Call for Papers | ASECS 2022, Baltimore
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor
(Photo by Patrick Gillespie, September 2016; Wikimedia Commons)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
2022 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor, 31 March — 2 April 2022
Proposals due by 8 October 2021 (extended from the original date of 17 September)
Proposals for papers to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, in Baltimore, are now being accepted. Proposals should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 17 September 2021. Along with our annual business meeting, HECAA will be represented with the Anne Schroder New Scholars Session, chaired by Dipti Khera and Aaron Wile (see #173). 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.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
1 Presidential Session | Venice, Real and Imagined
Irene Zanini-Cordi (Florida State University), izaninicordi@fsu.edu
Venice, hovering above its lagoon waters, was dismissed by Chateaubriand as a “city against nature” after his first visit, but defended by the Venetian salonnière Renier Michiel as “a city above nature.” This difference in perceptions, speaks to the fascinating protean quality of the city. Its beauty, traditions, architecture, culture and diversity have mesmerized and puzzled grand tourists, and have attracted artists, writers, singers, and actors from all over the world. This session welcomes papers focusing on any aspect of eighteenth-century Venice, both real and imagined.
2 Presidential Session | New Horizons in Enlightenment Studies (Roundtable) Meghan Roberts (Bowdoin College), mroberts@bowdoin.edu; and Daniel Watkins (Baylor University), daniel_watkins@baylor.edu
Twenty years after Keith Baker and Peter Hanns Reill published What’s Left of Enlightenment?, the Enlightenment is in the news. Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance became a bestseller in the wake of the 2015 attacks in Paris. David Hume’s racist statements in Essays, Moral and Political drew widespread notice and condemnation, resulting in Edinburgh University renaming David Hume Tower in 2020. In 2021, conservative talking heads claimed that Benjamin Franklin fought against “cancel culture.” The heritage of the Enlightenment is up for grabs. As Christy Pichichero has convincingly argued, it is necessary to complicate pristine notions of the Enlightenment and “make transparent the aspirations and the drastic omissions in Enlightenment ‘philosophie.’” We propose a roundtable that addresses the complicated and contested status of the Enlightenment in our current historical moment and contemplates new paths forward for Enlightenment teaching and scholarship. Among many possible questions, what is new for Enlightenment studies, and why does it matter? What does it mean to speak of Enlightenment in global and colonial contexts? Has studying race, gender, and Enlightenment changed in our moment of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter? We hope to represent a wide array of perspectives and particularly encourage graduate students and early career researchers to apply. Panelists working on any facet of the Enlightenment, broadly defined, are welcome.
3 Presidential Session | Undergraduate Research (Roundtable)
Rachael King (University of California, Santa Barbara), rking@english.ucsb.edu
This roundtable invites considerations of the role that undergraduates play in research into the eighteenth century. As major requirements and undergraduate interest are changing at many universities, many ASECS members are not teaching primarily, or at all, in the field of eighteenth-century studies. But at the same time, cross-rank research groups in fields such as the digital humanities, book history, and critical making are increasingly common, a trend that can attract undergraduates to the field. How is the move toward undergraduate research initiatives affecting our work? How can we encourage more undergraduate research? Presentations by or including undergraduate researchers are particularly welcomed.
4 Innovative Course Design
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.
5 Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon (Workshop) [Digital Humanities Caucus]
Collin Jennings (Miami University), jenninc@miamioh.edu
The ASECS Digital Humanities Caucus invites proposals for supporting a Wiki Edit-A-Thon focused on creating and expanding Wikipedia entries for marginalized figures and groups of the eighteenth century. Proposals may come from either scholars with experience editing Wikipedia entries or from scholars with plans for expanding particular entries. Speakers will prepare brief presentations (~5 minutes) on best practices or plans for editing Wikipedia entries, and the majority of the session will consist of attendees contributing to eighteenth-century entries. Although the Edit-A-Thon during the session will be relatively short, we will also set a goal for the number of entries to be created or expanded over the course of the entire conference.
6 Centering Marginalized Voices in Digital Humanities Projects (Roundtable) [Digital Humanities Caucus]
Mattie Burkert (University of Oregon), mburkert@uoregon.edu
How can scholars use digital tools, ranging from databases, to digitization, to visualization, to center marginalized voices of the eighteenth century? To what extent can new methods produce new perspectives on the figures and groups of the period? We seek proposals describing DH projects that have foregrounded marginalized voices of the eighteenth century. The projects can be at any stage of development, from planning to completion, but the speakers should be able to share concrete steps they took for centering underrepresented groups in their projects. These might include using digital research techniques for discovering under-researched figures, or they might entail using publication and exhibition platforms for representing projects designed around such figures.
