Enfilade

Bloodwork: The Politics of the Body 1500-1900
University of Maryland College Park, 6-7 May 2011

Proposals due by 15 October 2010

Conference Organizers: Kimberly Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, Carla L. Peterson

This conference will explore how conceptions of the blood—one of the four bodily fluids known as humors in the early modern period—permeate discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900. “Bloodwork” begins with the assumption that the concept of “race” is still under construction and that our understanding of the term would profit through an engagement with its long, evolving, history. Specifically, it asks how fluid transactions of the body have been used in different eras and different cultures to justify existing social arrangements.

Recent scholarship has opened up the question of the continuities and discontinuities between early modern and modern rationalizations of human difference. In early modern England, “race” commonly referred to family lineage, or bloodline, and relied upon pervasive notions of what were believed to constitute the properties of blood. The anxieties anatomized in Thomas Elyot’s Boke named the Governour (1537) about the degradation of “race,” or the corruption of noble blood, describe the physical technologies by which virtue—both physical and moral—was thought to be conveyed through bloodlines. Daniel Defoe’s later satire “A True-Born Englishman” (1708) echoes this rationale for difference. The language of his poem not only insinuates the crossover of the term “race” from family lines to national groups, but also supplies evidence that both kinds of racial ideology—whether affirming social hierarchy or national superiority—rest upon the invisible qualities of the blood. In late eighteenth-century Anglo-America, Thomas Jefferson invokes such notions as “White,” “Indian,” and “Negro” blood in order to suggest an essential difference between what he calls “the races,” a difference that he sees as “fixed in nature,” thereby anticipating modern racialism.

A comparative conference such as ours, that is trans-historical and transnational and draws literary critics and historians of cultures on both sides of the Atlantic world, will make a significant contribution to this ongoing debate about the “invention” of race.

Plenary Speakers:

• Colin Dayan (Department of English, Vanderbilt University)
• Michael Hanchard (Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)
• Ruth Hill (Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, The University of Virginia)
• Mary Floyd-Wilson (Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Questions:

• How does blood rationalize bodily difference in the period in which you work?
• How is blood used as a metaphor in your period? How is it contested?
• How—and why—is the idea of blood transforming? How does it operate in the body?
• What are the physical technologies of the body and how are these pressed into the service of difference? Conversely, how is the rationalization of bodily difference embedded in “scientific” discourse?
• Is religious difference figured in cultural or somatic terms?
• Does the body have a moral constitution?

Please submit abstracts of 500 words for complete panels (abstract plus panel descriptions), incomplete panels, or individuals papers by October 15, 2010 to: bloodwork@umd.edu.

BSECS 40th Annual Conference — ‘Emotions’
St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 5-7 January 2011

Proposals due by 30 September 2010

The annual meeting of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is Europe’s largest and most prestigious annual conference dealing with all aspects of the history, literature, and culture of the long eighteenth century. We invite proposals for papers and sessions dealing with any aspect of the long eighteenth century, not only in Britain, but also throughout Europe, North America, and the wider world. Proposals are invited for fully comprised panels of three or four papers, for roundtable sessions of up to five speakers, for individual papers, and for ‘alternative format’ sessions of your devising.

While proposals on all and any eighteenth-century topics are very welcome, this year the conference theme will be ‘Emotions’. We would thus particularly welcome proposals for panels and papers that address eighteenth-century understandings, and consequences, of the emotions, broadly conceived, and the role of the passions, feelings, and sentiment throughout the long eighteenth century, at all levels of society, and in any part of the world. These might include, but will not be confined to: the meanings and significance given to the emotions and feelings of all kinds, from affection to xenophobia, including fear, hatred, love and sensibility, and in all fields from history, politics and religion, to the arts, literature, and philosophy; gender and the emotions; ‘affect’; the relationship between reason, thought and feeling; and controlling emotions.

The deadline for submission of papers and panel proposals is Thursday 30th September 2010. You will be notified by Sunday 31st October as to whether your proposal has been accepted. If you are travelling from outside the UK and need an earlier decision, please mention this in your proposal and we shall endeavour to reach a decision earlier. (more…)

The 2011 College Art Association conference takes place in New York, February 9-12. The HECAA session will be chaired by Kristel Smentek and Meredith Martin. Also included here are various sessions related to the eighteenth century. The full Call for Participation is available at the CAA site. Proposals are due by 3 May 2010.

