Enfilade

36th Annual CSECS Conference: Charting the 18th Century: Encircling Land & Sea
St. John’s, Newfoundland  & Labrador, Canada, 14-16 October 2010

Proposals due by 28 February 2010

Plenary Speakers:

• Isobel Grundy (Professor Emeritus, English & Film Studies, University of Alberta)
• Jean-François Palomino (Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Montréal)
• Pat Rogers (Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts, University of South Florida)

The planning committee for the 36th annual CSECS conference welcomes papers on any aspect of the long eighteenth century. Selected papers will be published in Lumen. 2010 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Sarah Fielding, the Copyright Act, Swift’s Description of a City Shower and the 250th anniversary of the reign of George III, Diderot’s La religieuse, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Voltaire’s Tancrède . . . (more…)

DeBartolo Conference on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies: ‘Medievalizing Britain’
Tampa, Florida, 2 April 2010

Paper proposals due by 5 February 2010

Back by popular demand, the DeBartolo Conference will return in 2010 as a one-day Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference on Medievalizing Britain. Our event will feature a keynote lecture by Professor Antony Harrison, Distinguished Professor of English and Department Head at North Carolina State University. Dr. Harrison is a leading scholar on Christina Rossetti and the author of five books and numerous articles, editions, and reviews on Victorian poetry, culture, and medievalism. In addition, the day’s activities will include single-session panels, a roundtable discussion, a catered lunch, and an evening wine and cheese reception. This event is free to participants, guests, and the public at large. (more…)

Dirty Sheets: The Underside of the Grand Tour
International conference at the Villa Vigoni in Menaggio, Italy, 26-29 July 2010

Paper proposals due by 1 March 2010

Give what scope you please to your fancy, you will never imagine half the disagreeableness that Italian beds, Italian cooks, Italian post-horses, Italian postilions, and Italian nastiness, offer to an Englishman.

–Sharp, Letters from Italy (1766), p. 43 (letter XI, Rome, October 1765)

Organized by Joseph Imorde (University of Siegen) and Erik Wegerhoff (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich), the conference Dirty Sheets: The Underside of the Grand Tour aims to establish the cultural context of unfavourable travel accounts of Italy from the long eighteenth to the twentieth century. Academic discourse, not to mention popular conception, have long seen Italy as a dazzling destination yearned for by the northern European soul. This conference, however, will address an equally important tradition: disenchantment with and desertion of the Italian ideal. The two-day workshop at the Villa Vigoni will focus on the disillusion with, aversion to and rejection of Italy in travel accounts, diaries and letters, and on historically situating critical or pejorative opinions with regard to the sources in which they appear. We welcome case studies which illustrate these, as well as continuities and changes in the negative perception of Italy. Why do Grand Tourists present themselves as the ‘other’? How is this ‘otherliness’ shaped, formed, created or staged? Where did the preconceptions with which they travelled originate? How did they become conventional? How widely shared are these criteria of evaluation? This conference aims to map the contours of a cultural history of disillusion for Italy.

Please send an abstract (max. 400 words) and a brief CV by 1 March 2010 to both Joseph Imorde (imorde@kunstgeschichte.uni-siegen.de) and Erik Wegerhoff (erik_wegerhoff@yahoo.de). Presentations should be no longer than 30 minutes. Papers may be presented in English, Italian and German. A knowledge of German will be beneficial to those who wish to actively participate in discussion. Travel expenses and accommodation will be reimbursed.

Third Anglo-Italian Conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies
Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, 12-14 September 2011

Proposals due by 31 December 2010

Following the success of the first two Anglo-Italian Conferences, in York in September 2006 and in Capri, Italy in April 2009 the Italian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies are proud to announce the third in this series of conferences. The focus of the conference will be The Marginal and the Mainstream in Eighteenth-Century Italy and Britain. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers that deal with the theme essentially in Italy and Britain but also in a wider context. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by email to: Frank O’Gorman (fog17@btinternet.com) or Lia Guerra (dog@unipv.it). (more…)

Confronting a World of Bondage: Britain, Global Slavery, and the Long Eighteenth Century
Abstracts due by 15 March 2010

Great Britain’s engagement with transatlantic slavery in the long eighteenth century has garnered critical attention from scholars across disciplines, primarily in history and literary studies. Their dominance of the slave trade and the surprisingly successful abolitionist movement places Britain at the nexus of a set of singular social, political, and economic changes, specifically with respect to other European nations. However, as scholars like Nabil Matar and Linda Colley have shown, the idea of enslavement extended beyond West Africa and the New World. The public imagination also responded with fascination to tales of Barbary captivity and enslavement as well as to the ‘exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman empire. In addition, conflicts over religion produced tracts that compared Catholicism to a form of enslavement. During the Restoration in particular, pamphlets expressed the fear that Englishmen would become political ‘slaves’ to an absolutist monarch—i.e. French Catholic absolutism would enslave Englishmen in an overdetermined way. Moreover, proto-feminist discourse from writers like Mary Astell depicted the female condition as a form of enslavement.  Clearly, the term ‘slavery’ to the eighteenth-century audience encompassed broader physical and metaphysical conditions than current scholarship seems to acknowledge.

