Enfilade

Design/History/Revolution
The New School, New York, 27-28 April 2012

Proposals due by 7 December 2011

Keynote speaker: Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture & Design, MoMA

Whether by providing agitprop for revolutionary movements, an aesthetics of empire, or a language for numerous avant-gardes, design has changed the world. But how? Why? And under what conditions?  We propose a consideration of design as an historical agent, a contested category, and a mode of historical analysis. This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions and to open up new possibilities for understanding the relationships among design, history and revolution. Casting a wide net, we define our terms broadly. We seek 20-minute papers that examine the roles of design in generating, shaping, remembering or challenging moments of social, political, economic, aesthetic, intellectual, technological, religious, and other upheaval. We consider a range of historical periods (ancient, pre-modern, early modern, modern, post- and post-post-modern) and geographical locations (“West,” “East,” “North,” South,” and contact zones between these constructed categories). We examine not only designed objects (e.g., industrial design, decorative arts, graphic design, fashion) but also spaces (e.g., architecture, interiors, landscapes, urban settings) and systems (e.g., communications, services, governments). And we welcome a diversity of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches.

This conference brings together scholars from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences with designers, artists, and other creators. We hope not only to present multiple methodological approaches but also to foster conversations across traditional spatial, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.

We list some possible subject areas, and encourage you to propose others:

• Design and political / cultural / economic revolution….. Design and technological revolution…. Design and the print revolution
• Design and government…. Design and social movements…. Design and surveillance…. Design and empire….
• Design and historicity…. Design and the sacred……Design and the avant-garde…..
• Design and memory…. Design and philosophy/philosophies of design…. Design and literature / literature of design….
• Design and the everyday…. Design and consumerism… Design and education….
• Designed landscapes…. Design and the environment…Design and the city….
• Design and science … Design and cybernetics ….

Please submit a 250-word abstract (maximum) and 1-page CV to: designhistoryrevolution@gmail.com

Laura Auricchio, Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of Humanities, The New School, NYC

From the Chicago Art Journal:

Chicago Art Journal: Historiographies of New Media
Proposals due by 28 November 2011

The Chicago Art Journal, the annual publication of the University of Chicago Department of Art History, is seeking submissions of original work by graduate students and faculty for its 2011-2012 edition. This year’s issue asks how new media have affected not only the production of art, but also the production of knowledge about art. What is at stake in approaching art history through the concept of new media?

The term ‘new media’ has been applied to a range of formats (from photography to video to the internet) that have revolutionized the modes of transmission and reproduction of ‘old’ media of art at particular historical moments. Although the concept of new media seems to promise a mass media address, artists have often emphasized the limits of circulation—for instance, in closed circuit television, or zines that made use of Xerox processes and yet were distributed to small networks through the mail. Such a dialectical relation escapes media theory’s emphasis on mass distribution, and points instead toward misalignments and points of friction between the imaginative and material aspects of new media. Furthermore, from the double slide lecture to the publication of photographs in books, and from the use of facsimiles in the classroom to broadcasts of ‘art on television,’ the formation and performance of the art historical discipline has itself been contingent upon pivotal introductions of reproductive media. In turning our attention to new media, we consider art history’s rhetorics of description and display.