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The Global Eighteenth Century (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Meredith Martin, Wellesley College. Mail to: Kristel Smentek, Dept. of Architecture, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave., 10-303c, Cambridge, MA 02139; or email smentek@mit.edu and mmartin@wellesley.edu

Contemporary debates on globalization have encouraged us  to examine eighteenth-century art and design from an intercultural perspective. We invite papers that address the circulation of peoples and things—between India, Africa, Europe, Asia, and beyond—and explore the mutually transformative potential of such encounters. Topics to be addressed might include visual appropriation and translation, markets, collecting and display, and the political and diplomatic uses of objects. We especially encourage methodologically innovative approaches to analyzing these artistic exchanges and their historical specificity.

From H-Net:

The Emergence of Impartiality: Towards a Prehistory of Objectivity
Proposals due by 30 June 2010

We are inviting proposals for contributions to a volume to be published in the series Intersections. The volume will be edited by Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) and Kathryn Murphy (Oxford University).

Intersections is a peer-reviewed series on interdisciplinary topics in Early Modern Studies. Contributions may come from any of the disciplines within the humanities, such as history, art history, literary history, book history, church history, social history, cultural history, and history of ideas. Each volume focuses on a single theme and consists of essays that explore new perspectives on the subject of study. The series aims to open up new areas of research on early modern culture and to address issues of interest to a wide range of disciplines.

From the early seventeenth century onwards, the epithet ‘impartial’ (germ. unpartheyisch, fr. impartial, sp. imparcial/desinteresado, it. imparziale) appears in the titles of historical works, works on economy, law, philosophy, and histories of the church and of emerging nation states, to name just a few. This occurs at a time when gaining, teaching, and transferring knowledge was still widely conceived as a fundamentally agonistic activity. Intellectual exchange had been conceptualized as a contest since antiquity, and even the alleged methodological shift from ‘medieval’ dialectics to Renaissance rhetoric (held to mirror the epochal shift from scholasticism to humanism) had not changed the agonistic disposition towards academic practice and the ensuing conceptualization of arguments as fights or duels between opponents. The claim of impartiality would have sat very awkwardly with medieval and Renaissance scholars. (more…)

From Fabula:

L’hermaphrodite, de la Renaissance aux Lumières
Arras, 26-28 May 2011

Proposals due by 1 May 2010

Bien que l’hermaphrodite ait été l’objet ces dernières années de nombreuses études, tant en France que dans le monde anglo-saxon, en particulier à travers le prisme des gender studies, il mérite qu’on y revienne. En effet, pour ce qui est de la période envisagée, les travaux de Kathleen P. Long pour la Renaissance, de Patrick Graille pour les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, et l’analyse de Pierre Ronzeaud sur l’utopie hermaphrodite, pour ne citer que les ouvrages les plus connus, invitent à poursuivre la réflexion sur une figure aussi complexe que contradictoire, notamment en ce qu’elle interroge les frontières entre le masculin et le féminin, la norme et le monstrueux, le mythe et la réalité, et se trouve à la croisée de nombreux discours, où se confrontent et s’interpénètrent le médical, le politique, le théologique et le littéraire, entre héritage antique et modernité. (more…)

The 24th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
Indianapolis, 28-31 October 2010

Abstracts due by 15 April 2010

Submit 150-300 word abstract with title. Pre-organized panels for consideration can contain an additional summary paragraph along with proposed session title. Submit papers and register at http://www.litsci.org/slsa10/.

Topics can represent ANY work in litsci, history of science, philosophy of science, Science and Art, or science studies. SLSA conference programs have always represented the membership’s wide range of interests and research projects. We are particularly interested this year in submissions that might coordinate with a stream of sessions on “Ends of Life,” addressing issues in bioethics, medical humanities, literature and medicine, and Animality Studies, but this is an open topic conference, where a wide range of work will be welcome. All participants in the 2010 conference must be members of the Society for Literature Science and the Arts for 2010. For more information about SLSA, please visit the organization website at: www.litsci.org.