Contemporary scholarship has produced useful studies on Atlantic and Mediterranean forms of slavery, illustrating that human bondage was an extremely complicated and varied phenomenon during the long eighteenth century. If the term ‘slavery’ is associated in modern minds with the racialized institutions of plantation slavery in the Americas, it is clear that conceptions of slavery from the Restoration to the organized abolitionist movements against West African slavery encompassed a much larger domain, in both a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, audiences in Britain could and did often formulate competing ideas of slavery that allowed them to simultaneously view African slavery as a necessary evil, consider Mediterranean slavery as an atrocity, and invoke metaphorical slavery to inveigh against the current socio-political state. What new meanings can be discovered by bringing these multiple understandings of the term into conversation? How can we complicate ideas of bondage in an era that introduced new concepts of freedom and progress and knit it into a complex national narrative? (more…)

Women’s Political Thought in Europe 1700-1800
Prato, Italy, 25-29 August 2010

Proposals due by 8 March 2010

Offers of papers are invited for a conference on the contribution of women to the history of political thought in Europe during the Enlightenment period. Papers may discuss the political ideas of individual women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Sarah Churchill, Mary Delariviere Manley, Marie Jodin, Emilie du Châtelet, Madame Dupin, Olympe de Gouges, Felicité Keralio-Robert, Madame Roland, Germaine de Staël, Dorothea Erxleben Leporin, Amalie Holst, Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Luise Gottsched, Mariana von Ziegler, Elise Reimarus, Elisabetta Caminer Turra, and others. Papers placing the work of such women in the broader context of political writing by men are encouraged. ‘Political thought’ is broadly interpreted to include sexual politics as well as political theory, and discussions of the political ideas of women as expressed in genres other than the political treatise are welcome.

Submissions of title and one-page abstract should be sent by 8th March 2010, to Karen.green@arts.monash.edu.au, or in hard copy to Karen Green, School of Philosophy and Bioethics, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia.

Up to five bursaries of up to $500 will be available to help post-graduates and early career researchers to attend the conference. Applicants who wish to be considered for one of these should indicate this with their submission.

An edited volume on women’s political thought in Europe during the eighteenth century is proposed, and contributions to the conference may be submitted for publication in this volume. Contributors who are unable to attend the Prato Conference but would like to contribute a paper to the volume are invited to submit papers for consideration by September 30th 2010.

Society of Architectural Historians 2011 Annual Meeting
New Orleans, 13-17 April 2011

Session Proposals due by 4 January 2010

Members of the SAH, representatives of affiliated societies, and other scholars who wish to chair a session at the 2011 annual meeting are asked to submit proposals by January 4, 2010, to Professor Abigail A. Van Slyck, General Chair of the SAH 64th Annual Meeting (Dayton Professor of Art History, Connecticut College, Box 5565, 270 Mohegan Avenue, New London, CT 06320-4196, aavan@conncoll.edu).

As SAH membership is required to present research at the annual meeting, non-members who wish to chair a session or deliver a paper will be required to join the Society and to pre-register for the meeting in September 2010. SAH will offer a limited number of travel fellowships (with a value of up to $1000) for speakers participating in the annual meeting; session chairs are not eligible for these awards. The deadline for applying will be in October 2010. (more…)

From the INHA website:

Being an Art Historian Today : An International Symposium
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 18-19 June 2010

Paper proposals due by 25 January 2010

Organized by THES-ARTS, association of PhD students and PhD’s in 19th- and 20th-Century Art, at the Paris-Sorbonne University

For its first anniversary in June 2010, the THES-ARTS Association will initiate a series of symposiums in order to promote the work of young art historians. As preamble THES-ARTS decided to dedicate its first symposium to today’s role of the art historian. This event will be the occasion to place ourselves in relation to this discipline and also to statue on its evolution. Being a social science, Art History cannot afford a fixed way of looking at things, but needs constant renewal by confronting itself to the evolution of its proper subject of research. While the artistic revolutions of the last decades have deeply transformed the process of creation, it has become inevitable to question the way these disruptions have, or have not changed the thoughts and researches of the art historian, as well as the applications of his work. This symposium will be organized around three main problematics, which will question the rearrangement of traditional settings in which Art History is born.

New Researching Tools / New Art Forms / New Art Histories?