The importance of thinking through the art historical repercussions of new media has become paramount. Just as recent scholarship has addressed the nuances of ‘pre-modern’ and modern notions of mediality (including forms of mechanical reproducibility and audiovisual displays emergent in the middle ages), so might we aim to reframe more contemporary art historical categories of ‘lateness’ (such as Rosalind Krauss’s ‘post-medium condition’). Here we propose examining notions of new media within a long durée. How do such temporal categories foreground technologies that are positioned as obsolete? As Peter Weibel has proposed, “the intrinsic success of the new media resides less in the fact that they have developed new forms and possibilities of art than in the fact that they have enabled us to establish new approaches to the old media of art—and above all, have kept the latter alive by forcing them to undergo a process of radical transformation.” What conditions of possibility are embedded (or not) in the positioning of art as new media? How might we emphasize the aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of new media over notions that emerged out of communications theory, such as interactivity? We are especially interested in papers that address new media art histories that diverge from the well-known chronologies of Euro-American technological developments. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• performance and circulation of art history through facsimiles, photographs, slide projections, radio, and television
• responses and counter-responses to new media technologies within art criticism, critical theory, and film theory
• legacies of Friedrich Kittler and Miriam Hansen for theorizing new media
• analog and digital in art and art history
• historical modes of mechanical reproduction, imprinted coins, technologies of the book, seals, etc.
• ekphrasis
• transfers and transformations among media, media as reference for other media
• in what way are new media performative and public?
• materiality of new media, processes of materials
• new media and abstraction, issues of movement and circulation
• wider implications of artists’ practices in Xerox, zines, artists’ books, flip books, holograms, etc.
• relationship between art transmitted through media and art as media
• aesthetics of television in the context of capitalism and communism
• new media’s relevance for reframing art historical cycles and geographies of innovation
• challenges to medium specificity, from medium unspecificity to post-medium condition
• art and technology movements, including the role of dance and ‘new music’
• computerized models of art, computational ways of thinking
• collectivity and coalitions, notions of ‘social media’
• photography as new media
• historiographies of ‘video art,’ including the role of projection and the long durée of optical media
• queer aesthetics and new media
• painting after the advent of network theory
• theories of text as visual image and text as mediation

Submissions
Full papers must follow The Chicago Manual of Style, and should not exceed 4000 words. Each submission should include an abstract of approximately 500 words. If you would like to submit an abstract without a full paper, please contact the editors in advance. Both Word documents and PDFs are welcome. All contributors should include their name, address, telephone number, and email address. Authors are responsible for securing image reproduction rights and any associated fees. Please send submissions to the graduate student editors Solveig Nelson and Stephanie Su at UChicagoArtJournal@gmail.com by November 28, 2011.

Call for Papers:

The London-Irish in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1830
University of Warwick, 13-14 April 2012

Proposals due by 31 January 2012

The Irish became an intrinsic part of the London population through the course of the eighteenth century. Whether Catholic and Protestant, professional or plebeian, London provided opportunities for waves of Irish migrants. Irish migrants can of course be found throughout Britain (and Europe) at this time but London offered a burgeoning world capital that embraced all tiers of Irish society. The Irish, from both sides of the religious divide, could be found almost anywhere in London: in its kitchens, drawing rooms, legal chambers, banking houses, theatres, newspaper offices, and courts. Nevertheless robust systematic historical data on these migrants is scarce – such accounts that exist of the Irish diaspora in pre-1815 London (Denvir, Akenson, and Jackson) are useful but fragmentary and Irish historiography on the diaspora has generally tended to concentrate on the famine years.

There is work on Irish Catholics in Europe but only recently have more focused accounts of Irish networks operating in London in the eighteenth century begun to emerge. Yet despite the sparse accounts of their activities, there was certainly a strong Irish – Catholic as well as Protestant – presence in London throughout this period. Archbishop King warned that Irish visitors in London ‘converse only in a very sneaking private way with one another’ and this observation suggests a metropolitan space within which the Irish diaspora could form themselves into tight social and professional networks. The study of such networks would provide a fresh perspective on London in the long eighteenth century. How did such networks form? How did they evolve? To what degree were they inclusive/ exclusive? How did they represent ‘Irishness’ and/or Ireland to London? And how were they received?
This interdisciplinary conference is being organized by David O’Shaughnessy and will be hosted by the Department of English & Comparative Literature, University of Warwick. Plenary lectures will be given by Professor Toby Barnard (History, University of Oxford); Professor Claire Connolly (Literature, University of Cardiff; and Professor Mary Hickman (Sociology, London Metropolitan University). Papers will be welcomed in all disciplines and from scholars at all stages of their careers. The deadline for 300-word abstracts is 31 January 2011 (email: londonirish@warwick.ac.uk). Suggested topics might include but are not limited to:

• Quantifying the Irish diaspora (population, migration patterns/routes, births, deaths, baptisms, funerals)
• Defining an Irish community/network
• Catholic and Protestant communities/networks
• Professional Irish (lawyers, bankers, merchants, tutors, physicians, booksellers)
• Literary and artistic Irish (theatre, newspapers, literary clubs, artists, Society of Antiquaries, Royal Academy, bookshops)
• Labouring Irish (military, servants, sailors, shipwrights, builders)
• Religious Irish (places of worship, priests)
• Political Irish (clubs, societies, parliament, lobbyists, spies, petitioners, the Irish at court)
• Anti-Irish sentiment
• Irish language
• Riots
• Sport
• Irish societies and charitable organizations
• The Irish on trial (lawyers and criminals)
• The rise of the Irish pub (taverns/coffee houses patronised by the Irish)
• The Irish ‘ghetto’ (geography of the Irish in London)
• Irish elites and their circles (Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan)

