Enfilade

2017 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, 30 March — 2 April 2017

Proposals due by 15 September 2016

Proposals for papers at the at the 48th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, are now being accepted. Proposals should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 15 September 2016. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented with the Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session, chaired by Jessica Fripp. A selection of other sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members is also included below. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here»

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Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session (HECAA)
Jessica Fripp (Texas Christian University), j.fripp@tcu.edu

Named in honor of Anne Schroder (1954–2010), this open session is intended for advanced graduate students and early career scholars in the art and architectural history of the eighteenth century.

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Strawberry Hill and Other Queer Spaces
George Haggerty (University of California, Riverside), George.haggerty@ucr.edu

This session, in honor of Horace Walpole’s 300th anniversary, will consider Strawberry Hill as the quintessential queer space of the eighteenth-century and will look at other queer spaces too.

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The Eighteenth Century on Film
John H. O’Neill (Hamilton College), joneill@hamilton.edu

This session welcomes and encourages proposals for papers on any aspect of its topic, including—but not limited to—film and television adaptations of eighteenth century narratives (e.g., The Castaway, Tom Jones), films set in the period (e.g., Stage Beauty, Amazing Grace), and film explorations of eighteenth-century history or biography (e.g., Peter Watkins’s Culloden, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette). Proposals for discussions of adaptation theory as it applies to eighteenth-century works are also welcome.

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Amateurism in the Eighteenth Century
Lindsay Dunn (Texas Christian University) and Franny Brock (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), l.m.dunn@tcu.edu and mfbrock@live.unc.edu

Non-professional activity flourished in artistic, literary, and scientific circles of the eighteenth century due, in part, to economic prosperity of the upper classes, new forms of sociability, dissemination of previously privileged information, and an Enlightenment interest in the organization of knowledge. In turn, the amateur significantly impacted this period not only by expanding the contexts in which cultural products were made, circulated, and consumed, but also by challenging the very definitions and boundaries of these contexts. Until recently, amateur practice was considered inferior because amateurs often copied or imitated the work of others and usually did not earn money for their work, freeing them from the constraints of the market economy. This panel seeks papers that modify these views by exploring the contributions and working conditions of amateurs. We invite proposals from a range of fields, including art history, history, literary and music history, and others, to reconsider the position of non-professionals during this period. Possible topics may include the status of the amateur, training the amateur, the amateur’s direct influence as a purveyor of taste, the circulation of ideas through the work of amateurs, and how amateur practice influenced and shaped relationships between professional and non-professional groups.

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Art Markets: Agents, Dealers, Auctions, Collectors
Wendy Wassyng Roworth (University of Rhode Island), wroworth@uri.edu

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries numerous artworks were removed and sold from churches, monasteries, palaces, and private collections. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, and antiquities were purchased by Grand Tourists in Italy, and many were sold, confiscated, or lost as a result of political and social upheavals throughout Europe, especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Travel and trade in Asia and America brought new types and styles of art and artifacts to markets in London, Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere and stimulated taste for the exotic. This session seeks papers on the roles played by art dealers, auction houses, private sales, collectors, the movement of artworks from private to public or public to private collections as well as other aspects of the art market and effects on contemporary artists.

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Illustrating the Ilustración/Iluminismo: Visual Culture and Transnational Enlightenment in Iberia and Ibero-America
Nicholas Wolters (Wake Forest University), naw5fq@virginia.edu

Around 1765, Bohemian artist Anton Raphael Mengs painted a now iconic portrait of King Charles III of Spain. During his tenure as Charles III’s court painter, Mengs was also the author of celebrated frescoes in the Royal Palace in Madrid that eventually would become emblematic of Spanish monarchical splendor in the second half of the eighteenth century, influencing artists from Alcázar y Paret to Goya. Though the so-called Age of Enlightenment is often associated with the consolidation of national borders under the hand of absolute monarchs, transnational art and visual cultures more broadly flourished during this period and reflect evolving patterns of consumption and aesthetic taste that both transcended and shaped national identity. How was the Enlightenment visualized in Iberia and Ibero-America, and what did visual mediums—painting, sculpture, fashion, illustrations—contribute to global and local contours of reason and sensibility? To work towards answering this and related questions, this panel invites papers that engage visual cultures in eighteenth-century Iberia and Ibero-America with a focus on issues related to transnational aesthetics, consumer culture, modernity, modes of production, and dissemination. Papers exploring the intersections of the visual with nationalism, new technologies, advertising and the marketplace, and identity politics are particularly welcome.

