Enfilade

Special Issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Exoticism and Cosmopolitanism
Submissions due by 10 January 2011

Eighteenth-Century Fiction invites submissions to a special issue on exoticism and cosmopolitanism in the long eighteenth century (24:3, Spring 2012). Possible topics may include but are not confined to “tropicopolitanism,” or the relationship between cosmopolitan and colonial/postcolonial identities; the politics of cosmopolitan displays of exoticism in material and performance culture; the use of the “exotic” to mark the boundaries of the cosmopolis; the role of cosmopolitanism and exoticism as dual cultural forces in the shaping of national identities. We welcome articles that treat the topic in areas outside imaginative prose fiction. Electronic manuscripts (5,000-8,000 words) should reach the ECF office by 10 January 2011. Choose “Submit Article” at http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/

La rédaction sollicite des articles pour un numéro spécial consacré à l’exotisme et le cosmopolitisme au xviiie siècle (parution: printemps 2012). Ce numéro est ouvert à la discussion de toute sorte de représentation de l’exotisme et du cosmopoli-tisme et ne se limite pas à ses représentations dans la fiction narrative. Parmis les sujets possibles: le « tropicopolitisme », ou le rapport entre identités cosmopolites et coloniales/postcoloniales; la politique de manifestations cosmopo-lites de l’exotisme dans la culture matérielle ou dans la performativité; l’emploi de l’« exotique » pour marquer les bornes du « cosmopole »; la fonction du cosmopolitisme et de l’exotisme en tant que forces culturelles dans la formation de l’identité nationale. Les manuscrits (5000-8000 mots) doivent parvenir à la rédaction avant le 1oem janvier 2011 (par courriel: ecf@mcmaster.ca).

Hispanic Research Journal—Annual Visual Arts Issue
Submissions due by 15 January 2011

Hispanic Research Journal promotes and disseminates research into the cultures of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The fields covered include literature and literary theory, cultural history and cultural studies, language and linguistics, and film and theatre studies. As of 2007, the journal was expanded to include one issue per year devoted to the visual arts of Iberia and Latin America, co-edited by ASHAHS and ARTES (Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group). Hispanic Research Journal publishes articles in four languages; Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and English, and encourages, especially through its features section, debate and interaction between researchers all over the world who are working in these fields.

The visual arts issue co-editors invite submissions for scholarly, refereed articles (up to 8,000 words) covering art, architecture, and design from the medieval period to the present in Iberia, and from the colonial era to the present in Latin America. Consult the Notes for Contributors guidelines at www.maney.co.uk/journals/notes/hispanic. For submissions and questions, please contact Kelly Donahue-Wallace (kwallace@unt.edu).

Dr. Kelly Donahue-Wallace
Associate Professor of Art History
Interdisciplinary Art and Design Studies Program Coordinator
University of North Texas

The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations, 1640–1830
Tintern, Monmouthshire, Wales, 6-8 July 2011

Proposals due by 1 January 2011

The aim of this international conference – held on the banks of the Wye at Tintern, with views over to the abbey ruins – is to revisit one of Britain’s paradigmatic cultural sites: the Wye Valley. From Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan to William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, from the Early Modern period to Romanticism, this resonant ground has been central to British poetry, art, aesthetic theory, picturesque tourism and political intervention. The borderspace from Pumlumon to Chepstow became one of the great internalised cartographies of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is time to trace the flow of Wordsworth’s famous ‘wanderer through the woods’ anew in order to reconsider the conditioning influence this frontier-river had on the literary, artistic and cultural imagination of the age.

The Wye Valley: Romantic Representations will examine a broad spectrum of negotiations with the Wye Valley during the period 1640–1830, following in the footsteps and waterwakes of the period’s commentators, authors and artists. How might we ‘revisit’ the Wye Valley in order to defamiliarise the myriad responses to this landscape? What is the extent of the Wye Valley’s ‘reach’ into the various cultures of the age? What are the contours of various ‘cross-border’ negotiations with the Wye? The conference will bring international scholars together to examine a crucial section of the Welsh and British map.