7 Disability Performances [Disability Studies Caucus]
Annika Mann (Arizona State University) Annika.Mann@asu.edu; and Emily Stanback (University of Southern Mississipi), Emily.Stanback@usm.edu
This panel seeks to investigate disabilities, bodyminds, and performances in the long eighteenth century. How do we recover an archive of disability performance, broadly speaking? How might disability performance render new insights about the formation of disability as a socially constituted and contested identity? What insights can eighteenth-century archives offer about the performativity of the everyday when thinking through diverse bodyminds?
By “performance” we hope to signal not just theatre, the playhouse, and the repertoire, but also larger moments that feel “performative.” As Tracy C. Davis, Willmar Sauter, and Judith Butler theorize, performance time, performance events, and performative self-making raise concerns about layered temporalities, polychronicity, repetition, hiccups, ruptures, and revisions. Tobin Siebers calls attention to the multiple offstage performances like passing, masquerading, and other ways to navigate the social. How can eighteenth-century performances extend, complicate, or reshape our understanding of disability performance? We invite 250-word abstracts about these or related topics on disability performance in the long eighteenth century.
17 Transformation, Idealization, Animation: Contemporary Perspectives on the Pygmalion Myth [New Lights Forum]
Jennifer Vanderheyden (Marquette University), jennifer.vanderheyden@marquette.edu
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore holds Falconet’s renowned sculpture Pygmalion and Galatea. According to the museum’s website, “This statue is very likely the one exhibited by the artist at the Salon of 1763 (in Paris). Pygmalion is depicted in rapturous amazement at the feet of his love object, a nude sculpture, just at the moment when it is given life by Venus, the goddess of love.” This panel invites interdisciplinary proposals that consider the enduring influence of the Pygmalion myth from a contemporary perspective. In all disciplines one encounters love and its idealization, disappointment of imperfections, animation of the inanimate, transformations of the allegory, the aesthetics of mimesis… to name only a few. For example, in his Salon of 1763, Denis Diderot praises Falconet for his animation of Pygmalion, but continues with a critique and proposal of another version of the statue that would be even more lifelike. Diderot’s theories of this animation (including his proposal that one can consume marble by pulverizing it, mixing the powder with soil and compost, then sowing vegetables that will be consumed) continue to engage dialogue, as do other reworkings of the Pygmalion story.
19 Teaching the Eighteenth Century (Poster Session) [Pedagogy Caucus]
Linda Troost (Washington & Jefferson College), ltroost@washjeff.edu
How do we continue to engage students with the eighteenth century in innovative ways? All aspects of pedagogy are welcome for poster presentations that cover an entire course or focus on a particular element of a course. Brief presentations (5 minutes) will be followed by time for conversation. Participants in panels or roundtables are also welcome to participate in the poster session. Posters will remain on display throughout the conference and then be placed online.
20 Aiding the Anxious: How Non-Specialists Can Navigate Teaching about Race and Empire (Roundtable) [Race and Empire Caucus]
Kimberly Takahata (Villanova University), kimberly.takahata@villanova.edu
Building on the series of Presidential Sessions including Concepts in Race and Pedagogy for 18th-Century Studies (2021), Teaching Race in the 18th Century in the 21st-Century Classroom (2019), and Addressing Structural Racism in the 18th-Century Curriculum” (2018), this session invites facilitators for a discussion and workshop for non-specialists of critical race and anticolonial studies on integrating matters of race and empire into the 18th-century classroom. Pushing past strategies of syllabus “inclusivity,” this session asks: how can we center race and empire as critical paradigms across a variety of courses in eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history? What strategies can expand and deepen our engagement with race and empire in the classroom? In particular, this conversation will be interested in techniques that are helpful for early career, sessional, and adjunct instructors.
21 Eighteenth-Century Studies in Dialogue with the Work of Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe (Roundtable) [Race and Empire Caucus]
Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster University), zuroski@mcmaster.ca
At this moment of intensified calls across “traditional” academic fields for more sustained engagement with antiracist frameworks, decolonizing movements, and Black life and liberatory thought, how might eighteenth-century studies of race and empire better think with and learn from work in Black and African/African Diasporic studies? This roundtable invites participants to focus on the writing and scholarship of Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe—three thinkers whose work on ontologies, geographies, and narratives of Black life since the eighteenth century seems more crucial than ever to any scholarly approach to the long eighteenth century. Papers may focus on one, two, or all three writers, and should call attention to how a specific text, figure, concept, or method from these scholars’ work generates possibilities for future approaches to the study of race and empire.