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Aesthetics of the Urban
Alison O’Byrne (University of York), alison.obyrne@york.ac.uk

This panel seeks to explore how cities were described and represented in the eighteenth century. What kinds of aesthetic categories were invoked—or reworked—to describe particular cities, or particular occurrences in cities? Did / how did aesthetic categories associated with landscape and natural phenomena (such as the sublime and the picturesque) translate to the urban built environment? Are there new categories and new terminologies to describe the city in the eighteenth century? Topics might include natural disaster in the city, accounts of crowds, descriptions of improvement and decline, and any other topics addressing these questions.

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Empire and the Antique in Art and Design
Jocelyn Anderson (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Holly Shaffer (Dartmouth College), jocelynkristen@hotmail.com and hollyshaffer@gmail.com

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the influence of classical antiquity on European art and design was tremendous, shaping everything from monumental architecture to linear engravings to the collection of decorative objects for the home. Frequently associated with aristocratic connoisseurship and the Grand Tour, this enthusiasm also had an important global dimension: as European powers built their own empires, classical antiquity was a critical reference point, a model, a historical lesson, and a pantheistic comparison. In this panel, we seek to examine the connections between European interest in Ancient Rome and Greece, and the material culture of imperial projects of the long eighteenth century. Possible topics might include the use of the Neoclassical style for colonial building projects, the outline style used in publications, classical antiquity as a frame of reference for the interpretation of indigenous cultures, imperial leaders’ taste for the antique for self-fashioning in the metropole, explicit classical references in images of colonial territories, imperialist approaches to classical sites, or the adoption of the antique-inspired style by artists based in colonial territories.

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1680–1715: A Crisis of the European Mind?
Aaron Wile (Harvard University), awile@fas.harvard.edu

In his seminal work, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (1935), Paul Hazard identified at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries a profound crisis of the European mind. In short order, the foundations of the classical order were destabilized and the modern outlook of the Enlightenment emerged. Revisited by generations of scholars, the ‘Hazard thesis’ has proven remarkably resilient, yet the exact nature of the crisis remains in debate. This panel seeks to reevaluate the sources, effects, and extent of the crisis. Proposal from all disciplines are welcome and interdisciplinary perspectives, especially those that challenge or go beyond the idealism of Hazard’s history of ideas, are particularly encouraged. Topics that engage with Hazard’s thesis but are outside the strict confines of his chronology are also welcome.

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Women of Power and the Power of Women: Rethinking Female Agency in Honor of Maria Theresa
Rita Krueger (Temple University), rita.krueger@temple.edu

This panel invites papers that explore aspects of female power and rulership in households, cities, and courts from a variety of disciplines, as a way to commemorate the 300th year anniversary of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s birth in 1717. Maria Theresa was self-consciously and uncomfortably aware of the at times contradictory nature of her place in history. She had one foot in the baroque and the other in reformed governance. She gestured to the intimacy of the bourgeois family and to the splendor of dynastic pretensions. She lauded the submission of wives even as she dominated her family and her state. She was king and empress, mother and powerbroker. This panel honors that complicated legacy by bringing together new research on female power and agency from different disciplinary approaches and within varied social and spatial contexts. Papers that explore women’s negotiation of new social and political terrains; women performing unexpected social or economic roles; women who transcended their apparent inherited places; women who, Janus-like embraced multiple, at times contradictory agendas; women who said one thing and did another would be welcome. Papers are not limited to Central Europe—nor was Maria Theresa.

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Visualizing Weimar
Amelia Rauser (Franklin & Marshall College), arauser@fandm.edu

Weimar’s role as a cultural center and incubator of innovative Classicism has been richly explored by scholars of literature and philosophy who have mined the outstanding contributions of Goethe, Herder, and Schiller, among others. But the visual culture of Weimar has received relatively little scholarly attention, despite the importance these thinkers attached to visual art and the devotion of many famed Classicists to drawing, painting, and collecting. This panel invites papers that investigate the visual culture of eighteenth-century Weimar. Topics might include the patronage of Anna Amalia or Carl August, the collections of Goethe, the aesthetic theories of Herder, the painting of Tischbein or Georg Melchior Kraus, the founding of institutions like the Free Academy of Drawing in 1776, the design of architectural programs or decorations, or the path- breaking Journal des Luxus und der Moden. Much of Weimar’s visual culture was fueled by strong connections to other centers through travel, study, publication, and collecting, so other topics might include the relationship between Weimar and Naples or Rome, or counter-examples of the visual cultures of other princely European centers.

