Enfilade

From the ISECS website:

Thirteenth International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies
University of Graz, Austria, 25-29 July 2011

Proposals due by 31 January 2011

Our last general meeting took place at the 12th International Congress in Montpellier in 2007, and now preparations for the 13^th Congress, to be held in Graz (Austria) from July 25^th – 29^th, 2011, are well underway. (Please consult the website www.18thcenturycongress-graz2011.at for further information). Graz is Austria’s second largest city after Vienna. It is situated in the southeast of the country and can easily be reached by plane, train or car.

The Executive Committee of the ISECS accepted the organisers’ thematic proposals and so the principal overriding theme is confirmed as notions of time (past, present and future) in the eighteenth century. We believe that this topic is likely to be of keen interest not only to Congress participants, but also to the general public, especially as it allows for the possibility of research that can engage with issues of current concern.

The second overriding theme, Central and Eastern Europe in the Age of Enlightenment, has also been confirmed. Not only will this theme provide the opportunity for the discussion of state-of-the-art research on a fascinating range of topics, it will also allow participants the chance to forge new links with this part of the world and meet Central and Eastern European colleagues.

Here, we add a reminder that registration of new sessions and workshops is open until the end of July, 2010. We strongly encourage members take advantage of this opportunity to contribute new session and workshop topics in order that the congress programme is as rich and varied as possible. Once registration has closed, the organisers will draft a preliminary programme which will be posted on the website.

And, finally, we would also like to reiterate our invitation for members to register individual papers within the framework of the sessions and workshops. Please submit papers from October 1, 2010 to January 31, 2011. Papers will be selected on the basis of academic merit, and also with the aim of producing a varied and interesting conference programme with a wide range of contributors so that participants have the chance to make new and valuable contacts. In addition, special attention will be given to the work of young scholars, and this may also include the possibility of us providing additional support in some cases.

We look forward to welcoming you to Graz in 2011!

Yours sincerely,

The Congress Committee

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Panels that might be especially interesting for HECAA members include the following:

• AS028: Portraiture and Time in the Age of Enlightenment
• CS005: Collecting Art and Visual Culture in Latin America
• CS014: Garden Culture in Enlightenment Europe “In Memoria Michel Baridon”
• CS037: New Directions in Visual Culture
• CW016: The Art and Ritual of Eighteenth-Century Diplomacy

From The Clark:

In the Wake of the “Global Turn”: Practices for an Exploded Art History without Borders
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 28-29 October 2011

Proposals due by 15 January 2011

Conveners: Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza

Raqs Media Collective, "Escapement," detail, 2009. 27 clocks, high glass aluminium with LED lights, four flat screen monitors, video and audio looped

This Clark conference on art history in the wake of the “global turn” takes up, and yet departs from, decades of the critique of Eurocentric priorities and presumptions of the discipline of art history. What would it mean to understand the global turn as something that does not merely expand but potentially explodes the borders between fields and even the discipline itself? The conference, then, aims to address methodologies, research practices, and models for not just a de-centered but also a reoriented practice of the global, one that reckons with radical difference, unevenness, and even the untranslatable. And it will do so from an eccentric, agonistic position. Rather than seeking a unifying conceptual term or method that merely expands the discipline as we know it, the conference starts from the position that confronting the challenge of developing practices of and for “the global” necessarily involves learning how to engage with a range of irresolvable frictions, disunities, and incommensurabilities. Pushing beyond the questions that have arisen over whether there is or even could be a global art history or histories, the conference is dedicated to developing practices of and for a fractured conception of the global. (more…)

Wanted: two additional proposals for a collection of essays tentatively titled Objects of Inquiry and Exchange: Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context. If interested, please submit your proposal by January 15, 2011:

