuality, maternity, and personal relationships. This panel hopes to probe the image and characterization of queenship in the long 18th century as portrayed in visual arts and popular culture of the time and in relationship to our own era. Did queens have as much (or as little) power as we see in these films? How did the relationship of queens to luxury industries influence public opinion? How did the structure of courts and queenship change visibly as the century moved towards revolution? Topics might include: the body of the queen vs. the king in art, literature and the popular press; propaganda and slander; dress, makeup or ornament; the politics of reproduction; divinity and corporeality; caricatures and portraits; political marriages and alliances; patronage of the arts & architecture.

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Sensual Texts, Material Histories: Language in the Long Eighteenth Century
Elizabeth Bacon Eager (Southern Methodist University), eeager@smu.edu

Writing in 1781, English antiquarian Horace Walpole reflected on the Inka custom of knotted record-keeping known as the khipu, professing himself “so pleased with the idea of knotting verses…that if I were to begin life again, I would use a shuttle instead of a pen.” Going on to explore the linguistic implications of both the khipu’s feel and scent, Walpole’s discussion draws attention to concerns over the materiality of language in the eighteenth century. Over the course of the century, a burgeoning trade in encyclopedias, scientific atlases, and technical treatises gradually reordered the unruly logic of physical experience into a more systematized and largely textual form. In this context, the sensory capacity of language came increasingly under scrutiny. While a growing body of literature has sought to investigate this problem through the images that often accompany such texts, this panel explores the material form of the text itself. How did individual letter forms function as repositories of material knowledge? What can a material history of the word tell us about the relationship between language’s abstractions and sensory knowledge in the long eighteenth-century? Drawing inspiration from Walpole’s notion of the khipu as a “soft language,” this panel seeks contributions that explore the range of material practices through which text was produced in the eighteenth century—from the casting of type to the threading of needles. Papers that examine this notion of a tactile language from outside or in contact with the West are particularly encouraged.

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The Bounded Field: Landscape Models and Microcosms
Ruth Ezra, rezra@fas.harvard.edu

The groundbreaking 2014 exhibition, Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish, brought renewed attention to the subject of the lay figure in Western art. The proposed panel will complement this and other recent scholarly contributions on artists’ models by considering how landscapes, rather than figures, were represented, miniaturized, and mocked-up in workshop settings. According to Johann Neudörffer, the late-medieval sculptor Veit Stoss likely relied upon a topographical relief of mountains and rivers when carving scenery, and in the eighteenth century, the painter Thomas Gainsborough famously constructed a table-top landscape consisting of “cork and coal,” “sand and clay,” “bushes of mosses,” and “distant woods of broccoli.” As these cases suggest, the purview for the session will be broad, comprising examples drawn from a range of geographies and time periods. The ontological uncertainty of the model—tool? work of art? both?—will also inform a wider discussion of why there are so few independent landscapes in the Western sculptural tradition. Topics explored may include naturalia and artificialia; the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm; dioramas and natural history; seriality; divisions of labor; and problems of scale. Finally, papers are also welcome on the subject of miniaturized landscapes not as models per se, but rather as they appear in the bases or backgrounds of finished sculpture.

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The Collector and Cultural Narratives
Julie Codell (Arizona State University), julie.codell@asu.edu

From the mid-19th century, a new kind of narrative about private collectors appeared in Europe and the US, e.g., Jameson’s Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries (1844), Waagen’s Kunstwerke und Künstler (Berlin, 1837–39), trans. Elizabeth Eastlake as The Treasures of Art in Great Britain (4 vols. London, 1854, 1857); Dumesnil’s Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs (1853–60); F. G. Stephens’s 90 Athenaeum articles on British collectors (1873–87); Strahan’s (pseud. Earl Shinn) The Art Treasures of America (1879–82); and René Brimo’s The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting (1938), among others. To Oscar E. Vázquez, “collectors and collections…are a creation of the modern era” with “increased attention to…the collector over the collected object” (Inventing the Art Collection 57–58). Attention to collectors began in the 18th century; by the 19th century, collectors became cultural icons and national figures. Many gave their collections to museums, shaping public taste and the canon. This panel will examine the discourse around collectors’ activities, high profile and relation to museums and public taste. Panelists may consider questions about 18th, 19th and 20th-century collectors, such as (but not limited to):
• How did these narratives shape and revise collectors’ images over time?
• Did narratives about collectors inflect notions of the modern? of tradition?
• How were gender, class or national identity applied to collectors?
• Did narratives about collectors endorse cultural hierarchies?
• Were collectors tastemakers? public servants? cultural paradigms?
• How did collectors’ motives and desires affect their collections’ meanings?