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Material Culture, Then and Now
Beth Fowkes Tobin (University of Georgia) and Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), btobin@uga.edu and chloe.wigstonsmith@york.ac.uk

We invite papers that expand current approaches to material culture and develop new methods to address the materiality of objects. We are interested in how period treatments of objects and scholarly methods have shaped our understanding of eighteenth-century objects and their meanings. How do we read material culture ‘now’? Are there methodologies that build on object-oriented ontology and new materialisms, but refocus our attention on the materiality of things? Are objects always entangled with the human? How do they function separately from subjectivity? We are interested as well in the historical conditions of collecting and the physical conditions of extant objects. How have the historical treatments of objects (‘then’) affected current methodologies? What roles have museum collections, and the histories of acquisition, played in our methodologies (in relation to class and other concerns)? We welcome papers in particular that offer feminist, queer and/or postcolonial interpretations of material culture, as well as interdisciplinary approaches and submissions from colleagues in literary studies, archeology, art history, dress history and history. Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words and a very brief biography to both organizers.

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Home Subjects: Art and/in the Private House in the Eighteenth Century
Melinda McCurdy (The Huntington Library) and Anne Nellis Richter (American University), mmccurdy@huntington.org and anne.nellis@gmail.com

Eighteenth-century houses and interiors have become the focus of tremendous academic energy during the past five years. This topic has a particular resonance in the British context, as the eighteenth century saw the notion of the house as an iconic symbol of political and moral authority developing into a remarkably persistent cultural ideal; at the same time, this formulation may be unsettled by similar trends in other countries or colonial contexts. This session will explore the development of these ideas by considering the relationships between domesticity, the display of art and other objects in the private interior, and national or personal identity. We welcome proposals that explore such topics as the commissioning, and/or reception of artworks intended for private display, literary or theoretical thinking about the role of art and design in the private interior, the relationship between ‘decorative’ painting and easel painting, the uses and reception of decoration and painting in rooms and interiors, and the relationship between private and public modes of display and decoration. This panel will be convened by Home Subjects, an ongoing research working group focused on the display of art in the private sphere; please visit http://www.homesubjects.org for details.

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Is Improvement a Useful Concept?
Rachael Scarborough King (UC Santa Barbara), rking@english.ucsb.edu

‘Improvement’ was an Enlightenment buzzword, consolidating in the second half of the eighteenth century as a means to describe key cultural concerns from landscape gardening and the conversion of wasteland to new modes of education and the rise of the novel (in the debate over what constituted ‘improving’ literature). But does improvement maintain its intellectual purchase to assist us in understanding the changes in the organization of knowledge, relationship to the environment, and understandings of the self that took place in the eighteenth century? Or is it too vague, triumphalist, and/or progressivist to offer a useful framework? And are ‘material’ improvement, in the natural or built environment, and ‘intellectual’ improvement, in literature or the individual, aspects of the same concept? This panel invites papers that take improvement as both/either a grand organizing narrative and/or a specific set of material and intellectual practices, and that ask whether this term should remain—or return to being—a central rubric in the study of eighteenth-century literature and culture.

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Clothing as Visual Language
Kristin O’Rourke (Dartmouth College), kristin.o’rourke@dartmouth.edu

European clothing styles changed dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century, as did their depiction in the arts of the time. While the nervous draperies of late seventeenth-early eighteenth century portraits lend a dynamism and power to the elite subject, the mid-century emphasis on up-to-the-minute fashion and the meticulous representation of fabric and cuts bring a sense of realism to both the glittering upper-class world and lower domestic sphere. By contrast, the later eighteenth century classical revival meant, on the whole, a more abstracted perception of clothing in art as covering or draping the idealized, timeless body, rather than rendering it contemporary and tactile. Can we read clothing in the arts as an expressive language that offers clues as to the power of dress in conveying messages related to social and economic status, craft, fashion, trade, and so forth? Building upon recent work by social, cultural, and art historians on the construction, utility, appropriation, and circulation of clothing as material object and as artisanal product, I seek interdisciplinary papers that explore the multiple meanings of clothing in the visual arts and the connection to ‘real’ clothing. I welcome papers on all aspects of clothing and in all artistic media.