Whereas the temporal expanse of the “long” eighteenth-century has been repeatedly emphasized, its spatial inclusiveness and thematic coincidences beyond British (or British colonial) boundaries are still insufficiently addressed. This volume invites papers that may fill in this informational gap: they will focus on how the increased production and circulation of things during the century has encouraged processes of cultural, scientific, and commercial exchange that justify the period’s consideration from a more globalizing perspective. The main goal of the volume is to cover geographical and cultural areas insufficiently mapped out in eighteenth-century studies (the Near and Far Orient, South-Eastern Europe, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the Nordic countries, Black Africa, and Latin America) by exploring them through the material and narrative circulation of emblematic or familiar objects that represent them literally and culturally.  The possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• objects in intimate spaces and the emergence of domesticity;
• (im)proper objects and the public sphere;
• exotic things in travelogues and scientific investigation;
• automatons, fossils, totems and the scientific inquiry;
• collectibles, souvenirs, gifts and the epoch’s emerging interest in antiquarianism and the culture of the museum;
• gigantic and monstrous objects and the gothic imagination;
• anthropomorphized objects;
• it-narratives as forms of picaresque fiction and anti-luxury discourse;
• persons as things: the reifying mechanism of the satire;
• desirable things and associated practices (advertising, fashion, shoplifting);
• the traffic in china, fabrics, spices, and perfumes and the emerging interest in Orientalism;
• things as fetishes and objects of exchange;
• curious, magical, and ritual objects;
• the role of commodities in bringing geographically alien spaces together.

Ideally, the collection will highlight patterns of similar or divergent trends, behaviors, or themes that will reconfigure our understanding of the East/West (and North/South, for that matter) dichotomy by tracing down paths of commercial and intercultural exchange. Our goal is to provide a more accurate representation of the relationship between literature and material culture during the century from a comparative perspective that aims to elucidate whether synchronicity is a matter of influence or coincidence. Consequently, our call for papers encourages submissions from scholars involved in interdisciplinary and comparative research, both domestically and abroad.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief bio to Ileana Baird at ifp4a@virginia.edu and Christina Ionescu at cionescu@mta.ca by January 15, 2010. The deadline for manuscript submission will be June 30, 2011.

Icons and Iconoclasm
Inaugural issue of Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture

Proposals due by 29 October 2010

The Jefferson Scholars Foundation and the Jefferson Fellows at the University of Virginia recently hosted the second biennial Forum for Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Scholars from across the United States and the World presented their research at the two-day event. On the heels of the success of this conference, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation is proud to launch a new peer-reviewed academic journal entitled the Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture. The journal is a twice-annual publication intended to present high-quality manuscripts on interdisciplinary topics.  Each journal will also have a theme.  The theme for the first journal will correspond to the conference — Icons and Iconoclasm. We invite scholars in all fields to submit papers exploring the many roles, uses and interpretations of icons, as well as criticisms of their iconic status. Scholars are invited to interpret the terms “image,” “icon,” and “iconoclasm” in different ways. Some topics may include:

• iconic ideas (scholarly theories, religious beliefs and practices, culture)
• mechanics of icons (construction, transmission, perception, and reception/destruction)
• iconic images (scientific models, branding, maps, artwork)
• iconic figures (historical, religious, literary, political)

Please read the submission guidelines on this website and email your manuscript to jeffersonjournaluva@gmail.com by Friday, October 29, 2010.

Proposals due by 15 December 2010

Each year ASECS sponsors a scholar session at the annual meeting of these societies. Because ASECS is an interdisciplinary society, it encourages its members to propose a session (panel, round table) on a topic of broad scholarly interest and one that will have particular resonance and appeal for the constituencies of the AHA (historians), CAA (art historians), and MLA (literary critics). The deadline for submitting proposals is December 15.

Proposals should take into account the type of interdisciplinary work encouraged by ASECS. A non-member status waiver can be requested from the MLA, for scholars working in fields other than language and literature. A submission form is available on the ASECS website (near the bottom of the page).

Happiness or Its Absence in Art
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, 10 March 2011

Proposals due by 31 December 2010

For this symposium we invite papers relating to various aspects of the theme of happiness in art and visual culture, including concepts which generate or shape happiness (or its absence) such as: love, innocence, religious exaltation, spiritual uplift, physical pleasure and enjoyment, entertainment, food, life and death, along with misery, despair, unrequited love. We welcome papers dealing with a work of art or type of iconography, as well as studies from the field of art theory. We are interested in discourses about the perception of happiness by the artist or within the creative process itself; the status of the beholder and the artistic attempt to create a transcendental experience. New research methods and approaches within the discipline as well as papers which adopt an original perspective will receive special attention.