The conference will take place at the heart of Tintern, a few hundred yards from the abbey and the river. Hotels and B&Bs are located within a couple of minutes’ walk. Possible excursions include the Piercefield picturesque estate, the wooded hills overlooking the valley, the castle at Chepstow, the famous iron forges along the impressive Angidy Valley and of course the Abbey itself. 20-minute papers are invited in any relevant area; suggestions are given below. Please email abstracts of c. 300 words to Stephanie Churms (scc09@aber.ac.uk) by 1 January 2011. (more…)

As noted previously here at Enfilade, ISECS meets next summer in Austria. The following session may be of particular interest for HECAA members:

The Art and Ritual of Eighteenth-Century Diplomacy [C Workshop, CW016]
Panel at the Thirteenth International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies
University of Graz, Austria, 25-29 July 2011

Proposals due by 31 January 2011

Co-chaired by Meredith Martin and Michael Yonan

“These carnival embassies are extraordinarily expensive and of no real value.” So claimed one European noblewoman in her written observations of eighteenth-century court life. Noble courts expended vast amounts of time, ingenuity, materials, and finances on events such as diplomatic receptions, embassy visits, formal state-sponsored ceremonies, and audiences. This panel seeks new approaches to exploring the art and ritual of diplomacy in eighteenth-century Europe by focusing on new interpretive or methodological approaches, different forms of cross-cultural exchange, and other perspectives on art and the embassy. Topics may include diplomatic gifts, images of ambassadors, rituals and entertainment, the construction and protocol of embassies, the mechanics of travel, literary representations of diplomatic encounters, architecture both permanent and ephemeral, or prints and other illustrations made après coup. One of the more fascinating aspects of this discussion is the level of risk involved in the presentation and exchange of objects, images, and individuals in diplomatic encounters. These cultural and artistic interactions always carried some degree of fluidity or contingency and were continually subjected to alternate interpretations and misreadings. To what extent was this degree of risk (and this potential for reward) managed through art and the politics of display?

The application form can be found online at www.18thcenturycongress-graz2011.at/congressprogramme.html. Applications must first be sent directly to the ISECS conference organizers, who will forward them to the session chairs. The deadline to apply is January 31, 2011.

Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society Conference: The Arts & Sciences of Progress
University of Aberdeen, 7-10 July 2011

Proposals due by 1 December 2010

ECSSS invites proposals from ASECS members for its annual conference, to be held from 7 to 10 July 2011 at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Hosted by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, the conference will focus attention on the notion of “progress” – and its limitations – in society, literature, science, politics, and the arts. Proposals are welcome on this theme, as well as on relations between Ireland and Scotland, Jacobitism, Highland culture, Scottish Episcopalianism, 18th-century Aberdeen, and any other aspects of 18th-century Scottish thought and culture.

In addition, this conference will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry in the early 1760s, and papers relating to that theme will be particularly welcome. David Hume’s 300th birthday will also be duly noted, although we will leave the main celebration of that event to the Hume Society/IASH conference in Edinburgh one week afterwards. Plenary lectures will be presented by Professor Colin Kidd of Glasgow University: “Hypocrisy and Dissimulation in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of the Rev. Alexander Fergusson of Kilwinning” and Professor Fiona Stafford of Oxford University: “Everything Unreconciled? The Place of Macpherson’s Ossian.”

Please email or fax a title and one-page description of your proposed panel or proposed 20-minute paper, along with a one-page cv containing your contact information (deadline: 1 December 2010) to: Professor Cairns Craig, Director – Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, Aberdeen AB24 3UG, Scotland, UK. Fax: (0)1224 273677; email: cairns.craig@abdn.ac.uk.

A colleague of mine here in Paris, Jessica Fripp from the University of Michigan, is organizing an international conference on art and sociability during the eighteenth century. The call for papers is listed below, and I hope many of you out there will be inspired to submit some ideas for this promising event. – JF.

