Online Discussion | Advancing Equity in & through Academic Footnotes
Information on The Italian Art Society, which is dedicated to the study of Italian art and architecture from prehistory to the present day, is available here:
Citing Truth to Power: Advancing Equity in & through Academic Footnotes
The Emerging Scholars Committee of The Italian Art Society
Online, 2 June 2021, 12pm (CST)
Footnotes are the fundamental building blocks of academic arguments. They not only validate new ideas, they also situate us scholars within larger academic conversations and serve as a roadmap for how those conversations have developed over time. But this relationship is reciprocal. When appealing to the authority of these previous scholars, our footnotes also amplify their voices and argue implicitly for what conversations are worth being had, and by whom. As a result, footnotes often serve to reinforce the dominance of a narrow range of (usually European and American, white, fully-able, male) academics, limiting both the kinds of conversations that can be had within a field as well as who can have them. For this reason, we invite you to our virtual open forum. By bringing scholars of Italian Art History and related art historical and humanities fields into conversation with each other, we hope to interrogate what is at stake in both our footnotes and the citational process.
Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor for Brown University Library’s Digital Publications Initiative. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual culture and is co-chair of the College Art Association’s Committee on Research and Scholarship.
Julia DeLancey is Professor of Art History at the University of Mary Washington. She specializes in the visual culture of early modern Venice and, most recently, works on questions related to disability, art, and visual culture.
Robert Clines is Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at Western Carolina University. His first book A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean appeared in 2019. He’s currently writing a book tentatively entitled Ancient Others: Essays on Race, Empire, and the Mediterranean in Italian Renaissance Humanism.
Excavating James Madison’s Montpelier
Transferware ceramics, Bride of Lammermoor pattern, after 1819, when Sir Walter Scott’s novel was published.
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From the most recent issue of Preservation Magazine:
Meghan Drueding, “Ceramic Fragments Provide Clues to an Enslaved Community’s Past,” Preservation Magazine (Spring 2021), p. 16.
What does a one-inch-square scrap of an old ceramic teacup mean? Plenty, when it’s found during an archaeological dig at James Madison’s Montpelier, a National Trust Historic Site in Orange County, Virginia.
The dig took place over a four-year period ending in 2016, and focused on the South Yard, which contained housing for many of the people enslaved by the Madison family. It yielded thousands of ceramic pieces from hundreds of china patterns. Their existence revealed that members of Montpelier’s enslaved community often purchased their own ceramics using money they earned through activities like raising livestock, growing vegetables, or sewing—on top of the unpaid work the Madisons required of them.
“The ledger books survive from at least one nearby store,” says Mary Furlong Minkoff, curator of archaeological collections. “We have records of people we know were enslaved at Montpelier buying things for themselves.” . . .
The full article is available here»
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