Enfilade

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

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill has become quite the scholarly stimulus. With the restoration almost completed, this symposium (apparently a bit less art historical than much of the recent attention) will celebrate the building’s reopening . . .

Romantic Adaptations: A Strawberry Hill Symposium
St Mary’s University College, Twickenham (London), 25-26 March 2011

Proposals due by 31 October 2010

This two-day conference, hosted jointly by the Departments of English and Film and Popular Culture at St Mary’s University College, will mark the re-opening of Horace Walpole’s Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill. Despite Blake’s often-quoted contention that he had to ‘create a system or be enslaved by another man’s’, the investment in originality during the Romantic period disguises a pervasive culture of adaptation. The diverse afterlives of Romanticism can also best be described as a history of adaptation. This conference, itself hosted in a highly adapted Gothic space, seeks to consider both romantic-period adaptation, and subsequent adaptations of ‘romanticism’ and ‘the romantics’. The organisers invite abstracts for papers engaging with any aspect of this history of adaptation. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Antiquarianism, imitations and forgeries
• Histories and myths of romantic lives
• Gothic appropriations in print and on screen
• Iterations of poetic genres
• Classicism in art and politics
• Romantic intertexts
• Romantic drama and music
• Popular appropriations of romanticism
• ‘Genre’ and interdisciplinarity
• Eco-adaptations of romanticism

Keynote speakers are: Prof Andrew Bennett (Bristol); Dr Ian Hunter (De Montfort); Prof Peter Kitson (Dundee); and Prof Nigel Leask (Glasgow). The conference will include a tour of Horace Walpole’s newly-adapted house. Enquiries and / or abstracts, of no more than 300 words, for papers of approximately 20 minutes, should be sent to Dr Caroline Ruddell (ruddellc@smuc.ac.uk) or Dr Cian Duffy (duffyc@smuc.ac.uk). Abstracts should be received by 31st October 2010.

LUICD Graduate Conference 2011
Imagining Europe: Perspectives, Perceptions and Representations from Antiquity to the Present
Leiden University Institute for Cultural Disciplines, 27-28 January 2011

Proposals due by 1 November 2010

Confirmed key note speakers:
Professor Edith Hall, Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University

‘Qui parle Europe a tort. Notion géographique’. Otto von Bismarck’s elliptic remark, scribbled in the margin of a letter from Alexander Gorchakov in 1876, would go on to become one of the most often-quoted statements about Europe. But was Bismarck right? Is Europe nothing but a geographical notion? Even the briefest glance at history shows that more often than not perceptions and definitions of Europe go beyond the mere geographical demarcation of a continent. In 1919, for instance, Paul Valéry imagined Europe as a living creature, with ‘a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic and historical coincidences’. Of course this is only one of a multitude of different representations. Europe has always signified different things to different people in different places – inside Europe as well as outside. Europe meant, for instance, something different to Voltaire, l’aubergiste d’Europe, at Ferney in the 1760s than to Athanasius Kircher in Rome a century earlier or to Barack Obama in Washington today. (more…)

In conjunction with the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy Conference, The Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland will be sponsoring a specialist stream:

Sensibilité: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment
University of Queensland, Brisbane, 3-5 December 2010

Proposals due by 31 August 2010
In mid- to late- eighteenth century thought, particularly in France and in the thought of the philosophes, materialism and atheism were seriously considered both publicly in the writings of, for example, d’Holbach, and privately by others such as Diderot. The 1743 treatise Le Philosophe presented the philosopher in materialistic and mechanistic terms as a human thinking machine that reflected on its own motion. In the context of vitalist medicine however, this was far from a mechanistic description in the modern sense and only some philosophes were in fact materialists.

The vitalism of the médecines philosophes from the Montpellier faculty of medicine held the attention of the philosophes in a period in which medicine constituted the master discourse. It was Montpellier theorists who made sensibility a key concept of eighteenth century: sensibility was the basis of a holistic vision of the body, one in which individual organs had their own “tastes” or “lives,” and in which unity came not from a “higher” organizing seat (the soul, brain or noumenal subject) but, rather, from the harmonious interaction of the physical parts. Bordeu, Lacaze, and their disciples (1750s-80s) saw sensibility as a diffuse property conveyed not just through the nerves but also reciprocally through the three main spheres or departments of vital action: the head, the “phrenic” region, and the external organ (roughly, the skin). That the physical and the moral could not be separated was a broadly accepted proposition: the idea of diffuse embodied sensibility is critical for the period’s understanding of affect, the emotions, and of mental functioning. This is evidenced in the highly contested work of La Mettrie but also in Roussel, Tissot and Rousseau.