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The Institution as Collector (Society for the History of Collecting)
Elizabeth A. Pergam, eapergam@gmail.com

Both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrate their 150th anniversaries in 2020. Yet these two institutions began in very different ways. While the Boston museum was an outgrowth of that city’s Athenaeum, with an already extensive collection of works of art, New York’s museum was founded without a single object in its collection. These examples are a starting point to consider the ways in which museums act as collectors. The history of collecting is more usually positioned as driven by individuals or families. While house museums have garnered attention as expressions of their founders’ biographies and interests, municipal or encyclopedic museums have not in a comprehensive way. By focusing on institutions, our session seeks papers that expand our understanding of the nature of collecting. Papers might address any of the aspects of the collecting process: acquisition, installation and preservation, and de-accession. Questions that might arise for discussion are: How are acquisition policies of a museum articulated and how do they change with the growth of the institution? How and why have museums developed collectors’ committees? How do museums act as tastemakers? How are single collector bequests shown within a larger institution? What has been the impact of curators or directors on their institutions’ collections? Papers may consider institutions other than museums that collect works of art. For example, corporate collections, pension funds, or foundations have been little studied beyond self-produced volumes.

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“The Marketplace of the Flesh”: Coordinates for an Art History of Black Women’s Labor
C.C. McKee (Bryn Mawr College), cmckee1@brynmawr.edu; and Natalia Angeles Vieyra (Temple University), nataliavieyra@gmail.com

Theorist Hortense Spillers contends that black women’s enslavement “relegated them to the market place of the flesh, an act of commodification so thoroughgoing that the daughters labor even now under the outcome.” For Spillers, black femininity is an ontological position that constitutes “the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world.” Moreover, this commodification of the flesh did not end with emancipation, its vestiges live on in black women’s labor in the present. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists working in the Atlantic World mobilized the picturesque to obfuscate the realities of chattel slavery and the work of black women in particular. The fungibility that conditioned black femininity under slavery and in its wake has all-too-often been elided in art historical scholarship. Taking Spillers’s provocation as our starting point, this panel asks: Where can black women’s labor be located in the visual record? How do black women’s artistic practices continue to interrogate the visual and material histories of labor at the violent nexus of the human and non-human?

We welcome proposals that take up the visual and material conditions of black labor and women’s work in the Atlantic World. This includes, but is by no means limited to: the intersecting histories of gender and race as they relate to the representation of labor or its objects; contemporary artistic, visual and material cultural treatments of black women’s labor; and capacious approaches to black femininity and labor untethered to binary gender, encompassing trans* and queer identities.

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Topographical Drawing
Cynthia Roman (The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale), cynthia.roman@yale.edu; and Patricia Mainardi (The Graduate Center – City University of New York), pmmainardi@gmail.com

In the modern era, landscape painting has been largely defined by Impressionism, favoring atmospheric visuality over fidelity to form. And yet this was not always the case. This session seeks to explore the parallel incentive, topographical drawing, in all its manifestations. We define topography as a pictorial description of a specific place in a wide array of forms with a diversity of functions and patrons or audiences. These might include travelers’ sketchbooks, architectural renderings, mapmaking, estate portraits, botanical illustration, etc. We are interested in the work of professional and amateur artists, scientists, architects, and engineers. Proposals could focus on scientific knowledge of space (detail/geology/geography); on making and learning strategies; on the functions of topographical projects (patron, creator, or audience expectations); methods of observing, recording, or conveying the desired ‘information’ about the place (choices of media, format, style, color, technique).

Building on recent scholarly attention given to the role and history of topographical views, most notably the British Library’s project Picturing Place and broadening the ongoing Yale University-wide project on topography sponsored by the Lewis Walpole Library, we seek to cast as wide a net as possible, not limited either geographically or chronologically. We have designed this session as an open call for proposals. Preference will be given to new participants because we hope that this session will follow the long-standing CAA tradition of identifying and making connections among scholars whom we do not yet know but who share our interests.

