Enfilade

The conference ends where HECAA begins, but this early phase of Orientalism may still be relevant for dixhuitièmistes thinking about the topic. This is, incidentally, the first time I’ve ever seen the following in a CFP: send “a brief cv or a reference to your personal website.” For more information, see the conference website:

The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, 1492-1700
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 7-8 October 2011

Proposals due by 15 November 2010

In early modern Europe, discourses on and images of the Orient and Islam are inextricably tied to the rise of national consciousness and the formation of a European identity as several Western states were striving for imperial supremacy. The goal of this international and interdisciplinary conference is to explore the dialectical function of early modern Orientalism for the creation of different notions of a collective self: national, European, and/or imperial.

We invite proposals for contributions that analyze the multiple uses of an imaginary Islam and Orient and compare at least two national orientalist discourses and/or the intersection of nation-building and the invention of Europeanness catalyzed through these discourses. Beyond being simplifications, what role do stereotypes play in the complex and often contradictory rhetorical dynamics that served to articulate, implement and promote both internal policies and supranational endeavors of imperial supremacy? To whom are these stereotypical representations addressed and through what media? In what instances does the creation of a fictive homogeneous nation lead to the conceptual “islamization” of minority groups? Is there a competition among European nation-states for the hegemony in the representation of the Oriental, and in which ways does it feed into a transnational rivalry for imperial power? What does the comparison of different national accounts of Orientalism reveal about the supposed homogeneity of the stereotypical Muslim? (more…)

Association of Art Historians (AAH) Annual Conference
University of Warwick, 31 March — 2 April 2011

Proposals due by 8 November 2010

The AAH 2011 Annual Conference showcases the diversity and richness of art history in the UK and elsewhere over an extensive chronological range from ancient to contemporary (with a healthy dose in the middle). Sessions are geographically inclusive of Western Europe and the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. A full range of methodologies is on offer, ranging from object-based studies, socio-historical analyses, theoretical discourses, visual culture of the moving image, exhibition cultures and display. The sessions reflect the composition of our wide constituency – independent or academic researchers (including students), museum curators and teachers.

Plenary Speakers
Horst Bredekamp, Humboldt University and Permanent Fellow of the Institute of Advances Studies, Berlin
Patricia Rubin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

If you would like to offer a paper, please email the session convenor(s) directly, providing an abstract of your proposed paper in no more than 250 words, your name and institutional affiliation (if any). You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks. In the absence of this, please post a paper copy, including your full contact details to the convenor. Please do not send proposals to the conference convenor.

Details, including descriptions of all sessions, are available here»

Midwest Art History Society 2011 Conference
Grand Rapids, MI, 14-16 April 2011

Proposals due by 15 October 2010

Grand Rapids Art Museum

The 2011 MAHS conference will take place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 14-16. The scheduled plenary speakers are Jim Dine and Rebecca Zorach. Sessions will take place at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art. Panels on the eighteenth century are included below. Proposals of no more than 250 words and a recent CV should be submitted electronically by October 15 to the respective chairs noted at the end of each description. A full list of sessions is available here»

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European Art and Architecture, 1600-1800

This session will consider topics concerning European visual art or material culture from 1600 to 1800. Work in all media (painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, or decorative arts) is welcomed as the focal point of the topic.

Valerie Hedquist, University of Montana, Valerie.hedquist@umontana.edu

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Prints and Drawings

Papers are invited dealing with any topic addressing prints and drawings as distinct genres within art history and art criticism. A variety of methodological approaches is welcomed. This session will be hosted in the Jansma Prints and Drawings Center in the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

Cindy Buckner, Grand Rapids Art Museum, cbuckner@artmuseumgr.org

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The Body in Art

From Paleolithic sculpture to 21^st C performance and film, the human form has been central to art. This session seeks papers that examine the use of the body in both historical and contemporary art production and practice. Topics may include portraiture, the body as the site of political, social or psychological identity, the glorified or abject body, the nude, the clothed body, and the role of fashion in art.

Suzanne Eberle, Kendall College of Art & Design, eberles@ferris.edu

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Conservation and Appearances of Art Objects and Art Historical Interpretations

The visual appearance of a work of art object results not only from the techniques and materials used during its creation, but also the cumulative, sometimes complex physical history which results in its present condition. How does our knowledge about the technique, materials, and state of conservation inform our particular art historical interpretation of an object? How are we challenged to reconstruct the former appearance, meaning, and even the function of an artwork based on our understanding of its current state? Topics touching on these issues from a wide diversity of objects, media, historical periods and cultures are sought for submission and discussion.