Central to the wide-spread rejection of innate ideas, sensationism was the highly idiosyncratic epistemology of the period. Formalised and systematised by Condillac, the sensationist presuppositions were widely shared across the French and Scottish Enlightenments and it was arguably the most significant unifying feature of the period allowing thinkers as diverse as Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, and Sade to share common ground. In Rousseau and Adam Smith, sensationism as a theory of physical sensation became a theory of moral sentiments: sensibility as a theory of knowledge was expressly conceived of as a theory of moral knowing. Rousseau was a dualist, a sensationist, a theorist of virtue and purity of heart. For him the violence of passion was itself an enemy, the unnatural product of modernising society. Sade was a materialist, a sensationist and a theorist of vice, cruelty and lust. For him the purity of the heart was an impediment to pleasure. Here the philosophical novel’s power to affect made it the philosophical genre of choice.

Sensibility, then, was an embodied epistemology which briefly flourished in a period before “the theory of knowledge” was taken as a discrete field of philosophical inquiry. Hence sensationism was heavily influenced by the philosophical anthropologies of the day and by medical science: the Enlightenment notion of sensibility provides a paradigm that integrates such diverse fields as physiology, medicine, philosophy, ethics, anthropology, aesthetics and literature. Yet neither sensationism nor sensibility are key Kantian themes and the nineteenth century’s construction of the Aufklärung as leading to an apotheosis in the three Critiques has worked to occlude this feature. This stream seeks then to retrieve a major component of Enlightenment thought from the shadow the Kantian edifice.

Call for Papers
If you would like to submit an abstract, or if you have any queries about the specialist stream, please contact Martyn Lloyd (m.lloyd@uq.edu.au). Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and include a list of five keywords. Papers will be 30 minutes long. Please include a short biography (100 words) including institutional affiliation. The stream will be run with a view to the publication of an edited collection of papers on the theme. Closing date for abstracts: August 31, 2010.

Keynote: Anne Vila
Anne Vila is Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specialises in the eighteenth-century French novel, theatre, and intellectual history; the body in literature and medicine; the culture and philosophy of the Enlightenment. Her book Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) focused on the conjunction between scientific and literary/philosophical writings during the French Enlightenment, working against the tendencies of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of epistemology to obscure that which preceded them. She has also published “Penser par le ventre: The Gastric Embodiment of Thought and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century France,” and “Sex and Sensibility: Pierre Roussel’s Système physique et moral de la femme,” as well as papers on Tissot, Rousseau, and Diderot. She is currently working on a manuscript provisionally entitled Singular Beings: Passions and Pathologies of the Scholar in France, 1720–1840.

57th Annual Meeting of The Society for French Historical Studies
The Citadel, Charleston, SC, 10-12 February 2011

Proposals due by 1 September 2010

The 57th Annual Society for French Historical Studies conference will be held at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina from Thursday, February 10, through Saturday, February 12, 2011 and will be hosted by The Citadel.  Featured speakers include Dena Goodman (University of Michigan) and Sylvain Venayre (Université de Paris I). Featured events include a plenary session and reception Friday evening at The Citadel and a banquet on Saturday evening. Additional outings on Sunday morning February 13 to Fort Sumter and Drayton Hall Plantation, will be organized.

The program committee will make every effort to combine single papers into coherent panels, but we encourage individuals to organize complete panels composed of two or (preferably) three papers, with a chair and commentator. Roundtables and other formats will also be considered. Please do not send proposals for papers that have already been presented or that are scheduled for presentation at other conferences, or that have already been published. All conference participants must be members in good standing of SFHS at the time of the conference. (more…)

Historians of British Art: Emerging Scholars Session at CAA, 2011
New York, 9-12 February 2011

Proposals due 1 October 2010

The Historians of British Art, a CAA-affiliated society, seeks papers for an upcoming mini-session of work by emerging scholars to be held during the HBA Business Meeting at CAA in New York, Feb. 9-12, 2011. Current or recent graduate students (if a Ph.D. recipient, the degree must have been earned within the past three years) are invited to submit proposals for consideration. The papers may address any topic related to British art, architecture, and visual culture. Presentations or “works in progress” should be limited to fifteen minutes to allow for ample discussion. This is an opportunity for informal presentations of new or ongoing research followed by open discussion.

To submit a paper for consideration, send the following items to Colette Crossman, HBA 2nd Vice President, at colettecrossman@yahoo.com : (1) a one page abstract; (2) a C.V. (limited to two pages).; and (3) a brief cover letter explaining interest in the field. The deadline for submission is October 1, 2010. Decisions will be made by November 1. Upon selection, presenters are requested to join HBA if not currently a member.