Enfilade

Dear HECAA Members,

I want to remind everyone that the deadline for submitting an article to Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture is August 21, 2010. I urge our members to consider submitting. Details are available at the ASECS website under publications.

Also, in August I will be asked to recommend a “long” (2.5 hours) panel for the 2011 CAA. If you would like to propose a session, please send me the proposal by July 15. This will give the membership time to vote on the proposals. I hope you are all having a productive and enjoyable summer.

Best,

Julie-Anne Plax
HECAA President
jplax@email.arizona.edu

New Horizons in Maritime History
King’s College, University of Cambridge, 15-16 October 2010

Paper proposals due by 16 July 2010

New Horizons in Maritime History aims to explore the broader possibilities of maritime and oceanic history as a burgeoning field of research, bringing together researchers working in disparate areas of history with different topical and methodological allegiances in order to facilitate a discussion on the ways these fields relate to and inform maritime history, and what looking at the sea can offer the historical discipline more broadly. The conference seeks to challenge received notions about the remit of maritime history and to interrogate the ways in which it has been traditionally practiced. In particular, it seeks to move beyond nautical antiquarianism performed at or below the level of the nation-state, and highlight the intersection of maritime history with novel currents in the discipline that emphasize global continuity and transnational relationships.

Panels will be structured around fields and approaches in historical scholarship and their relationship to maritime history, exploring the problems and possibilities of these connections. Papers might highlight the maritime applications or contributions of a specific sub-field, such as economic, political, religious or intellectual history. Alternately, they might focus on specialist topics or area studies, such as the intersection of maritime history with imperial history, slavery and abolition, the Caribbean, navies and violence at sea, gender and sexuality, colonialism and decolonization, to name but a few.

To present a paper, please send a proposed title and abstract (of no more than 300 words) with a short CV to the conference organizing committee at cambridgemaritimehistory@gmail.com. Submissions from postgraduates and early- career researchers are especially welcome. The deadline for submissions is Friday, 16 July 2010. Successful applicants will be notified the following week. Those wishing to attend the conference without giving a paper are invited to register their interest with the committee. Conference organizers: Joshua Newton, Richard Blakemore, Simon Layton.

The Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA) announces the submission deadline for its winter issue, August 1, 2010. Articles submitted by this date will be considered for publication in Winter 2010. For details, please consult the journal’s Submission Guidelines.

JHNA is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published twice per year. Articles focus on art produced in the Netherlands (north and south) during the early modern period (c. 1400-c.1750), and in other countries and later periods as they relate to this earlier art. This includes studies of painting, sculpture, graphic arts, tapestry, architecture, and decoration, from the perspectives of art history, art conservation, museum studies, historiography, technical studies, and collecting history. Book and exhibition reviews, however, will continue to be published in the HNA Newsletter.

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