Kenneth Bé, Gerald Ford Conservation Center, kbe.lute@gmail.com

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The Garden as Ideal

Because of the way gardens foreground the complex relationship between art and nature, they typically give physical form to various ideals regarding nature and its role in the constructed environment. This panel invites papers addressing gardens throughout history as these spaces shaped visions of how the world – or at least a portion of the world – should be ordered. Presentations might address issues of paradise, the garden as a sacred space, themes of knowledge construction, notions of nature perfected, the function of geometry, or the picturesque.

Craig Hanson, Calvin College, CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com

The Cultural Production of Natural Knowledge, 1700-1850
Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, 30 October 2010

Paper proposals due by 29 September 2010

This one-day interdisciplinary workshop seeks to understand the cultural and aesthetic frameworks within which medical and scientific knowledge was created, represented and communicated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We aim to place these within the contexts of the wider global circulation of people, texts and things, and the expanding market for medical knowledge and scientific objects. We envisage that the workshop will focus on the following themes, but we invite speakers to interpret these flexibly. First, we wish to discuss the cultural discourses surrounding the collection and collation of new facts from the field. Questions that might be discussed could include: Who acted as intermediaries in the transmission of information, and how did they do so? What factors influenced the extent to which informants’ contributions were included, or excluded, by the travellers who collected new knowledge? How did these processes of collection and inscription relate to those that took place in the metropole, where texts were edited and streamlined for publication, objects were marshalled into museum collections, and paintings were produced and displayed? What was the relationship between natural knowledge and place / space, and how did this relate to contemporary aesthetic theory?

Second, we aim to relate these cultural contexts to the production and consumption of texts, collections and visual representations. Who read these texts or studied collections, and how did they relate to them? How were scientific and medical ideas created and disseminated in literary texts, epistolary culture, travel writings, works of art, and other cultural productions? What were the points of intersection between aesthetic discourse and medical and scientific knowledge? Bringing together scholars of literature, history and art history, this workshop will discuss the cultural production of knowledge, texts, and visual representations of natural knowledge.

We invite papers of 20-25 mins in length. Please send proposals (300 words) to: Emily Senior, E.F.Senior@Warwick.ac.uk and Sarah Easterby-Smith, Sarah.Easterby-Smith@alumni.Warwick.ac.uk. The deadline for proposals is Wednesday 29 September 2010.

Emily Senior and Sarah Easterby-Smith
University of Warwick
E.F.Senior@Warwick.ac.uk
Sarah.Easterby-Smith@alumni.Warwick.ac.uk
Email: e.f.senior@warwick.ac.uk
Visit the website at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/emforum/confworks/naturalknowledge/

A Forgotten World: Florentine Patricians as Patrons, Collectors, Cultural Brokers under Medici Rule (1530-1743)
University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 3-5 March 2011

Proposals due by 1 December 2010

This first international conference on the cultural habitus of Florentine patricians during the principate of the Medici originates from a research project at the University of Groningen, started in 2007 by prof.dr. H.Th. van Veen. The flourishing cultural life of the Florentine patricians during the principate of the Medici has either been forgotten or ignored for a long time. There has been little interest in patricians as commissioners of palaces, villas and chapels, as participants in academies and confraternities, and in patrician engagement in art, literature, theatre and music. In the twentieth century historians have systematically portrayed the patricians as sycophant courtiers, only interested in gaining noble titles and estates. The fact that reality was much more complex and dynamic, has become clear only in the last two decades. Through groundbreaking research in the field of socio-economic history, prosopography and political science, the image we have of the Florentine patrician is now changing, These studies show that patricians, as a group, were still holding on to most of the economic and institutional power they had obtained in the fifteenth century. The studies also show that patrician diplomatic missions played an important role in the arranging of marriages and foreign politics of the Medici. Remarkably, this historical revisionism is taken up by very few art historians, even though we now know that the contribution of patricians to the cultural dynamics of early modern Florence was highly significant.