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Un-making Architecture
Jason Eugene Nguyen (Getty Research Institute), jason.e.nguyen@gmail.com; and Elizabeth J. Petcu (University of Edinburgh), ejpetcu@icoud.com

Architecture is enduringly conceived as an additive, building-oriented phenomenon. Nevertheless, the prelude to construction—as well as architecture’s emergence and aftermath—nearly always involve elements of destruction. The razing of built and natural landscapes, planned obsolescence, cycles of dismantling, iconoclasm, spoliation, and other forms of un-making condition architectural cultures across time and geographies. Destruction, in other words, undergirds architecture’s creative processes. This session seeks papers that investigate ways of un-making in architecture across any period or region. It asks how acts of destruction, whether deliberate, accidental, or caused by natural forces, produce architectural knowledge and inform the built environment in theory and practice. Although recent scholarship has privileged the making process, the acts of ‘un-making’ that inform most architectural projects work in profound but often overlooked ways. These includes the demolition of monuments and heritage sites, the flattening of settlements ensuing human displacement, the obliteration of natural and built landscapes due to environmental disaster, and the dismantling of buildings for renewal and restoration. Processes of architectural un-making also operate in architectural theory, as in Piranesi’s sublime depictions of ruination, or, more recently, Forensic Architecture’s analyses of urban and environmental devastation. How have acts, events, and theories of destruction altered our conceptions of architecture? What productive consequences have emerged from the rubble of architecture’s un-making? And how has the physical and theoretical disassembling of architecture prompted shifts in artistic thought and practice? We welcome histories of architecture that confront the materials, conditions, environments, things, and ideas that building practice and architectural theory un-make.

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What Can Art Say about Extinction?
Lily Woodruff (Michigan State University), lilywoodland@gmail.com; and Brianne Cohen (University of Colorado, Boulder), brianne.cohen@colorado.edu

Extinction of plant and animal species was discovered at the end of the 1700s even as its causes continued to be debated for centuries. Today, we are in the midst of a massive loss of biodiversity caused by human activities that include global warming, the destruction of habitats, and the slaughter of animals for reasons ranging from convenience to the market in exotic species. Not all groups are equally responsible, however, as extinction is driven by the development and consumer activities of the wealthy, while traditional ways of life are alternatively scapegoated and jeopardized. Emerging from the animal turn, recent publications on extinction have taken interdisciplinary approaches that multiply the stories that can be told in the face of great loss. This panel seeks to address this topic from across its history, and from diverse cultural perspectives. We aim to understand the ways that art and visual culture have reflected on and processed species loss in forms ranging from scientific illustration, to eco art, video, and protest. How does visual production allow us to understand the cultural, political, and economic causes of extinction, and conversely of conservation? Can it remediate the harm done by colonial exploitation? Do artistic practices provide an opportunity to conceptualize animal and plant subjectivity in a way that promotes human understanding of our ecological interdependence? How do they provide models for envisioning temporal scales of generational loss, the traumas of cataclysm and of slow violence, or investments in long-term sustainability?

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Working with Decolonial Theory in the Early Modern Period
Natalia Vargas Márquez (University of Minnesota), varga066@umn.edu; and Leslie Elise Todd, leslie.e.todd@gmail.com

Decolonial theory developed in the early 1990s as a renewed theoretical framework associated to critical theory that focuses on the concept of coloniality, a term that encompasses the expansion of colonial domination and its effects today. Scholars who have primarily written on and contributed to the development of the theory were and continue to be social scientists such as Aníbal Quijano and thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, as well as anthropologists and scholars of literature, philosophy, religion, and languages. Recently, art historians have explicitly drawn decolonial theory more directly into their work including Ananda Cohen-Aponte’s 2017 award-winning chapter “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance: A View from the Andes” in which she outlines a decolonial model of early modern art history, and Paul Niell’s preface to the 2018 exhibition catalogue Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié in which he outlines a curatorial approach to decolonialism. This panel invites art historians of the early modern period to continue the conversation opened by Cohen-Aponte and Niell on decolonial models in art history. We seek to explore on a global scale how decolonial theory shapes our work, and in turn, what we can contribute to the theory. What is the applicability of this theoretical framework to art history of the early modern period? What are its blind spots? How do ideas and terms such as hybridity, mestizaje, and syncretism fold into or contrast against decolonial theory? We encourage papers that focus on historiographical, curatorial, and/or art historical ideas and questions.