Enfilade

Call for Submissions: Historiography in the Enlightenment
Proposals due by 15 December 2009

This work will be an account of Enlightenment historical writing with particular attention to its philosophical and political significance.  The work has been commissioned by Brill (Leiden) for its series on historiography (Historiography in the Middle Ages has already appeared; volumes on historiography in the Renaissance and the Early-modern period are forthcoming). We project a work of around fifteen 20-30-page chapters. Around half the chapters will be devoted to central figures, while the other half will be devoted to themes.

Authors are invited to submit proposals for chapters on any of the following writers: Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Herder, and Vico. Authors are equally invited to submit proposals for chapters on the following themes:

• Enlightenment self-understanding as a historical period
• Biblical criticism
• ‘Historicism’ and its relationship to Enlightenment
• The political deployment of the ancients
• Natural law and history
• Stadial theories of history
• History in national contexts (a survey)

Proposals for chapters on themes or authors other than those listed are also welcome. The work will be a survey of some central uses of history during the Enlightenment, with particular attention to the political significance of historiography. Our intention is neither to have a dry, encyclopaedic tome, nor to have a pastiche of unrelated articles, but rather to offer a coherent volume of articles contributing original argument on a sufficiently general level so as to accessible to non-specialists and graduate students but also of sufficient originality to be compelling for specialists.

Chapter proposals should contain an abstract of 200-250 words. Authors are also requested to submit a C.V. The deadline for the submission of proposals is 15 December 2009. Authors will then be selected. The book will be published in English, but submissions in German or French are also welcome (we will provide translations).

Dr. Robert Sparling
School of Political Studies
University of Ottawa
rsparlin@uottawa.ca

I am putting together a volume of essays devoted to the subject of single-artist, thematic, and single-object exhibitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, organized and displayed outside of academic jurisdiction. It is tentatively called Alternative Venues. Essays will explore the functions, meanings, organizational and visual structures, and/or successes/failures of artists’ solo shows (e.g., Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism), exhibitions of thematically unified work (e.g., Fuseli’s Milton Gallery), and displays of single art objects (e.g., David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women). It is my hope that the collection as a whole will highlight the innovation and modernity of such exhibitions, while perhaps setting their motivations and functions into relief against similar displays in the contemporary art world. Essays dealing with landmark exhibitions in the first half of the twentieth century will also be considered for inclusion.

Publishing interest has already been expressed by a very reputable press, famed for such volumes of art historical essays. Please send a CV and 3-5 page abstract by October 15, 2009 to Andrew Graciano, Department of Art, University of South Carolina, 1615 Senate Street, Columbia, SC 29208 USA or by email at graciano@sc.edu.

-Andrew Graciano

Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes: Colonial Writing, Cultural Exchange and Social Networks in the Age of the Enlightenment
Newnham College, Cambridge, 1-3 July 2010

The year 2009 will see the publication of  the first volumes of the new critical edition of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes by the Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle of Ferney-Voltaire — the first volume of the text and the Tableaux, atlas et cartes.  For eighteenth-century scholars this is a landmark event. After a long period of neglect, there has been a remarkable explosion of interest in Raynal, and the new edition — the first complete one since 1820 — will be welcomed by researchers across a wide range of disciplines working in the fields of colonial history, Enlightenment studies, the history of ideas, literary history and book history.

The nineteen books of the Histoire, which chart a philosophical and political history of European colonial trade and settlements, were hugely influential.  Translated into many other European languages, they helped popularise and shape anti-colonial and abolitionist discourse even while they served to inform colonial administrators and to reflect on intra-European rivalries. Substantially revised and augmented over a period of ten years, Raynal’s project was a vast undertaking in which he drew on multiple resources, placing the Histoire at the centre of a complex and extensive network of writers, politicians, administrators, scientists and other thinkers on the one hand, and, on the other, at the confluence of countless texts concerning the history of European colonies and travel writing, written over several centuries in different times and spaces, and from often very different professional and ideological positions.