48 Crafted Lives
Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), chloe.wigstonsmith@york.ac.uk; and Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent), J.E.Batchelor@kent.ac.uk
We invite proposals that address the teaching and making of needlework by women and girls in the transatlantic eighteenth century. In recent years, the “material turn” has generated new approaches to material culture and maker’s knowledge in eighteenth-century studies. Yet skills such as needlework and embroidery often remain underestimated, falling under the collection of “female accomplishments” perceived, then and now, as symptomatic of the undereducation and oppression of women and girls. “Crafted Lives” seeks to reorient attention to the transfer of knowledge, aesthetics and techniques that circulated back and forth across the Atlantic. We’re especially keen on proposals that make visible the politics of needlework and the complexities of women’s handicrafts and their experiences of learning, making and teaching needlework over the lifecycle. How did material literacy intersect with or diverge from textual literacy? How did needlework forms articulate their makers’ emotions and their cultural, religious and political beliefs? How did some of these material contributions engage debates about abolition, empire and women’s rights? How did eighteenth-century craft knowledge circulate within/between classes, households and institutions, the provinces and the metropole, and within colonial spaces? We welcome abstracts from across the disciplines represented by ASECS members, as well as abstracts that draw on a range of archives.
54 Arts of the Table in Global Perspective
Sarah R. Cohen (University at Albany, SUNY), scohen@albany.edu
For elite and middle-class consumers in the eighteenth century, dining entailed a variety of forms of artistry: in addition to food preparation itself, elaborate attention was often paid to tableware, rituals of consumptive performance, as well as written texts that alternately prescribed, described and imagined the process of consuming food and drink as physical and material enactment. All of these arts were moreover often global in scope, whether one took the perspective of diners in Europe or of those in other parts of the world; through international commerce, colonization, travel, and curiosity food and its consumptive arts manifested multiple points of intersection, exploitation and even hybridization among countries and cultures. This panel seeks papers that address any aspect of the arts of dining, viewed through the lens of an increasingly globalized eighteenth-century world.
55 Transplanted Lives and Foreign Presence: The Visual Culture of Immigrants in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Marina Kliger (Metropolitan Museum of Art); and Thea Goldring (Harvard University), Marina.Kliger@metmuseum.org
During the long eighteenth century, established commercial networks, expanding empires, political conflicts, and economies of slave labor contributed to the growing presence of foreign individuals and communities within Europe and the British Isles. These voluntary and forced transplants from the East and West Indies, the shores of the Mediterreanean, and from across Europe itself became part of the urban fabric of increasingly cosmopolitan cities like London, Paris, Marseilles, Venice, and Amsterdam. Building on the work of Denise Murrell and Ian Coller on France and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Rozina Visram, and Jennifer Germann on Britain, this panel considers the visual representation of these immigrant groups in Europe, as well as their own artistic practices within their host societies. Following recent scholarship that foregrounds the negotiation of difference within and the global character of Enlightenment culture, we ask: How did images of eighteenth-century Europe’s foreign residents contribute to constructions of cultural difference and competing notions of cosmopolitan and national identity? How did these portrayals shape such communities’ lived experiences? Conversely, how did foreign individuals exert agency through visual representation and negotiate their new societies through artistic practice? Finally, considering both the gaps and biases of the visual archive, what are the limits and dangers of using images as evidence of the historical presence of these groups in Europe? We particularly welcome papers that seek to recover the identities and lived experiences of persons represented in exoticizing studies, unidentified portraits, cosmopolitan city views, artist sketches, and the like.
61 How ‘Byzantine’ Was the Eighteenth Century? New Insights on the Christian Orthodox Art and Architecture of the Late Ottoman Empire
Nikolaos Magouliotis (PhD Candidate ETH Zurich/gta); Demetra Vogiatzaki (PhD Candidate Harvard University), vogiatzaki@g.harvard.edu
The most common term used to describe Christian Orthodox art and architecture produced in Ottoman territories during the early modern period is “post-byzantine.” While Byzantine elements did persist long after the Fall of Constantinople, the referentiality of the term falls short of the increasing aesthetic variation of architectural monuments, decorative objects and artworks produced by the Christian communities of the Empire. As recent scholarship has highlighted, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards, the eastbound expeditions of missionaries, merchants, diplomats and antiquarians, the establishment of Ottoman embassies in the West, and the privileges granted to the Christian millet had a significant influence on the local culture; from Jerusalem to Istanbul and from Anatolia to the Balkans, regional idioms merged with metropolitan Istanbulite fashions and Western influences.