Art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle (1715-1815)
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 23-25 June 2011

Proposals due by 31 December 2010

Over the past two decades, sociabilité has become a useful and hotly debated concept for discussing the social, political, and cultural changes during the eighteenth century. The works of Daniel Roche, Dena Goodman, Daniel Gordon, Antoine Lilti, and others have demonstrated that sociabilité can be fruitfully approached from the perspectives of sociology, philosophy and anthropology. In the eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie defined the term as “this inclination we have to do to others all the good that we can, to reconcile our happiness with that of others, and always to subordinate our personal advantage to the overall and communal advantage” (Louis de Jaucourt, 1751-1765) – that is, it was an abstract concept that explained the desire humankind had to participate in society. At the time, it was intricately linked to the social practice of commerce, broadly defined as any reciprocal communication or exchange. The emerging public sphere of the period, constituted by spaces such as academies, literary salons, and Masonic lodges, was the stage on which such exchanges were enacted.

Since the publication of Thomas Crow’s Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, art historians have taken an interest in the role of artists in the public sphere. These studies tend to take a monographic approach that is more interested in reconstructing the history of an individual artist, salonnière, or collector rather than the role that artworks played in larger systems of practice and exchange. This symposium will examine sociabilité in the eighteenth-century art world through the theme of social practice. By investigating the social practices of artists, amateurs, critics, salonniers, and others we seek to uncover the larger networks of social exchange created by the commerce of material objects through collection practices, the art market and the display of art, and by the commerce of ideas through writing and conversation. To what extent did social practices in the public sphere influence artistic production and the material, economic, and verbal exchanges that took place around that production?

This symposium will take place at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, June 23-25, 2011. We welcome papers from a wide range of humanities disciplines such as: history of art, history, anthropology, philosophy, and literature, as well as sociology and cultural studies, as we are interested in bringing together different disciplinary approaches to these topics and exploring connections between them. Please send an abstract of no more than one page, in French or English, and C.V. to colloque.sociabilite@gmail.com before December 31, 2010.

Book Destruction
University of London, Senate House, 16 April 2011

Proposals due by 10 January 2011

Much attention has been given in recent years to the book as a material, historical object and its possible technological obsolescence in the era of digitization. Such reflections have tended to concentrate on the production and cultural circulation of books, their significance and their power to shape knowledge and subjectivities. But there is another aspect to our interactions with the book which remains relatively unexplored: the history of book destruction. In certain circumstances books are treated not with reverence but instead with violence or disregard. This conference invites reflections on this alternative history of the book, and we welcome papers from a range of historical periods and disciplinary backgrounds. We welcome proposals from postgraduate students, as well as from more established academics.

Why do people destroy books? What are the mechanics of book destruction: the burning, pulping, defacing, tearing, drowning, cutting, burying, eating? What are the cultural meanings that have been attached to book destruction, and what do they reveal about our investments in this over-familiar object? Why should the burning of books have such symbolic potency? Book destruction is often invoked as a symbol of oppressive, despotic regimes; what is our ethical position, now, in relation to such acts? What is the relationship between book destruction and other forms of cutting up (quotation; collage)? When do acts of destruction become moments of creativity? How does destruction relate to recycling and reuse? Do transitions in media (manuscript to print; print to digital) threaten those older forms? How might the current phase of digitization and the gradual disappearance of library stock relate to prior moments of destruction? In the internet age, is it still possible to destroy (that is, completely erase) a text? What does materiality mean in a digital age?

Please send 300-word proposals (for a 20-minute paper) and a brief CV to Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk) by 10 January 2011.

Joint Meeting of CSECS, NEASECS, and the Aphra Behn Society
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 27–29 October 2011

‘The Immaterial Eighteenth Century’

Proposals due by 31 January 2011

In response to the sustained scholarly focus on the material aspects of eighteenth-century culture, the core concern of this interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and French) conference will be reactions to instability in the material realm, including but not limited to the emergence of an affective public sphere, a revaluation of labour, cosmopolitanism, sensibility, the new spiritualism, political radicalism and rights discourse, supernaturalism and the rise of the gothic, and anti-slavery and anti-imperial movements.  Papers on these and any topics related to the material and the immaterial in the period will be welcomed.  Panels dedicated to new theoretical models are particularly encouraged: looking beyond “thing theory” and “interiority,” enquiries that have dominated the field for the last decade, what approaches can raise the ethical and political stakes in the study of eighteenth-century literature and culture? Session and paper proposals should be emailed directly to Peter Walmsley (walmsley@mcmaster.ca) or Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins (zjenkin@mcmaster.ca).