From The Courtauld:

Contested Views: Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum at Tate Britain, London, 19-20 July 2012

Proposals due by 16 December 2011

Goya, "The Third of May 1808," 1814 (Madrid: Prado)

In July 2012, in advance of commemoration of the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, Tate Britain is to host a two-day conference exploring the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on world-wide visual culture, from the outbreak of the pan-European conflict with France in 1792 to the present day. Centered on themed panels, plenary lectures and workshops, this cross-disciplinary conference will promote knowledge and understanding of the range of ways in which the ‘First Total War’ has been mediated in visual cultures, not only in Britain and continental Europe but throughout the world.

The organizers are keen to receive proposals for papers that present new research and/or methodological approaches. In particular they would like to encourage proposals from scholars from different disciplines who wish to work in collaboration with each other. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to Phil Shaw ps14@le.ac.uk.

Organised by Martin Myrone (Tate Britain), Satish Padiyar (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Phil Shaw (University of Leicester), and Philippa Simpson (National Maritime Museum)

Ars Judaica Conference: Traditions and Perspectives in History of Jewish Art
Bar-Ilan University, Israel, 10-13 September 2012

Proposals due by 6 November 2011

The conference will bring together historians of art and material culture and researchers in history, religions, semiotics, psychology, sociology, and folklore to explore the fields of interest of Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art that include, but are not limited to:

– The Jewish contribution to the visual arts and culture from antiquity to the present
– Art and architecture of Jewish sacred spaces
– Biblical texts as a source in Christian and Muslim visual arts
– Jerusalem and the Holy Land as an object and model in visual arts
– Images of Jews in visual arts
– Hebrew script in visual arts
– Patrons, collectors and museums of Jewish art
– Jews, arts and politics

Abstracts (limited to 200 words) of twenty-minute presentations with a short CV should be submitted (as attached MSWord documents) by January 6, 2012 to gr.ajudaica@biu.ac.il. The applicants will be notified of the decision regarding their proposals by February 6, 2012.

Special Issue of World History Connected: Art in World History
Submissions due 1 December 2011

The February 2012 issue of the online journal World History Connected will focus on “Art in World History.” It seeks to offer case studies and effective methodological and/or pedagogical approaches highlighting this important aspect of both research and teaching in the field of world history. The editor of the journal, Marc Jason Gilbert, and the guest editor of this forum, Ralph Croizier, seek five sorts of contributions: (more…)

Women Artists in Early Modern Italy
The Medici Archive Project, Florence, 3 March 2012

Proposals due 1 December 2011

The Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists in the Age of the Medici at The Medici Archive Project is organizing a one-day conference (Florence, March 3, 2012) to highlight new documentary findings on the creative production of women in the visual arts (broadly defined) in the period 1500-1750.

Researchers have been exploiting historical archives to answer such questions as, What were the lives of women artists like in early modern Italy? Did their creative production take its cues from the social, cultural and professional circumstances that characterized their careers? Did they operate workshops similarly to male artists? Did their techniques for attracting patronage and setting prices follow the example of male artists?  Where else besides the professional artist’s studio did women engage in the visual arts? Are there works of art by women artists that can be identified, dated or otherwise clarified by means of archival evidence?  This conference offers an opportunity for comparing findings on early modern women artists and for examining a range of useful archival strategies and historiographic methodologies.

Although Italian women artists are of primary concern at this conference, papers on women artists of other countries are welcome particularly if they can be linked with the Medici or if their works were collected by any of the Medici (as in the case of Rachel Ruysch for instance). We are also particularly keen to include papers dealing with the collecting and display of works by women artists in the years 1500-1750, as well as papers that characterize the patronage enjoyed by women artists of this period.

To apply, please submit by December 1, 2012, a paper title, a one-page abstract either in English or Italian, and a curriculum vitae. Submissions should be sent via email to Dr. Sheila Barker: barker@medici.org