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Material Girls
Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College), jgermann@ithaca.edu

Women and girls up and down the social ladder bought, sold, made, and used things. What can we say about their lived experience in relation to their property and production? This panel invites papers about women’s relationship to material goods, property ownership, or productive and/or creative labor. How does the relationship between women and girls and their things either support or undermine normative ideas about gender, sexuality, or other facets of identity? Interdisciplinary and global topics welcomed from the broad span of the long eighteenth century.

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‘Home is Where the Start is’: Interrogating Eighteenth-Century Domesticity
Karen Lipsedge (Kingston University), K.Lipsedge@Kingston.ac.uk

For many scholars, the eighteenth century was the time when modern domesticity was invented. Developments in domestic architecture, material culture and concepts of self, contributed to the evolution of a concept of the home that was spatially and ideologically distinct from other architectural spaces. Scholars from Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall to Amanda Vickery and Cynthia Wall have explored eighteenth-century domesticity from the perspectives of social class, material culture, the rhetoric of description, and gender. More recently, the role of men and the domestic servant, as well as the concept of domestic patriarchy, have also been placed under scrutiny. As the lens through which we view eighteenth-century domesticity becomes broader, now seems to be an appropriate time to take stock: to interrogate what we do and what we do not mean by eighteenth-century domesticity. I invite papers exploring eighteenth-century domesticity from a range of perspectives, including domestic architecture, parenthood, religion, family life and anthropology, as well as social and political history, popular culture, and landscape and garden design.

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Small Courts
Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College), jgermann@ithaca.edu

Small courts offer an opportunity to consider art, literature, music, as well as the political structures that developed and flourished in circumstances distinct from the better known examples of the Bourbons and Habsburgs. This panel invites papers that consider small courts and their cultural production in a variety forms. Questions that papers might consider: What kinds of novel or conventional representations did small courts produce of themselves for consumption both within and outside of these courts? Did small courts offer novel or distinct gendered configurations? How did artists, musicians, and writers assimilate bourgeoisie culture into court culture? Papers welcome from all disciplines and cultural contexts.

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Cities and Disasters
Cindy Ermus (University of Lethbridge), cindy.ermus@uleth.ca

Today, more than half the global population lives in cities, and as urban centers continue to expand, the dangers posed by disasters and the effects of climate change in highly populated areas will become increasingly acute. It is important then to study the ways in which past societies have managed the prevention and effects of disasters, as well as the short and long-term ramifications of these responses. This panel will explore the ways in which eighteenth-century cities experienced, managed, and were shaped by ‘natural’ or man-made disasters, including earthquakes, famine, fire, disease, hurricanes/typhoons, etc. For example: How did eighteenth-century cities respond to disaster, and how did these responses help shape the urban, political, or cultural landscape of affected areas? How linked or divorced were local responses from the centralizing state? How did a specific catastrophe help shape understandings of disaster causation, and/or of vulnerability and resilience? What can we learn from studying responses to disasters in the past? Papers may address these and/or other questions. My own work looks at responses to the 1720 Plague of Provence in some of Europe’s most active port cities, including Cádiz, Lisbon, and London, but I welcome papers on all geographic regions.

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Strolling in the Garden: Performance and Material Culture in Semi-Natural Spaces
Shawn Watkins (Duquesne University) and Sarah Hancock (Carnegie Mellon University), watkinss@duq.edu and sarahh1@andrew.cmu.edu

This panel seeks presentations that explore the intersection between material culture, performance, and semi- natural spaces, such as parks and gardens. Possible questions for exploration include, but are not limited to: how do semi-natural spaces inform eighteenth-century notions of sociability and performance in terms of race, class, and gender? What plants, architectural features, clothing, and/or accessories characterize semi-natural spaces? How are these objects used, re-used, or misused in these spaces in order to perform, complicate, and/or reinforce notions of national, ethnic, or gendered identity? How is the physical layout of semi-natural spaces influenced, shaped, and implicit in movement and performance within these spaces? What relationships exist between these semi-natural spaces and other spaces, such as the theater or the country estate? We invite papers that consider all genres of eighteenth-century texts—literary or otherwise—and scholarship that addresses eighteenth-century material culture and performance from all disciplines.