The ambition of this conference is to discuss the cultural contribution of patricians to Florentine society and to approach it from an interdisciplinary perspective. The main question we will address is: how can we designate the dynamics, already observed in economical and political studies, in the cultural field? Other relevant questions are: how can we compare the cultural activities and ways of self-representation of the patricians, to those of the Medici? Did patricians facilitate or emulate the grand dukes? Or were they even seeking to rebel against them? Were the cultural objectives of the patricians homogeneous in character, or did they differ from one family to another? By stimulating the debate on an international level, we hope to shed more light on the nature and intentions of patrician art patronage and their collecting activities in this period. (more…)

The Substance of Painting: Graduate Student Symposium
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Saturday, 26 February 2011

Proposals due by 15 November 2010

What painting shows is its material cause, which is to say paint —Georges Didi-Huberman, 2005

This one-day graduate student symposium explores the materiality of paint and the processes of painting both historically and in contemporary practice. It invites the consideration of paint as a substance, technically, as well as in terms of meaning. How have the ways in which paint has been used and interpreted developed over time? How are paint and painterly processes considered in today’s art studios and in art history? This symposium seeks to bring together the rich historiography on painting techniques with innovative recent art-historical methodologies for analyzing painting, investigating how paint has been interpreted and exploited by artists, scholars, critics, conservators, and audiences.

The symposium coincides with two major exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, a mid-career survey of the work of the British abstract artist Rebecca Salter (b. 1955), and an exhibition of the portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), organized jointly with the National Portrait Gallery, London. This juxtaposition provides a valuable opportunity to explore the versatility of paint and painterly processes by examining the work of two artists, an academic painter active at the turn of the nineteenth century, and a contemporary artist, both sharing a highly experimental approach to the use of media. Lawrence’s complex process of creating a chalk drawing on prepared canvas, which he then covered over with bravura strokes of paint, and Salter’s technique of applying, scraping away, and reapplying pigment, both challenge the canonical notion of painting’s flatness, as does Salter’s view of her practice as “making an object” rather than a two-dimensional surface. Both exhibitions include not only paintings but also works in other media, such as pastels, watercolors, and prints, highlighting the technical innovations and methods of both artists and inviting us, in different ways, to consider the complex relationships and often porous boundaries between media, such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• paint texture
• facture and finish
• painterliness
• painting as performance
• flatness
• color
• techniques and methods
• the historiography of materials
• drawing and painting
• painting conservation
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers on this theme from graduate students working in any discipline. Special consideration will be given to papers examining the topic in relation to British art and culture. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by November 15, 2010.
by e-mail lisa.ford@yale.edu
by mail Lisa Ford
Associate Head of Research
Research Department
Yale Center for British Art
P.O. Box 208280
New Haven, CT 06520–8280

Exploring Empire: Sir Joseph Banks, India, and the ‘Great Pacific Ocean’:
Science, Travel, Trade, Literature, and Culture, 1768–1820
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (London), 24-25 June 2011

Proposals due 1 November 2010

Plenary speakers: Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) and Dr Jeremy Coote (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

In 1768, Sir Joseph Banks sailed around the world with Captain Cook and in doing so inaugurated a new era in British exploration, empire and science. As a botanist, man of science, adviser of the monarch and of ministers, and as President of the Royal Society, Banks became a central figure in the expansion in discovery and settlement that took place in the Indo-Pacific region from 1768 to 1820. Through his correspondence with fellow men of science and with government agents, Banks promoted the exchange of knowledge about flora, fauna and human cultures new to Europeans. He was a prime mover in the development of natural philosophy, ethnology, collecting and its global organization, travel and exploration, the publication and illustration of natural history and other mission findings, the development of knowledge within the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, imperial policy making and the practical uses of science by the state. He planned, for instance, the colonization of Australia and shaped the extension of British imperial influence through India and Polynesia. His activities brought Britons into contact with peoples, countries, plants and animals previously unknown to them, and this contact had major effects on indigenous societies and ecosystems. It also stimulated major cultural interest at home, and this is apparent in the new, Romantic, turn in literature and visual art, whether in Shelley’s Frankenstein, Byron’s The Island, Southey’s The Curse of Kehama and in the paintings of Pacific mission artists Hodges and Westall. (more…)

2011 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Vancouver, British Columbia, 17-20 March 2011

Proposals due by 15 September 2010

The 2011 ASECS conference takes place in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 17-20, at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented by two panels chaired by Douglas Fordham and David Ehrenpreis and Kevin Justus. In addition to these, a wide selection of sessions are also included, here»