This session seeks papers that investigate the evolution of the artistic and architectural expression of Eastern Orthodoxy in the long eighteenth century. How cohesive was the aesthetic production of the Christian millet? How did it mirror the contemporaneous intra-confessional collision and coalescence within the Empire? What was the influence of European travelers and Ottoman cosmopolitan elites? We encourage close studies of situated artifacts (ie. buildings, artworks and devotional objects), itinerant people (such as pilgrims and craftsmen) and objects (from holy relics, to print media) that illustrate or complicate the deviation from the Byzantine tradition. Contributions that seek to challenge or revise the terminology used to describe Christian Orthodox art and architecture in the eighteenth century are particularly welcome.
64 Seeing Empire Near and Far
Daniel O’Quinn (University of Guelph), doquinn@uoguelph.ca
This panel aims to explore how formal hybridization allowed metropolitan and colonial subjects to conceptualize empire across a wide range of visual media in Britain and its colonies including panoramas, phantasmagoria, theatrical scenography, raree shows, wonder cabinets, collections of ephemera, and embroidery samplers. The extreme differentiation in scale and purpose of these cultural artefacts is important to the overall argument of this panel for it contends that similar formal procedures could be adapted to the most public visualizations of empire and to the most private acts of colonial resistance. The desire here is not to suggest that everyone sees empire in a similar fashion, but rather that the changing structure of the world could be addressed in the formal spaces where disparate cultures meet. Using familiar visual tropes and strategies—i.e. that which was close at hand–the makers of these objects were able to broach unfamiliar social scenarios that encompass the vast global networks that were transforming the flows of populations and commodities in the long eighteenth century.
74 Skin & Bone: Animal Substrates in the Eighteenth Century
Sarah Grandin (The Clark Art Institute), sgrandin@clarkart.edu
Eighteenth-century Europe saw technological improvements in the manufacture of a variety of smooth materials, from paper to porcelain. And yet alongside the use of these highly processed substances, those of animal origin continued to be deployed for their unique receptivity to marks and incisions. Artists and artisans continued to prize animal supports the world over, from Paris, to Manila, to Dakar, to the Labrador peninsula, using ivory in portrait miniatures, vellum for botanical illustrations, teeth for scrimshaw trophies, tusks as religious figurines, and caribou skins for coats. As studies in technical art history have articulated, such surfaces were valued for their physical properties, from their capacity to retain or repel ink, to the glow imparted by collagen, to the organic translucence of polished bone. The import of maritime, missionary, colonial, indigenous, and local economies from which these substances emerged in the eighteenth century has only recently begun to be explored.
This panel invites speakers to consider the observable qualities of animal substrates in relation to their origins. How did practitioners and viewers think about the copresence of liveliness and death caught up in these materials, which were extracted from animal bodies, and often at great cost to the humans who hunted them, slaughtered them, prepared them, and were even exchanged against them? Did working on tissue illicit moments of sympathy, repulsion, or identification? Through a focus on animal substrates, this panel encourages participants to investigate how materials’ geographic and anatomical sources were understood, overlooked, and elided in the eighteenth century.
90 Materials of Global Trade: Networks, Mobility, and Transformation
Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College), jgermann@ithaca.edu
This panel will explore the abundance and variety of materials that travelled the globe during the long and wide eighteenth century and the different modes of transformation and appropriation they experienced when they reached their destinations. Such materials include natural resources (e.g., silver, cacao, and minerals) and botanical and zoological specimens, among others. This panel is interested in how such materials could be modified or transformed to create novel types of material goods or be the inspiration for creating new objects. Some questions to consider include: how were materials adapted and transformed? In what ways were artistic traditions shaped by these contacts with a diverse range of material goods and things? How were these materials and products beneficial in promoting innovation and experimentation? How did they facilitate the creation of new customs and in what ways did they combine with (or hinder) pre- existing ones? What meanings were generated in different cosmopolitan centers around the world, especially port cities that played an essential role in the dissemination of goods on a global scale? Topics that explore regions outside of Europe and North America and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, as are graduate students and early career scholars.
114 Hispanists Here to Help! Integrating Spain and Latin America into Your Eighteenth-Century Courses (Roundtable)
Adela Ramos (Pacific Lutheran University), ramosam@plu.edu
This roundtable continues the call to build “Everybody’s ASECS” and “to stimulate interdisciplinary and cross-cultural conversations” by helping to create classroom spaces where the many languages and literatures that constitute the Enlightenment come together. Proposed in response to the enthusiastic support the session received at ASECS 2021 and offered in connection to Plan Your Survey Course: Workshop on Backwards Design, it has a twofold goal: we aim to continue providing dieciochistas from all corners of the globe with ideas for how to integrate the literatures of Spain and Latin America to their courses, and with opportunities to reflect on, discuss, and even revise our pedagogical frameworks. We invite proposals from scholars that offer innovative ideas for including the Hispanic world—perhaps a separate unit or in a comparative framework—in courses on the eighteenth century and/or the Enlightenment offered by departments of English, French, American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, History, Art History, and Music. We also welcome proposals that consider the broader implications of rethinking the traditional pedagogical parameters that have tended to marginalize the Hispanic eighteenth century for our understanding of issues such as empire, race, slavery, science, and commerce.