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Color in Eighteenth-Century Architecture
Basile Baudez, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV), basile.baudez@gmail.com

Although associated with baroque exuberance born after the Counter Reformation movement or the nineteenth-century rediscovery of polychromy in Greek architecture, color was far from absent from eighteenth-century architecture—even if critics like Quatremère de Quincy, or draftsmen like Boullée, favored monochromy on built structures and their representation. At a moment when color was invading every aspect of daily life, when artists and printers were developing new ways to diffuse color reproductions, when authors from Roger de Piles to Goethe were revalorizing the evocative and sensualist effectiveness of color, how did architects respond to this pressure, both in their drawings and buildings? The geographic breath of this session is left deliberately open, but proposals should be unified by their close attention to the complex and paradoxical relationship between theory and practical use of color in architecture in the eighteenth-century. Key issues will include comparisons of attitudes towards color in different national traditions, the decision to hide or reveal colored materials, the place of color in architectural definitions of beauty or connotations of color within typologies, spaces or specific periods.

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Textual and Visual Representations of Nature and Landscape Architecture (Roundtable)
Chunjie Zhang and Alessa Johns (University of California Davis), chjzhang@ucdavis.edu and amjohns@ucdavis.edu

This session seeks presentations that deal with the dynamics between textual and visual representations of nature or landscape architecture (gardens and parks) in and outside of Europe in the long eighteenth century. The written description of nature became an important scientific method for the project of Natural History and was practiced diligently by naturalists on European world expeditions. At the same time, visual images imported from non-European cultures (China, Oceania, or India) informed and inspired European and early American writers and artists to textually imagine and visually design different landscapes in novels, treatises, paintings, and actual garden and architectural designs. Nature also became the site where liberal and conservative political visions competed in the garden revolution in England and Germany. The roundtable seeks presentations on, but not limited to, the differences or similarities between textual and visual representations and their mutual influences in British, German, French, Italian, or American contexts.

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Illustrating Nature from the Margins
Craig Ashley Hanson (Calvin College), CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com

This panel aims to explore marginalized or understudied aspects of scientific illustration, particularly prints and drawings that were important for the study of nature in the eighteenth century but haven’t received their due in the often heroically ‘Whiggish’ accounts of the history of science. Papers might consider practitioners—‘nonprofessionals’, women, provincial or indigenous individuals—whose contributions were given little credit by contemporaries or historians. Talks might also focus on previously overlooked geographic regions or fields of knowledge. Especially welcome are presentations that advance close readings of scientific illustrations in regard to subject matter and the social circumstances of their production. Examination of concerns related to historiography, methodology, the history of scientific collections, and reception histories are also encouraged.

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On the Walls: Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe
William W. Clark (Queens College and The Graduate Center CUNY), wwclark@comcast.net

In her book, Hanging the Head, Marcia Pointon states “that the ordering of imagery in particular spaces and settings produces meanings specific to those times and places,” and she adds, “it is …the case that objects like paintings which symbolize the ownership of a particular class or institution, enshrine the sense of identity of that group….” Papers for this panel may treat paintings executed for (installed in) royal palaces, aristocratic residences, and other domestic sites as well as public institutions including religious, judicial, civic, and military establishments. They might focus on special iconographic programs for certain sites or on particular rooms such as salons, libraries, drawings rooms, portrait galleries, dining rooms where the display might provide additional levels of meaning. What social identity is described by these paintings? What virtues are valorized by these works? How does the combination of certain paintings add luster to a family or an institution? Interdisciplinary topics are equally welcome.