Site Coordinator: Richard Nash, Indiana University
Program Chair: Elizabeth Wilson, Emory University

Notification for Acceptance of Submissions: 1 August 2010

The 2011 ASECS Conference takes place in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 17-21. Proposals for panels are due by May 1. Details and a form for submitting a session for consideration can be found here»

The Sporting Eighteenth Century
Special Issue of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Proposals due by 15 May 2010

2012 will witness the third London Olympics. This event seems an appropriate moment to consider the totality of cultural, social, political and economic relations that sport helps organize and sometimes challenge. The enlightenment period sees new ways of debating the significance of sport internationally. Sport is one of the most inter-disciplinary of topics, engaging the attention of  poets, painters, social scientists and historians. Proposals are sought for contributions to a special edition of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (formerly known as the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies) to appear in 2012 on the subject of sport in the Eighteenth-Century. (Those unfamiliar with the Journal should note that it is concerned with a long eighteenth century from 1650-1820.) The editors  (Dr Conrad Brunström, Department of English, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland; Dr. Tanya Cassidy, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario; and Dr. Martha K. Zebrowski, Department of Political Science, Columbia University) of this edition represent three different disciplines and three different national traditions and it is hoped that this interdisciplinary and cultural diversity will be reflected in the range of submissions. Topics may include but are not limited to the following: (more…)

The 2011 College Art Association conference takes place in New York, February 9-12. The HECAA session will be chaired by Kristel Smentek and Meredith Martin. Also included here are various sessions related to the eighteenth century. The full Call for Participation is available at the CAA site. Proposals are due by 3 May 2010.

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The Global Eighteenth Century (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Meredith Martin, Wellesley College. Mail to: Kristel Smentek, Dept. of Architecture, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Ave., 10-303c, Cambridge, MA 02139; or email smentek@mit.edu and mmartin@wellesley.edu

Contemporary debates on globalization have encouraged us  to examine eighteenth-century art and design from an intercultural perspective. We invite papers that address the circulation of peoples and things—between India, Africa, Europe, Asia, and beyond—and explore the mutually transformative potential of such encounters. Topics to be addressed might include visual appropriation and translation, markets, collecting and display, and the political and diplomatic uses of objects. We especially encourage methodologically innovative approaches to analyzing these artistic exchanges and their historical specificity.

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Imitation, Copy, Reproduction, Replication, Repetition, and Appropriation

Malcolm Baker, University of California, Riverside, Dept. of the History of Art, 235 Arts Bldg., Riverside, CA 92521, mcbaker@ucr.edu; and Paul Duro, University of Rochester, Dept. of Art and Art History, 425 Morey Hall, Rochester, NY 14627, paul.duro@rochester.edu

Despite a growing body of recent work, imitation is still commonly confused with copying, to the detriment of the many forms of repetition that are thereby negatively contrasted with notions of originality and authenticity. Yet within some categories of artistic production—including that of the Renaissance bronze statuette—there is no “original.” We seek papers on any aspect of imitation, copying, reproduction, replication, repetition, and appropriation, whether drawn from art theory, practice, criticism, or historiography. These might include case studies that have implications for our wider understanding of these terms or discussions of key texts in which such terms have been formulated. Our goal is to disconnect the association between imitation and copying and to question the value of originality as the sole means to understand the artwork.

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New Approaches to the Study of Fashion and Costume in Western Art, 1650–1900

Helen Burnham, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Justine DeYoung. Mail to: Helen Burnham, Dept. of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115; or email: HBurnham@mfa.org and justine.deyoung@gmail.com

This panel seeks to foster discussion of the significance of dress to the making of art and its reception from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, while encouraging panelists to reflect on questions raised by recent scholarship (e.g., gender and identity, the politics of dress, and the economics of fashion). Papers that focus on particular moments or themes in the history of Western art and dress are welcome and might include, for example, studies in portraiture or patronage; exotic or historic costume in painting or sculpture; symbolic and theatrical dress in art; certain media or techniques and their perception in dress-oriented terms; or fashion and modernity. Preference will be given to those proposals that take into account the discourse (e.g., aesthetic debates, criticism, instructions to artists) surrounding dress or fashion in art.