122 Redesigning Eighteenth-Century Britain
Mike Goode (Syracuse University), mgoode@syr.edu
This session asks participants to attend to the conceptual frameworks through which eighteenth- century British artists, craftspeople, gardeners, engineers, philosophers, and/or politicians talked about medial, ecological, structural, formal, or aesthetic design, with an especial emphasis on how they thought about *redesigning* as an activity, process, and mode. Papers might ideologically critique specific eighteenth-century languages of, or material instances of, redesign to unpack the work they accomplish (the example comes to mind of how debates over “revolution” and “reform” sometimes played out as conversations over how best to “renovate” or “remodel” the state). But the impetus for the session comes just as much from current interest in so-called “post-critical” approaches to eighteenth-century Britain, like new materialism, new formalism, and actor-network theory. Such approaches often encourage thinking about objects and forms both as designs and as designing agents, and they also sometimes leverage conceptual vocabularies imported from design theory (affordances, capabilities, allowances, etc.). To what extent are any of these new approaches drawing upon or redesigning eighteenth-century terms or conceptual lenses? Might any eighteenth-century intellectual frameworks or terms for thinking about design generally, or about specific designs or instances of redesign, be used to enrich or critique new scholarly approaches that rely upon design concepts and vocabularies? The goal of the session is to promote a richer understanding of the intellectual history of eighteenth-century British design while also reflecting on the theoretical possibilities and limitations that various design concepts might hold for studying eighteenth-century texts and cultures.
125 Visualizing Urban Spaces (Roundtable)
Molly Nebiolo (Northeastern University), nebiolo.m@northeastern.edu
How can we see the spaces of the past? How did cities fit into early American landscapes? In what ways do digital tools and the digital humanities inform our understanding of space and place in eighteenth-century early America? These are just a few questions that can be addressed, pondered, and answered in this panel. Images of the period, from colonial maps to city plans, give us one way to imagine early American cities. Narratives around place, or the travelogues of those moving between cities and colonies, provide us with another avenue for “seeing” the past. With digital tools and programs, we can move closer to a more comprehensive narrative of early urban spaces. GIS mapping, 3D modelling, VR, and other digital platforms create a larger, interdisciplinary narrative around eighteenth century spatial history and the way different populations moved, belonged, and occupied urban spaces. We welcome a variety of interpretations of urban space, place, and ways of understanding both, digitally or otherwise. The session investigates the ways in which humanists are able to visualize the past, and it exemplifies the significance of urban space to the eighteenth century.
129 Let’s Get Small: Micro-Art Histories
Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), mlhyde@ymail.com
A by now thoroughly established trend in art history and in accounts of eighteenth century culture has oriented us towards questions of sweeping global scope and ambition, and the charting of vast and complex international networks and Empires in art and culture. This history, rich in insights, is nevertheless sometimes gigantesque in its claims for art as well as in its scope. This session takes a different tack, and proposes instead to explore little histories, micro- histories, local histories and microscopic histories of art, understood either as histories of small or marginal things or as ‘little histories’, geographically confined, fleeting, circumscribed, particular, even anecdotal. What can intense scrutiny of local specifics, concentration on seemingly small-scale or unnoticed events works or networks of art tell us? And what are the pleasures, as well as the profits, of paddling the backwaters and trawling the pond for all that is teeming, singular, vibrant but hard to see? I welcome papers from “microscopists” of eighteenth- century art history on any aspect of the period that ask big questions about small things.
131 Spreading the Image: European Print Culture
Susanne Anderson-Riedel (University of New Mexico), ariedel@unm.edu
This session invites new scholarship on the publishing, commerce, and distribution of prints to investigate the close net of international collaborations within the European print market in the long eighteenth century. Market interactions highlight the role of prints in facilitating aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural dialogues of the Enlightenment.