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The Art of Watercolor
Julia Sienkewicz (Duquesne University), julia.a.sienkewicz@gmail.com

In recent years, the medium of watercolor has garnered new critical attention, particularly for its rise and global dissemination toward the end of the eighteenth-century. Quick and portable, watercolor offered the means to capture the world, whether on picturesque tour of Britain, an expedition in Africa, or in a Philadelphia garden. The facile medium has brought new attention to amateur artistic practice and to scientific subject matter. Significant in multiple national contexts, the medium has also been tied to ideological content—especially in Britain where the rise of translucent watercolor has been closely tied to nationalism. This session seeks to continue the scholarly discussion about the importance of this medium by bringing together new scholarship about watercolor in the eighteenth century. Papers are sought that consider work from all corners of the globe, by professional or ‘amateur’ artists, and with any subject matter. Of special interest will be any work that expands our understanding of the ways in which artists (in the broadest possible understanding of this term) employed the medium in experimental and intellectually-critical ways.

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Anything Goes? From the Sister Arts to Media Studies
Timothy Erwin (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), timothy.erwin@unlv.edu

The last couple of decades have seen a paradigm shift in the way we talk about literature and the visual arts. The field once called literary pictorialism is now more often called media studies or visual culture. Studies of image and text today are often framed in language either borrowed from film criticism ( ‘movement image’ and ‘gaze’) and narratology (‘focalization’ and ‘diegesis’) or else cobbled together from scratch (‘imagetext’ and ‘iconotext’). What makes for a useful lexicon in a time when adaptation tends to collapse the distinction between still and moving images? How can we make old terms more serviceable, and how should we be using the new? How do we describe our interdisciplinary practices, and determine our interartistic values? Even though no hard and fast answers may be found for questions like these, I invite papers alert to the problematics of talking about texts and images.

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Laocoön’s Legacy: Testing Out the Limits of Aesthetic Representation
Anne Pollok (University of South Carolina), apollok@sc.edu

In 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published Laocoön: On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, which remained at the fulcrum of debate about the unity of the beautiful and the respective differences among the arts (literature, music, sculpture and painting). At different times, different aspects of Lessing’s work were highlighted for debate—all of which engage in fundamental ways with central issues of aesthetics and theories of art. One of these concerns the specific grammars in the different genres of art and how the composition of the artwork evokes admiration or empathetic participation. Another aspect foregrounds the relation between the objective structure of a work of art and the subjective work of the beholder’s imagination, a third engages the thesis of the media-specificity of art and associated formalist calls for aesthetic purity. In this session, I aim to reflect on these three areas as discussed by Lessing’s contemporaries, may those be his friends and adversaries, his inspiration or subject to his scorn. Major figures include (but are not limited to) Mendelssohn, Herder, Goethe, Harris, Diderot, or Dubos. Instead of trying to capture the full breadth of Lessing’s masterpiece, papers with a concentration on either of the aforementioned areas are preferred.

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Rococo Queens
Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), mlhyde@ymail.com

Recognizing that the Rococo is not a stable idea or category, this session invites papers that consider how two ‘constants’ (femininity and women) nonetheless have attended Rococo art since the eighteenth-century and in the discourse on it ever since. Papers might approach the topic from the point of view of ‘Rococo Queens’ (whether literal or figurative) as patrons and collectors, as arbiters of taste for the Rococo. But also welcome are papers that consider (or interrogate) conceptions and definitions of the Rococo itself, or its afterlives in relation to questions of gender, and queenship.

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Innovative Course Design Competition
ASECS@wfu.edu

ASECS invites proposals for a new approach to teaching a unit within a course on the eighteenth century, covering perhaps one to four weeks of instruction, or for an entire new course. For example, participants may offer a new approach to a specific work or theme, a comparison of two related works from different fields (music and history, art and theology), an interdisciplinary approach to a particular social or historical event, new uses of instructional technology (e.g., web sites, internet resources and activities), or a new course that has never been taught or has been taught only very recently for the first time. Participants are encouraged to include why books and topics were selected and how they worked. Applicants should submit 5 copies of a 3- to 5-page proposal (double-spaced) and should focus sharply on the leading ideas distinguishing the unit to be developed. Where relevant, a syllabus draft of the course should also be provided. Only submissions by ASECS members will be accepted. A $500 award will be presented to each of the participants, and they will be invited to submit a twelve-page account of the unit or course, with a syllabus or other supplementary materials, for publication on the website.