We cordially invite you to propose papers by sending a title and an abstract (up to 300 words) in English, in MS Word format to happiness.arts@gmail.com by December 31st, 2010. Please remember to attach your contact details. For further inquiries please contact Ms. Ronit Milano at ronitmilano@gmail.com.

Tenth Annual Workshop: The Eighteenth Century and the Unconscious
Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, 11-13 May 2011

Applications due by 7 January 2011

Eighteenth-century studies in many ways emerged from and remains beholden to “the Enlightenment”-a category often understood in terms of rationality, reason, and the exercise of conscious decision making. Reason may be celebrated (see Jonathan Israel) or it may be critiqued (see Horkheimer and Adorno): in either case, it remains central to most accounts of the period. Yet the eighteenth century was also the era of  empirical psychology, sentimentalism’s triumph, and the emergence of what we now call Romanticism. It may even be the era of the discovery or the invention of the unconscious (Sloterdijk). By focusing on “unconscious” eighteenth centuries, this workshop therefore asks participants to reconsider the relation of reason to un-reason and of theory to historically inclined analyses.

Any mention of the unconscious immediately invites psychoanalytic interpretation. Yet the framework and vocabulary of psychoanalysis were unknown to eighteenth-century protagonists. For the purposes of this workshop, we therefore propose a broad starting definition of the unconscious as that which is unavailable to consciousness: it may be simply invisible or it may be actively produced by some “invisibilizing” mechanism, such as repression, suppression, or forgetting. It may operate within an individual or text, or it may function throughout a culture; its effects may be social, political, legal, literary, pedagogical, or psychological. There may be structurally different forms of unavailability. While the unconscious and its effects may be analyzed in terms derived from Freud, they do not need to be-indeed, it is our hope that this workshop will provoke participants to rethink both their understandings of the eighteenth century and their accounts of conscious and unconscious processes.

We invite participants to be explicit about their methodological choices. Papers might address one or all of the following concerns:

1. Was there an unconscious according to eighteenth-century protagonists; if so, how did it emerge and what functions did it serve?
2. Can we historicize a concept or structure such as the unconscious? What would be gained from doing so? What would be lost?
3. If there is something “eighteenth-century” about current theories of the unconscious, need their origins be found in this period, broadly construed?
4. To what extent do eighteenth-century examples challenge or complicate common models of unconscious life? With its focus on oedipal dramas within the nuclear family has psychoanalysis itself blinded us to the effect of extended families, the importance of social modes of remembering and forgetting, and the emotional work of religious affiliation?

The workshop format will consist of focused discussion of four to six papers a day, amid socializing and refreshment. The workshop will draw both on the wide community of eighteenth-century scholars and on those working in this field at Indiana University-Bloomington. The workshop will cover most expenses of those scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals. We are asking for applications to be sent to us by Friday, January 7, 2011. The application consists of a two-page description of the proposed paper as well as a current brief CV (no longer than three pages). Please email or send your application to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, 400 North Sunrise Drive, Weatherly Hall North, Room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405, Telephone 812/855-2856, voltaire@indiana.edu. Papers will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee. All submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail within a fortnight: if you have not received an acknowledgment by the January 7th application deadline, please contact Barbara Truesdell or Mary Favret. We will make final decisions on participants in early February. Further information can be found on our website, or you can find us on Facebook. For additional details and queries, please contact the director of the Center, Mary Favret, Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN  47405, favretm@indiana.edu.

Aesthetics, Art, and Pornography
Institute of Philosophy, London, 16-18 June 2011

Proposals due by 1 February 2011

The aim of this conference is to investigate, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures, films, and literature. Is there such a thing as pornographic art? Or are pornography and art mutually exclusive? Can a line be drawn between these two domains of representation? Or is there perhaps some interesting overlap, some common ground worth exploring? To answer these questions certain fundamental issues in the philosophy of art need to be addressed. One cannot hope to critically examine the middle ground between art and pornography without seriously engaging with current research on the definition of art, the nature of aesthetic value, aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, the relation between art and morality, the psychology of picture perception, and the role of imagination in art. However, more is involved than just an abstract philosophical problem. In the history of art, and especially also in the contemporary world of art (construed in the broadest sense), there are many paintings, photographs, prints, films, poems, short stories, novels and graphic novels which have been labelled ‘pornographic art’. Any investigation of the artistic status and potential of pornographic representations would not be complete without a careful examination of such works that consciously explore the boundaries between art and pornography.