In the last few years, the new materialities of the work as the new researching tools have reinvented the approach and the speech of the art historian. Through the artistic experimentations, which have emerged at the dawn of the twentieth century, the materiality of the work has changed. The artist has appropriated every single element of life from the usual objects to the precious ones, from the organic to the new technologies, from tangible to the immaterial. The lack of boundaries of these raw materials has enriched the artistic vocabulary that has in its turn contributed to the evolution of the art historian’s theoretical vocabulary. The art historian’s work has been revitalized by the creation of innovative tools, which brought him to reconsider his approach towards new and old works. Thanks to technology and especially to computer science, many tools are now accessible to the researcher. Databases have been created, museums have digitized their collections and archives are now widely available by remote access. Is travelling and facing the original works getting superfluous? This symposium will be the occasion to study how art historians reinvent their way of researching and their speech when faced with these new stakes.

Art History Today: In Search of Critical Detachment

The renewal of the work materiality and the methodology of the art historian raise the question of the detachment he uses to understand the works of his time. Constantly assailed by requests to give his point of view in the various medias, isn’t he playing both roles, the one of critics and of scientifics? His ability to expertise gives him a specific legitimacy to express his judgments of taste. But at the same time, he might try to find his place amongst writers, journalists or even philosophers? Is this mediatic shift shattering the theoretical foundations of Art History? Some studies will have to answer these questions by recounting the epistemological continuities and discontinuities which characterize Art History and by analyzing how the past’s Art History influences today’s Art History.

Art History as Applied Art

From the library to the museum via the gallery, the art historian has to face different scopes of application that turned his knowledge into a “savoir-faire” making sense in its interaction with other subjects and jobs. Through this gathering of knowledge which has also nourished other theories, doesn’t the art historian appear as much as a scientific and a professional of conservation and circulation of cultural inheritance? From these three problematics, transverse studies will contribute to improve the thought. Thus, while questions have appeared in recent years concerning the survival of Art History (in the works of Hervé Fischer and Hans Belting, for example), this upcoming symposium will remind us how the art historian has always been able to invent a totally new methodology, a new approach of art, metamorphosing his fields of thinking and his areas of applications, as he was carried by the creative impetus of art.

Abstracts — in French or English — should not be more than 500 words. Please submit the abstract and a short CV, before the 25th January 2010 to: thesarts.sorbonne@gmail.com. Replies will be sent at the end of January 2010. For the participants, the costs of travel and lodging will be paid for in full or in part. Articles will be published after the conference on the THES-ARTS website.

Notes:
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The French artist and philosopher Hervé Fischer symbolically cut the the string of linear Art History on 15 February 1979 during a performance in the Centre Pompidou Museum. He is also the author of the essay L’histoire de l’art est terminée published in 1981. The German art historian Hans Belting continues Fischer’s reflections in 1983, in L’histoire de l’art est-elle finie?

13th International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Graz, Austria, 25-29 July 2011

Proposals due by 31 January 2011

Organised by ISECS, the University of Graz, and the University for Music and Dramatic Arts of Graz

Graz is situated in South Eastern Austria which is in Central Europe. Travellers can reach the town by aeroplane (from Vienna, Frankfurt and other destinations), by train or by car. Graz is the historical centre of the unique region in Europe where Latin, Germanic and Slavic elements come together to form a common heritage. There are three universities with about 50,000 students.

Main subjects

I. Time in the Age of Enlightenment: Situating the Present, Imagining the Future
In the age of Enlightenment man did not only think systematically and continuously about his life, but began to manage and change it. So it is necessary to focus on this change in perception of time and to ask: In which manner did man esteem his time? What were the reasons for turning his attention to the future? What did the visions about the future contain? For instance: How did man intend to organise the future? What did the idea of prevention mean for him? Since the 18^th century served as foundation for today’s world – which of the contemporary visions are still prevalent and which ones are not and why not?

II. Central and Eastern Europe in the Age of Enlightenment
Although Central and Eastern Europe represent a considerable part of the European continent, this area does not have the same characteristics in the 18^th century as the Western world: The political order was based on large Empires (Russia, Turkey, Austria), similar colonial processes as in the occident did not exist, the cultural situation was influenced by three major religions (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam) and by a dominant rural world. The most important questions are: What was the social and cultural profile of the countries in this space in the 18^th century? How did the Enlightenment from the West enter into the area between the Baltic and the Black Seas? What signals did this region give to the West? Are there any effects which have remained as problems till the present?

Beginning October 2010 we will gladly accept your proposal for a paper within a section or a workshop; applications forms are available on the conference website. We ask you to please register your proposal no later than January 31st, 2011. Proposals cannot be accept after this date. You will receive information about the acceptance of your proposal no later than March 1st, 2011 as well as a request to register yourself.