133 Spectacle behind the Curtain: Décor, Machines, and Special Effects
Elisa Cazzato (Università Cà Foscari, post-doc and NYU, visiting research fellow), elisa.cazzato@gmail.com
This panel promotes a discussion on artistic practices behind the creation of spectacle in eighteenth-century Europe. The worlds of stage design, machinery, and popular attractions are inherently transient and contingent and often leave few traces. During this period, moreover, a host of stage decorators, machinists, fireworks technicians, circus performers, and foreign entertainers circulated across Europe, spreading ideas and practices that were frequently appropriated and standardized while their origins or creators went unacknowledged. These influential artists and performers, often lacking strong institutional affiliation, have not been given the same critical attention paid to visual artists, musicians, or dramatists. This panel encourages a behind-the-scenes look at such artistic practices that can expand our view and understanding of eighteenth-century spectacle and its varied constituents. For example, how did artists involved in ephemeral or peripheral activities exert their individual personalities? In what ways did certain attractions like wax statues and dioramas, cabinets d’optique, and Wunderkammer inform and overlap with science and technology? How might we account for the status of the marvelous within an era of so-called “Enlightenment” rationality? How can we appreciate décor and other special effects not only as artistic products, but also as autonomous cultural phenomena?
The session seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on performance creation, stage-settings, and the circulation of artists and ideas. It welcomes submissions from scholars at any career stage, as well as from arts professionals in or outside academia. Contributions informed by the experience of staging (or planning to stage) an eighteenth-century work are especially encouraged.
136 Media, Techniques, and Practices from the Mezzotint to the Daguerreotype
Megan Baker (University of Delaware); and Joseph Litts (Princeton University), mebaker@udel.edu
Numerous novel artistic techniques were developed over the long eighteenth century. Following recent process-driven art history, including research by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth or Matthew Hunter, we are interested in interrogating the politics and possibilities within artistic media, techniques, and practices. Artists, regardless of their culturo-geographic positioning, faced choices and material limits; beyond simple lack of access, they innovated and deliberately blurred the lines between different media. How did they navigate these choices and what are the non-iconographic visual ramifications? Can materials have a politics? Is there a materiality of settler colonialism? Is there a materiality of resistance to settler colonialism?
We especially encourage submissions from scholars at all stages who are looking at materials beyond traditional oil painting or sculpture, particularly including: drawings, pastels, watercolors, reproductive prints, miniatures, photographic processes before the daguerreotype, period techniques for ageing and/or conserving works of art, wax, relationships between makeup and theatrical productions, decoupage, souvenirs, or silhouettes. We are interested in approaches that consider inter-media and inter-material approaches to the history of art, as well as process- driven research centering innovative artistic techniques and new materials in the eighteenth century.
138 Conversations across the Arts: Adaptations in the Long Eighteenth Century
Daniella Berman (New York University), daniella.berman@nyu.edu; and Ashley Bender (Texas Woman’s University), abender@twu.edu
When we talk about the eighteenth-century and adaptation, we frequently talk about adaptations of eighteenth-century literature and art, often into film. Yet adaptation was a common practice during the eighteenth century as well. From Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear to William Hogarth’s 1731 representation of a scene from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728); from Henry Fuseli’s images inspired by, and William Blake’s illustrations for, Dante’s Divine Comedy to the numerous adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), eighteenth-century artists, writers, and composers regularly adapted works of their contemporaries and predecessors into new genres (e.g., novel to opera) and across media (e.g., novel to oil painting), creating what Giuseppe Mazzotta has called a “conversation among the arts.” Drawing on the distinctions Julie Sanders makes between adaptation and appropriation (Adaptation and Appropriation, 2006), we invite papers that explore these phenomenona across the long eighteenth century. We welcome papers on any kind of adaptation in the period, with a particular interest in adaptations across the arts.
141 Portraiture in the Americas
Emily K. Thames (Florida State University), ekt13@my.fsu.edu
This panel calls for papers that examine portraits created during the long eighteenth century from any geographic, political, or cultural context in the Americas (North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean), and it endeavors to generate scholarly discussion about the trends and themes that emerged in the practice of portraiture across the hemisphere during this time. The topic of portraiture has received much attention in recent decades in eighteenth-century art historical studies—how can we ‘rethink’ portraiture, specifically in the Americas, to consider new methods of inquiry or interpretation? What unique meaning or use do such portraits possess within their local milieus? What roles do portraits play in the creation and/or reification of colonial or imperial narratives? With the expansion of colonial networks and the shifting of imperial boundaries throughout the century, what cross-cultural exchanges can be addressed through portraiture? This panel particularly encourages papers that consider portraits or portraiture traditions from understudied regions in the Americas or portrait artists from underrepresented communities.