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From Physiognomy to Portraiture

Deborah Dorotinsky, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, Mexico City; deborah.dorotinsky@gmail.com

This session will explore the relationship between scientific knowledge production about population groups in the Americas (indigenous, blacks, and other minorities) and their documentation through drawings, prints, paintings, plaster casts, sculpture, and photographs between the sixteenth and the twenty-first century. Papers should address images that concentrate on body form, and particularly on portraiture as a means of addressing diversity, alleged abnormality, and other concepts in the range of criminal anthropological theory, racialist theories, eugenics, and biotypology. How does the canon set forth by academic portraiture foster the inquiry into the human head as indexical of moral and racial traits? How did local art academies and scientific institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean respond to the need for these images? How did they foster nationalist discourses and ideology? How do gender issues bare on the syntax and style of these images? How do present day visual culture and art differentiate from these discourses on race to deal with diversity?

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Architecture and Space in the Early Modern Ibero-American World

Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University; and Michael Schreffler, Virginia Commonwealth University/CASVA. Mail to: Michael Schreffler, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, 2000B S. Club Dr., Landover, MD 20785

From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spain, Portugal, and their American dominions were sites of great innovation in architecture and urbanism. Recent scholarship in these fields has erased modern geographical borders and embraced the cosmopolitanism of the Ibero-American world. Some of these studies have focused on models of stylistic hybridity, but less attention has been paid to theoretical considerations of space as a reflection of political will and might. This session seeks to build upon the recent literature by exploring the nexus of architecture, space, and politics, the latter understood here to encompass aspects of political theory as well as the practices of imperial administration in the early modern Ibero-American world. We especially encourage papers that situate studies of key monuments, sites, or cities in their socio-political and intellectual contexts whether through case studies or considerations of methodology and historiography.

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Luxury and Consumption in Early Modern Northern European Art

Wayne Franits, Syracuse University, Dept. of Art and Music Histories, Ste. 308 Bowne Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-1200; wefranit@syr.edu

In recent years, a large number of historical studies, including books by Simon Schama, Lynda Levy Peck, Woodruff Smith, and Jan de Vries, have explored evolving concepts of luxury and consumption in Northern Europe during the early-modern era. Yet, the ramifications of this scholarship for early modern Northern European art have not been sufficiently investigated. This is regrettable since art works of the period frequently feature luxurious objects and often enjoyed the status of luxury commodities themselves, owing to the high prices they commanded. This session solicits proposals for papers concerning ever-changing concepts of luxury and consumption in relation to art, such as the depiction of material culture, the function of “old” and “new” perceptions of luxury in the contemporary reception of art works, the commodity status of art works; the rituals wherein they were potentially deployed, and the social traits and status of those who “consumed” them.

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Recurating: New Practices in Exhibition Making

Betti-Sue Hertz, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103

Approaches to organizing exhibitions shifted in the 1960s as postminimal, conceptual, performative, and political art practices challenged traditions in the relationship between the art object and the viewer. In the past twenty years, curatorial practice has become a highly self-conscious activity, fueled by a deepening archive of precedents providing a springboard for new inventive possibilities. Taking this history into consideration, this session will focus on a new vision for curatorship, where the preexisting exhibition becomes a destabilized object or entity for curatorial consideration. What value can new presentations add to an exhibition conceived and constructed by an originating curator in an earlier historical moment? What new contemporary interpretive meanings become available when the original presentation of an exhibition is adapted, rearranged, changed, or expanded to correspond with new formulations of the object/audience relationship? How does recycling, rearranging, repackaging, and redirecting, as methodologies for recurating fully realized exhibitions, reflect current innovative practices in art and design?

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Dissemination: Prints, Publishing, and the Early Modern Arts in Europe

Sheila McTighe, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, Somerset House, the Strand, London WC2R 0RN, UK; sheila.mctighe@courtauld.ac.uk

The publication of artists’ biographies across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changed forever the relation between artists and their posterity and between innovation and the emulation of past art, as well as relations between individual works of art and the collected oeuvre of an artist. As with printed texts, the publishing of printed images changed the trajectory of artistic careers and shaped new, international publics for the arts. This session invites studies of any aspect of the world of printed texts and printed images in the early modern period. Papers that address the concept of print culture are particularly welcome, as are studies that cut across the boundaries that divide the study of prints from the study of cultural history and visual culture as a whole.