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Made Up in the Eighteenth Century: Makeup, Accessories, Fashion, and Hair (Graduate Student Caucus)
Mallory Anne Porch (Auburn University), map0030@auburn.edu

This panel seeks to explore any and all aspects of what it meant to be ‘made up’ in the eighteenth century. Essays on makeup, accessories, fashion, hair, and any other related areas are welcome.

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Getting on a Panel: Tips, Tricks, and Knowing When It’s Already Full (Graduate Student Caucus)
Mallory Anne Porch (Auburn University), map0030@auburn.edu

This roundtable invites all those willing to share and discuss their experiences with conference panels.

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Beauty, Fashion and Taste … According to Women (Italian Studies Caucus)
Catherine Sama (University of Rhode Island), csama@uri.edu

How did women’s participation in the eighteenth-century debate about their place and purpose in society influence contemporary notions of female beauty and fashion? How did it help shape the question of taste, so central to the century’s formulation of aesthetics? Was Beauty as important to women as it appeared to be to men—who tended to consider it a principal female attribute—although they, too, were subject to the dictates of fashion as much as at any time in history? Possible areas of focus:
• The influence of fashion periodicals on notions of performance, gender and class;
• The role of eighteenth-century Italian female writers, artists and scientists in changing the terms by which beauty, fashion, taste, and women themselves were defined;
• The influence of Grand Tourism on questions of fashion, beauty, taste, and views of Italian women.
This session invites contributions that explore and/or address these issues and related questions.

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Gendered Materialities (Women’s Caucus)
Hannah Wirta Kinney (University of Oxford) and Rivka Swenson (Virginia Commonwealth University), Hannah.Kinney@history.ox.ac.uk and rswenson@vcu.edu

This multi-disciplinary session explores the ways objects and their modes of production were or became gendered in the long eighteenth century (geography open). Our definition of materiality embraces multiple disciplinary definitions and approaches, including (but not limited to) art history and literature/book history (process of making, artistic media, and multi-modal sensory engagement). The session goal is not only to identify materialities with gendered associations, but also to scrutinize the process of gendering. What value structures contributed to the formation of those associations? Were they aesthetic, sensory, economic, political, social, scientific? Were they influenced by where the object was made, used, or displayed? How did media or processes of making effect the gendered associations of a finished object? Did the language that gendered these materialities develop in public debates, within texts (either academic or popular), or through their circulation on the market? How did these materialities reinforce gendered boundaries? In what cases could materialities allow makers, owners, and users to transgress gender boundaries? Presenters will give 8- to 10-minute papers. The session will conclude with a group discussion that incorporates the attendees, focused on demarcating how the material worlds of eighteenth-century people intersected with ideas of gender. Send 250-word abstracts to co-chairs.

From H-ArtHist:

The Architect as Active Reader
Vicenza, 15–17 June 2017

Proposals due by 15 September 2016

The Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (CISA) will organize an international conference on the theme of The Architect as Active Reader, 15–17 June 2017. Printed treatises and texts have been the main vehicle for the communication of architectural ideas. Architects and builders, as owners of these texts, have left records of their thoughts in the form of subsequent annotations, comments, and drawings within the texts or closely connected to them. In developing the notion of the architect as an ‘active reader’ who absorbs new information for future practical application, the conference seeks to bring out examples of architects in dialogue with texts.

Geographic area and time period are open. Scholars may apply individually or propose a theme to be carried through in a single session by a group or team. (Such a theme might address a single architect’s varied reading practices; multiple approaches to a single work; the collecting practices revealed in an architect’s library). Contributions from scholars and librarians are welcome.

Those interested in participating with a contribution (20 minute limit) should send an outline (no more than 250 words) and brief CV (no more than 100 words) to cfp@cisapalladio.org by 15 September 2016. Speakers will be notified by 31 October 2016.

From the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art:

Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 7 October 2016

Proposals due by 8 July 2016

The Paul Mellon Centre’s research project Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display investigates the collection and display of works of art in the country house in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day. Focusing on specific case studies, the project addresses two closely related issues:
• The formation, character and function of country-house art collections
• The conventions, development and dynamics of pictorial and sculptural display within the country house

The crucial importance of the country house to understanding the history of art-collection and display in Britain is indisputable and of long-standing interest to historians of British art. This project, in turning a fresh eye on the collections of art associated with the country house, builds on exciting new developments within this area of scholarship, which shed new light on the wide range of motivations and circumstances that have shaped such collections. The project extends to the country house a growing scholarly interest in modes of pictorial display, which has hitherto tended to focus on the display of paintings, sculpture, and prints within more urban and public environments, and on the exhibition space in particular.