Focussing on the twin concepts of exchange and networks, understood from textual, cultural and social perspectives, this conference seeks to explore Raynal’s Histoire within the multiple circuits of communication that simultaneously shape the colonial world, its modes of sociability and its literature. The conference aims to bring current areas of  investigation from various disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences into dialogue: historical and sociological approaches to sociability and its role in knowledge formation; recent work in English and Modern Languages on what have variously been described as textual migrations and intercultural transfer; book history and bibliography and the material dimensions of the text’s production and reception; work from literary, musical and art history on collaborative enterprises such as ateliers and editorial and authorial teams and their role in producing hybrid and collective works. The twin concepts of exchange and networks, as well as being central to the concerns of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, are matters of contemporary interest in all of these disciplines. (more…)

Correspondence: Travel, Writing, and Literatures of Exploration, c. 1750-c. 1850
University of Edinburgh and National Library of Scotland, 7-10 April 2010

Proposals Due by October 1

The University of Edinburgh (Institute of Geography and Centre for the History of the Book), in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, is pleased to announce Correspondence: travel, writing, and literatures of exploration, c. 1750–c.1850–a four-day, interdisciplinary conference concerned with travel, travel writing, and the associated literatures of exploration. (more…)

Abstracts due by September 15 (next Tuesday)

At the 2009 ASECS conference in Albuquerque, March 18-21, HECAA will host two sessions, chaired by Wendy Wassying Roworth and Adrienne Childs:

HECAA New Scholars Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) Wendy Wassyng Roworth, U. Rhode Island; (home) 112 Slater Avenue, providence, RI 02906; Tel: (401) 351-6448 (home); Fax: (401) 874-2729; E-mail: wroworth@uri.edu
This session will feature papers by graduate students and recent recipients of the doctoral degree on new research in the history of art and architecture. Papers are welcome on all aspects of art history including studies of art collecting, patronage, exhibitions, and art production in all media.

Theorizing the Decorative in Eighteenth-Century Art (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) Adrienne Childs, David C. Driskell Center, 1214 Cole Student Activities Center, U. of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742 (ATTN: ASECS Session Submission); Tel: (301) 314–2615; E-mail: alchilds@umd.edu
“Decorative” is a term that has been consistently used to describe the arts of the eighteenth century. Applied to painting, sculpture, material culture, interior design, architecture, and more, decoration evokes a feeling of luxury and abundance. In recent years scholars of eighteenth-century art have attempted to look beyond the profusion of floral motifs and arabesque lines to investigate how these seemingly innocuous motifs are part of larger social, economic, political, and cultural systems at work in the period. This paper seeks papers that engage critical and theoretical perspectives that investigate and decode the “decorative.”

In addition, there are numerous other panels that should prove interesting for art and architectural historians. You can, of course, check the ASECS website for details and a full listing, but a couple of dozen are included here» (more…)

Brtish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference

St Hugh’s College, Oxford, January 5-7, 2010

Proposals due by September 26

Main entrance of St Hugh's College, Oxford on St Margaret's Road (Photo by Stannered, Wikimedia Commons)

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 individual papers, for fully comprised panels of three papers, for roundtable sessions of five speakers, 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 Time and Space. We would thus particularly welcome proposals for papers that address eighteenth-century understandings and uses of concepts of time, space, and periodisation, throughout the long eighteenth century and in any part of the world. These might include, but will not be confined to: the meanings and significance given to time in all fields from science to music; different ways of measuring time, calendars and almanacs; perceptions/representations of the past and the future, including in art and literature; models and applications of social, literary, architectural, and cosmic space; and travel and geography.

Clock in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (Photo by Alves Gaspar, Wikimedia Commons)

To recap some previous posts as due dates approach:

• August 28 – Proposals for an edited collection of essays, Women of Fashion: Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century and the Eighteenth Century in Popular Culture, edited by Tiffany Potter (University of British Columbia).
• September 1 – Submissions for the Catharine Macaulay Prize, awarded annually for the best graduate student paper on a feminist or Women’s Studies subject presented at the ASECS Annual Meeting or at any of the regional meetings during the academic year.
• September 1 – Paper proposals for a conference to be held in London at the National Gallery, in March 2010 on Correspondences: Exchanges and Tensions between Art, Theatre and Opera in France, c.1750-1850.
• September 1 – Session proposals for the annual CAA meeting in New York in February 2011.
• September 1 – Paper proposals for the annual CAA meeting in Chicago in February 2010, specifically for the panel hosted by the Historians of British Art, “Young Scholars’ Works in Progress.”
• September 10 – Paper proposals for a conference to be held in Salem, Massachusetts in March 2010 on Visual Arts and Global Trade in the Early American Republic.
• September 15 – Paper proposals for the 2010 ASECS conference in Albuquerque, March 18-21.
• September 18 – Proposals for an edited collection of essays on Sociability and Cosmopolitanism: Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment.
• September 30 – Proposals for the 2010 ISECS interdisciplinary seminar for junior scholars, to be held in Belfast in August 2010 on the theme of Cultural Intermediaries.