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Radical Neo: The Past in the Present in British Art  and Design (Historians of British Art)

Jason Rosenfeld, Marymount Manhattan College, New York; and Tim Barringer, Yale University. Mail to: Jason Rosenfeld, Dept. of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College, 221 E. 71st St., New York, NY 10021; or email: jrosenfeld@mmm.edu

British art has been at its most compelling when mobilizing the past to critique or reformulate current practices. From eighteenth-century Neo-Classicism through the Gothic revival, Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts Movement, Primitivism, and Neo-Romanticism, the resurgence of interest in a cultural moment in the past, and its related visual style, formed the basis for radical new creativity. We invite papers on any period that discuss the revival of art, architecture, or theory from an earlier age. In addition to fine arts and architecture, the fields of fashion, graphic and product design, food, and popular entertainment fall within our remit.

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Seeing through the Medium (Historians of British Art, shorter session)

Imogen Hart, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Yale Center for British Art; and Catherine Roach, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of the History of Art, Cornell University; imogen.hart@yale.edu and cr342@cornell.edu

A central but challenging question for art history is the relationship between objects and their audiences. This issue, like most of the questions faced by the discipline, is usually addressed in terms of individual media. Yet how might the study of the historical interpretation of objects complicate current academic divisions by media? Recent scholarship testifies to the breadth of British artistic production, yet histories that focus on different media do not always speak to one another, with the result that an integrated picture of the arts of a period often proves elusive. While a specialist understanding of specific media may be essential to a thorough study of the process and experience of making, a broader, more inclusive approach may be more appropriate to a study of the ways in which contemporaries engaged with objects. Recent scholarly interventions such as the Henry Moore Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition and catalogue Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts and Caroline Arscott’s book William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings offer models of how art historians might engage in cross-media analysis. This panel seeks papers focusing on British art of any period, including colonial contexts, that address the question of reception and cut across current scholarly divisions, especially between the “fine” and “decorative” arts.

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Rococo, Late-Rococo, Post-Rococo, New Rococo: Art, Theory, and Historiography

Katie Scott, The Courtauld Institute of Art; and Melissa Hyde, University of Florida; Email: mlhyde@ymail.com

This session invites contributions on the continuing debate about the periodicity of the Rococo, style moderne of the early decades of Louis XV’s reign. Was Rococo always already late—the end of Gothic or the Baroque—or, on the contrary, radically modern? Our working hypothesis is that time or periodicity, rather than form, constitutes the problem of the Rococo. We hope to prompt inquiry into the wide range of meanings (cultural, political, gendered, etc.) that attach to a visual language that lacks theoretical and historical anchorage and which undergoes conscious revival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, usually as pastiche. Papers might consider issues of contrivance, reproduction, simulation, dissemination, the fake, and the souvenir, or take up questions  of when and under what conditions the Rococo is revived. In addition to papers on designed objects and representations, we welcome reflections on the critical fortunes and historiography of the Rococo.

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Collectors, Dealers, and Designers in Modern Asia: Historiographical Categories Revisited

Mercedes Volait, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, InVisu, 2, rue Vivienne, Paris 75002, France; mercedes.volait@inha.fr

This session focuses on connoisseurs who played a pivotal role in the development of cross-cultural exchanges between Asia and the West from the eighteenth century on. At the edges of Western imperial territories and institutions, local collectors, dealers, designers, and patrons embodied the complexities of a process that involved as much mixing and negotiating as separation, division, or resistance. Border-crossings of all sorts—geographical, sociocultural, and religious—intensified as the century progressed, not only transforming Asia, but also European formulations of identity and knowledge. In both places, new sets of relations to art and architecture, as well as interactions between art, heritage and design developed. By shedding light on the ambivalent condition of colonial “in-between-ness” and processes of self-invention in imperial contexts, the panel seeks to address the problematic place assigned to the history of modern “Islamic art and architecture” in conventional art history.