The project will concentrate attention on the ways in which country house art collections were formed and on the reasons why they took the form they did. It will address the impact upon collecting practices of such factors as the growth of continental travel, the development of a sophisticated art market, fluctuations in taste, and dynastic ambitions and familial alliances. It will also address the conditions, facilities, and habits of display in the country house, investigating such issues as the shifting modes of the picture hang, the introduction of dedicated gallery spaces within the country house, the relationship between the country house and the town house as sites of collection and display, the development of cataloguing, and the growth of professional curatorship.

As an integral part of this project, the Centre is organizing the first of a series of conferences designed to showcase new research in this area. We invite proposals for 30-minute papers which discuss some aspect of the collecting and/ or display of art in a single country house from any point over the past five hundred years. We welcome proposals from academics, museum curators, independent scholars, those working in the heritage sector, and those actively involved in postgraduate studies. While the Call for Papers has a purposefully broad and open brief, it is essential that submissions offer fresh, methodologically ambitious perspectives on the topic.

Possible themes for exploration might include, but are not limited to:
• The impact of commerce and travel on collecting
• The creation and presentation of spaces for display
• The commissioning and display of portraiture in the country house
• The collecting and display of historic and/or contemporary art
• The relationship between country- and town-house modes of collection and display
• The interaction of works of art within the country-house interior
• The relationship between the fine and decorative arts in country-house display
• Patterns of display across the different rooms of a single country house

Proposals, of no more than 250 words, together with a short CV, for 30-minute papers, should be submitted to Ella Fleming at efleming@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by 8th July 2016.

From the conference website:

Romanticism and the Peripheries
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 5–7 December 2016

Proposals due by 30 July 2016

“The Romantic phenomenon seems to defy analysis, not only because its exuberant diversity resists any attempt to reduce it to a common denominator but also and especially because of its fabulously contradictory character” (Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. by Catherine Porter, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). In an attempt to accommodate both its diversity and contradictory character, Löwy and Sayre defined Romanticism as “a worldview constituted as a specific form of criticism of ‘modernity’” and expanded the term beyond artistic and literary phenomena to encompass a wide range of fields such as religion, political theory, philosophy, etc. Even though Löwy and Sayre may offer a guiding principle outside the interpretative confusion often generated by the term, their analysis is still mostly, if not exclusively, concerned with the definition of the phenomenon as it manifested in the principal centers of Europe (namely England, France, and Germany).

This three-day conference, organized on the occasion of the bicentenary of Fernando II’s birth, the Portuguese king responsible for the edification of what is widely considered the hallmark of Romantic Portuguese architecture, seeks to focus on Romanticism in the peripheries, both European and non-European, and explore the validity of the concept for the analysis of artistic and cultural forms that, for the most part, originated outside the centers of bourgeois industrial civilization. Taking as its starting point the definition proposed by Lowy and Sayre, the conference invites participation on a number of issues including, but not limited to:
1  When Was Romanticism? Attempts at Periodization and Definition
2  Sublime matters: Romanticism and Material Culture
3  Transfers and Cross-Sections: Literature, Theater and the Visual Arts
4  The Romantic Traveler: Drawings, Prints and Souvenirs
5  Artistic Education. Academy versus Nature?
6  Romantic Landscape, Gardens and Architecture
7  Romantic Nationalism – Romantic Imperialism? The Politics of Style

Abstracts (of no more than 300 words), accompanied by a short bio (approximately two paragraphs) should be sent to the members of the organizing committee, at iha.romanticism2016@gmail.com by July 30, 2016. Participants will be notified by the end of August, and the conference program will be published in mid-September. The languages of the conference are English and Portuguese.

A selection of papers from the conference will be published as a special number of the Revista de História da Arte, an annual peer-reviewed journal, and a second publication, in the form of a book, is also being contemplated by the organizers. For all questions regarding administration and practical matters, as well as the payment of the conference inscription, please contact Mariana Gonçalves and Inês Cristóvão (iha.romanticism2016@gmail.com). Conference inscription rates: speakers 50€, participants 40€, students 20€.