144 Representing Slavery in French Enlightenment and Revolutionary Cultures
Masano Yamashita (University of Colorado Boulder), masano.yamashita@colorado.edu; and Scott M. Sanders (Dartmouth College), scott.m.sanders@dartmouth.edu
This panel explores the visual and rhetorical tropes deployed in representations of enslavement in the French-speaking world. From Voltaire’s Candide to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, many canonical French texts describe encounters with enslaved people in vivid tableaux. In addition to narrative depictions, colonial newspapers documented the marks of torture that transformed enslaved bodies into visual histories of brutality. While in novels, these encounters are often moralized as moments of pity and indignation, in historical documents, they objectify the enslaved as property. We seek proposals that explore the tableaux representations of novelists, playwrights, travel writers, memoirists, artists, and illustrators, who faced the task of confronting French and/or colonial audiences to the shock of slavery. Of particular interest to our panel are papers that recover the voices and agency of the enslaved, analyze the circulation and translation of ideas regarding slavery from one medium to another, take up questions of gender and slavery, or assess the social taxonomies of slavery and servitude. This panel additionally aims to include various voices of French diasporas across the globe.
147 The Unproductive
Amit Yahav (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), ayahav@umn.edu
This panel seeks papers that draw on eighteenth-century examples to consider the capacity of the arts not so much to please as they teach, but to afford breaks from an overbearing regime of productivity and growth. While the eighteenth century has been implicated in instrumentality of all sorts, it also promoted idlers, ramblers, airy fictions—emblems of inefficiency and uselessness. How might we conceive of ephemerality, vacuity, or inaction as in and of themselves worthy conditions? How might we make the case for the value of reading materials, musical pieces, or decorative arts that leave little enduring marks on mind or heart? And how might instances of eighteenth-century embracing of futility help us craft defenses of current humanistic studies, defenses that do not rely on the humanities’ serviceability to a social machinery which privileges productivity, efficiency, utility, and growth? Proposals examining arts and literatures of all languages, media, and genres are welcome.
151 Objects and the Making of Enlightenment Selves
Joelle Del Rose (College for Creative Studies, Detroit); and Mary Peace (Sheffield Hallam University), m.v.peace@shu.ac.uk
This panel will ask how the acquisition and accumulation of material objects in the eighteenth century brokered modern ideas of the self and new cultural forms. Novel commodities flooded the mental and physical worlds of eighteenth-century men and women, changing their perception of self and others. Now in the twenty-first century as we are forced to confront limits of the material world and the sustainability of material acquisition, it’s timely to return to the origins of this material accumulation. The panel solicits papers which to ask how the arrival and manufacture of new commodities—furniture, sugar, coffee, tea, fabrics, and architectural spaces, etc. choreographed ideas of the self and new cultural forms such as the conversation piece and the novel. The panel is interested also in soliciting papers which consider how the symbolic meanings of these material objects are forged and contested in contemporary representation. We solicit papers of 15 minutes duration to be circulated in advance to facilitate an extended discussion period.
152 Forging Forgeries: Material Imitations
J. Cabelle Ahn (Harvard University), cabelle.ahn@gmail.com
This panel invites papers that examine visual technologies of material mimesis. There has been recent scholarly attention on “fakes” or imitation materials in early modern Europe such as Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing Project’s recreation of a recipe for imitation coral, as well as studies on the roles of artists, collectors, and amateurs and how their intentional forgeries advanced the development of connoisseurship. The eighteenth century continued the Renaissance interest in material substitutions sometimes in order to meet market demands and to cut production costs—this in turn gave rise to original materials or methods of production. The panel hopes to unearth understudied examples of imitation and how these technologies contributed to the evolving discourse on connoisseurship, metamorphosis, and artisanal intelligence in this period. Examples include James Tassie’s glass paste that imitated antique cameos, Piet Sauvage’s paintings that imitated marble bas-reliefs (which he frequently exhibited in the Salon), manuals on how to forge gemstones by coloring glass and crystals, the vogue for “japanning” which imitated east Asian lacquer work, wooden furniture and architectural interiors painted to resemble porcelain or marble, as well as various printmaking technologies that not only reproduced different drawing media but also modes of printmaking. Submissions may thus consider specific case studies of artworks, manuals, objects, or sites, and the panel invites papers on all geographies across the long eighteenth-century, particularly submissions outside of the Eurocentric context.
157 Deconstructing, Dismantling, Decolonizing: Current Scholarship on the Arts of the Colonial Americas (Roundtable)
Caroline Culp (Stanford University); and Philippe Halbert (Yale University), philippe.halbert@yale.edu
We invite proposals for a roundtable discussion on current and future directions in scholarly approaches to the arts of the colonial Americas, including North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. What trends have emerged in recent years that prompt new ways of interpreting hemispheric circulations of art, ideas, and materials? How have methodological and theoretical innovations shaped more inclusive perspectives on “American” art and identity? In the wake of ongoing calls for decolonization, what role can art historians working in this area play in nuancing larger historical narratives? Short talks offering insight into postcolonial, queer, and gender- and race-related topics are especially welcome as we come together to consider the state of the field.