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Art Before Nationalism (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Douglas Fordham and David Ehrenpreis, U. of Virginia, McIntire Dept. of Art, PO Box 400130, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4130; Tel: (434)243-2285 (Douglas work); Fax: (434) 924-3647 (Douglas work); E-mail: fordham@virginia.edu, EHRENPDH@jmu.edu

The concept of nationalism is often associated exclusively with modern state formation and the push for popular sovereignty that accompanied the American and French revolutions during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But how are we to interpret the shifting attitudes toward the state in other periods and/or in other places? This session seeks papers that explore the relationship between visual art and the concept of nationhood at a variety of moments and geographic locations throughout the long eighteenth century. Papers could address this relationship through a focused examination of individual works of art, aesthetic theories, or broader frames of inquiry. Relevant questions might include: Has there been a tendency to read 19th century notions of nationhood and nationalism back onto the eighteenth century? Were there aspects of either art production or aesthetic writing that failed to cross national boundaries?  Is there a difference between patriotism and nationalism during this period? Have British and/or French conceptions of nationhood been imported uncritically into our understanding of other ‘national’ artistic traditions? These are the types of questions that we encourage contributors to pose through the lens of their own regional and interpretative specializations.

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Looking Forward, Looking Back: HECAA’s New Scholars Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Kevin Justus, 4134 E Hayne Street, Tucson, AZ 85711; Tel: (520) 327-8407; E-mail: kevinjustus@yahoo.com

This session seeks to present works by new scholars who are members of HECAA. A diverse subject matter is encouraged and welcomed.

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 41

Submissions due by 1 October 2010

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (SECC) is an interdisciplinary annual volume that publishes significantly revised versions of papers read at national and regional conferences of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and its affiliates during the 2009-10 academic year. SECC strives to feature the finest work in eighteenth-century studies and to represent ASECS’s wide range of disciplinary interests. The Editors encourage theoretically informed, academically rigorous essays that reflect new directions of research in the field. Essays from previously under-represented disciplines are particularly desired. Published for ASECS by Johns Hopkins University Press and now digitized as part of Project Muse, SECC is included in the membership fees of Sponsors and Patrons of the Society and is offered to all members at a substantial discount.

Guidelines for Submission: Papers from all disciplines presented at regional and national meetings of ASECS and its affiliates between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010 are eligible for consideration. Contributions will be judged according to the highest standards of scholarship. The editors of SECC will not consider papers already submitted to other journals. Papers must be substantially revised from their presentation version and scholarly apparatus must be added. All submissions should be written in English or other commonly-used modern European languages. Submissions typically average 20 to 25 double-spaced pages in length. Current editorial practice follows the Chicago Manual of Style. In accordance with SECC’s policy of blind submissions, author’s names should not appear on the manuscript; any references to the author’s previous work should be in the third person. Please note that electronic submissions are preferred. The deadline has been extended to October 1, 2010. Final decisions will be made by December 1, 2010. Please submit appropriately revised essays to:

Lisa Cody
Associate Dean of the Faculty
Claremont McKenna College
Baurer Center, 500 East Ninth Street
Claremont, CA 91711-6400

If you have questions, please contact Lisa Cody (lisa.cody@cmc.edu).

The British Society for the History of Philosophy Annual Conference 2011
University of Sussex, 29-31 March 2011

Proposals due by 31 December 2010

Papers relating to any aspect of the philosophy of the enlightenment will be considered. The topic will be interpreted broadly, but we particularly
welcome papers in the following areas:

• Philosophy and Political Thought in the Enlightenment
• The Enlightenment and Kant
• Aesthetics and the Enlightenment

There will be a panel on ‘Jewish Thought in the Enlightenment’, and papers on this topic are also welcome. Plenary speakers will include Jonathan Friday (Kent), Knud Haakonssen (Sussex), James Harris (St Andrews), Ian Hunter (Queensland), and Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary, London). The conference is being hosted by the Department of Philosophy and the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History.Papers, suitably formated for blind review, should be sent to Lucy Allais: L.L.Allais@sussex.ac.uk

Inquiries:
Lucy Allais: L.L.Allais@sussex.ac.uk  or
Knud Haakonssen: k.haakonssen@sussex.ac.uk