Enfilade

William Burges, H. W. Lonsdale, and Thomas Nicholls, Banqueting Hall, Cardiff Castle, Wales, ca. 1870s.

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From the Call for Papers:

Revivalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, 19 February 2024

Organized by Peter Lindfield

Proposals due by 24 November 2023

Keynote Speaker: Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin (University of Cambridge)

The past often informs the present in many, interconnected ways. For example, Howard Colvin in his well-known essay on the “Gothic Survival and Gothick Revival” offers a nuanced reading of medieval architecture’s perpetuation in C17–C18 Britain (‘Gothic Survival’) and the style’s quite separate revival. Like the ‘Gothic Revival’, references to and recreations of the past can take many different forms across the arts and humanities; these revivals can leverage mimesis, or perhaps they are more frivolous and based upon loose associationism. Revivals’ form, fidelity, function, and motivation are therefore varied and crucial to understanding and mapping the materiality and ideas from history to its continued relevance, recycling, and recreation in the present.

This conference wishes to examine the legacies of the past and the past’s recreation under the broad label of ‘revival’ across time, place, and discipline: how and why has the past been reworked, recreated, or revived; what are the minimum requirements for work(s) to be considered a revival; can revivals be counter-cultural? The conference also wishes to examine how revivals have been interpreted (both positively and negatively); and how revivals can be and are set against the source material that inspired them.

20-minute papers on any aspect of revivalism across the arts and humanities are solicited for this in-person conference. Proposals that explore interdisciplinary manifestations of revivalism are especially welcome. Topics could include:
• Art, architecture, or applied design
• Literature (fiction and non-fiction)
• Revivalism, pastiche, and forgery
• Historiography of revival
• Interdisciplinary revivals
• Motivation(s) for revivals/ism
• Comparisons between revivals and the revived

300-word proposals should be sent to the conference organiser, Dr Peter N. Lindfield, FSA, Welsh School of Architecture (LindfieldP@Cardiff.ac.uk) no later than 24 November 2023.