158 Embodied Rhetorics (Roundtable)
Miriam Wallace (New College of Florida), mwallace@ncf.edu
Where and why do we find examples of “embodied rhetoric” in the eighteenth century? We might think of Defoe’s description of Friday’s gesture placing his head beneath Robinson Crusoe’s foot signifying voluntary servitude and its relation to the supplicating figure of “Am I not a Man and a Brother” emblem, memoralized by Wedgewood. Or we might consider Trim’s gesture with his hat in Tristram Shandy describing how we pass from life to death, and onwards to Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia as a handbook for speaking gesture (building upon Bulwer’s Chirologia) as figures for something like “embodied rhetoric” or an emphasis on gesture and persuasive or signifying postures. How do we think about literary descriptions, elocutionary training, satirical prints, theatrical portraits, or historical paintings as exemplifying and figuring rhetorical delivery and effective speaking? How was ‘rhetoric’ in the sense of performed speech or persuasive writing divorced from or dependent upon embodiment? Which bodies were ‘speaking bodies’ and under what conditions? Presentations that engage literary works, visual images, or ekphrastic moments are invited to help us think about the relation of embodiment to persuasion and effective representation.
159 Clothing and Empire: Dress and Power
Kristin O’Rourke (Dartmouth College), kristin.orourke@dartmouth.edu
This session hopes to explore the knotty connections between fashion and power in the long eighteenth century, particularly in relationship to the military, financial and racial politics of empire. Over the past several years, art history, fashion studies, and material history have made clear the importance of examining the details of dress, accessories, cosmetics, furnishings, and behaviors in visual imagery in order to understand social status and power relations over time and across geographical and national boundaries. From Napoleonic history paintings to elite portraiture to graphic satire throughout Europe and in relation with European colonization, we can read dress as a curated self-representational device as well as an unconscious sign of power or powerlessness. This panel would welcome individual case studies as well as broader theoretical or historical discussions surrounding both the stuff of dress and its political effect.
173 Anne Schroder New Scholars Session [Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture]
Dipti Khera (New York University), dipti.khera@nyu.edu; and Aaron Wile (National Gallery of Art), A-Wile@nga.gov
This is an open session for advanced graduate students and early career scholars in the art and architectural history of the long eighteenth century around the globe. We especially encourage submissions from underrepresented scholars; those who work in universities, museums, and para-academic institutions outside of North America and/or in adjunct employment positions; and those who define their stakes, topics, and temporal frames for the eighteenth century through visual/material/spatial analyses in relation to histories of enslavement, colonization, and the racialization and discrimination of bodies, knowledge, places, and objects.
185 Seen Here Making a Masterpiece: Rendering Artists, Musicians, and Authors in Painting, Poetry, Sculpture, and Prose [South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies]
Kevin L. Cope (Louisiana State University), encope@lsu.edu
Whether Edmund Waller’s address to a painter or Frances Burney’s account of the imaginary poet Macartney or Largilliere’s portrait of Voltaire or the Derby Porcelain Manufactory’s figurine of a poet, the long eighteenth century abounds with representations of artists and writers that were executed in media or genres other than those in which the depicted subjects specialized. Essayists write about artists, novelists tell tales concerning songsters, and sculptors portray architects at work. These media-crossing renderings often involve a significant change in tone. Engravers satirize elegists; composers change the tune of would-be lyric poets. This panel will feature papers exploring the presentation of artists dedicated to one medium or genre in another medium or genre. It will refresh acquaintance with the easily overlooked and frequently forgotten imagining of artists and artistry. The panel will raise questions about the purpose of such boundary-crossing representations while also probing Enlightenment ideas about the mutual affiliation of the arts and about the character, value, and social roles of modern cultural professionals. It will give new life to a puzzling genre, the representation of those who represent, that both perplexes and peps up the neoclassical distinctions between art and nature, original and copy, and life and its artful immortalizations.
Hi Craig – I just was on the ASECS website and they did just extend the deadline until Oct 3 for the CFP.
Thanks so much for pulling out the relevant panels. Many of the art history panels seemed to be towards the end of the CFP…
Hope to see you in Baltimore – I am really looking forward to it
Best,
Kristin
Thanks, Kristin, for the update! Hugely helpful. I just added the new deadline above. I’ll also run a ‘reminder’ post soon. All the best, -Craig