The conference will bring together philosophers and aestheticians, art historians and film theorists, to explore these topics. This interdisciplinary approach is intended to throw new light on these general questions, and to lead to a more accurate and subtle understanding of the range of representations that incorporate explicit sexual imagery and themes, in both high art and demotic culture, in Western and non-Western contexts.

Confirmed Speakers

MARTIN KEMP History of Art, Oxford University (Emeritus Research Professor)
PAMELA CHURCH-GIBSON Film & Cultural Studies, University of the Arts London
JERROLD LEVINSON Philosophy, University of Maryland
JESSE PRINZ Philosophy, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
ELISABETH SCHELLEKENS Philosophy, University of Durham

Call for Papers

We invite submissions on any issue related to this topic, ranging from abstract philosophical questions to detailed analyses of particular films, paintings, photographs, novels, etc. Papers from different disciplines and theoretical perspectives are encouraged. Speakers will have a presentation time of approximately 40 minutes. Papers should not exceed 5000 words and should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract and a short CV. Please send papers to conference organiser Hans Maes (H.Maes@kent.ac.uk) by February 1, 2011. Communication of acceptance: March 15, 2011. Submissions will be refereed by an international committee, and selected on the basis of general quality and relevance to the special topic of the conference. The organisers plan to publish (a selection of) the conference papers. We welcome volunteers to serve as session chairs and commentators. We regret that we cannot cover travel or other expenses.

Organising committee: Hans Maes, Michael Newall, Murray Smith, Barry C. Smith, Jerrold Levinson, Jonathan Friday.

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the The American Society for Aesthetics, The School of Arts and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kent.

Performing Research: Art History Not For Publication
Courtauld Institute, London, 6 May 2011

Proposals due by 10 January 2011

This conference seeks to explore the clarity, diversity, and freedom that can come from presenting art historical research directly to an audience, as opposed to through traditional publishing routes in books or academic journals. Shifting away from more static forms of analysis encouraged by the inevitable limitations of print-based media, the conference will investigate and exploit the evolving technologies at the disposal of researchers. It will give an opportunity for scholars at all stages of their careers to experiment with dynamic, alternative methods of communicating research, allowing and encouraging the format of papers to both reflect and directly comment upon the subject presented.

Building on seminar workshops on Art History and TV, Art History and Radio, and Art History and the Internet, the group invites abstracts for short 15 minute papers from all areas of the discipline. In each case the art historical research presented should be further elucidated through a novel and alternative presentation method, be it visual, aural, or action-based. Joint papers or collaborations between art historians, or between art historians and practitioners from other disciplines (especially the visual arts) are welcome and encouraged. In keeping with this ethos conference recordings will be archived in an open online forum. Possible papers: (more…)

Urban History Group Annual Conference: Leisure, Pleasure, and the Urban Spectacle
Robinson College, University of Cambridge, 31 March — 1 April 2011

Proposals for Sessions and Papers due by 29 October 2010

This conference theme broadly explores the pursuit of pleasure in the context of the history of towns and cities. The conference organisers are interested in investigating the significance of specifically urban forms of pleasure and leisure for understanding the historical dynamics of social, economic and cultural relationships. Towns and cities have historically offered an array of pleasures to cater for ever larger concentrations of people. The types of leisure activities available to urban populations have never remained static; indeed, changing social and economic conditions have transformed popular leisure patterns over time as well as across urban space. The pursuit of pleasure, both licit and illicit, has adapted with the changing relationship between work and leisure. As working hours became increasingly rigid during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too did leisure time. The lack of free time was further exacerbated by growing pressures on land use. Thus, the pursuit of pleasure was increasingly set aside for specific buildings (inns, brothels, theatres, music halls and, more recently, fitness centres) or clearly delineated spaces (botanical gardens, public parks, public walks, gated communities and even the internet) where access could, in theory, be carefully managed. Cities, seaside towns and holiday resorts were also developed to specifically cater for a variety of tastes and pleasures. Once it was recognised that there was money to be made out of the pursuit of pleasure, cities became intertwined with the business of leisure and began to market themselves as centres of tourism, heritage and culture. Some issues that the conference seeks to consider include: (more…)