Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

The Useful Enlightenment: Theories, Practices, and Representations of Usefulness
Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, 26–27 June 2025

Organised by Jean-Alexandre Perras

Proposals due by 31 December 2024

Clément-Pierre Marillier, Jean-François de Troy, Allégorie de l’enseignement des Arts (Château de Pau).

“What’s the use?” is often the very first question asked of a scientific endeavour. Indeed, the notion of utility has come to dominate our understanding of knowledge in the humanities as well as in the practical and fundamental sciences. It also furnishes the criterion by which we regularly assess the relevance of scientific research, where utility is often linked to potential applications and their economic benefits. This close relationship between knowledge, utility, technological improvement, and economic advantage dates back to the Enlightenment. This period saw not only the flowering of reason and human rights but also the beginning of the industrial exploitation of natural resources and the development of the logistical and economic infrastructures necessary to profit from the forced labour of displaced populations. As this conflict suggests, the question of utility has never had a simple answer, insofar as it requires us to consider for whom something is useful and to what ends.

This conference invites researchers from a wide range of historical disciplines (including the history of philosophy, literature, institutions, economics, and the sciences) to explore the many aspects encompassed by the notions of utility, usefulness, and usage over the course of the long eighteenth century. The aim is to reconsider how the circulation of various conceptions of utility shaped the relationship between knowledge, technology, politics, and the economy and how this relationship gave rise, in turn, to the concept of ‘useful knowledge’, whose links with the historiographical idea of the ‘industrial revolution’ and the accompanying rise of capitalism have been strongly emphasised through the notion of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Mokyr 2002). This follows research over the last twenty years that has challenged these intrinsic relationships, whether by applying a gender perspective (Serrano 2022; Maerker, Serrano, and Werrett 2023), by framing approaches in the global context of the circulation, exchange, or appropriation of knowledge and commodities (Schäfer and Valeriani 2021; Berg and Hudson 2023), or by focusing on the long-term transmission of practices and knowledge (Nigro 2023).

In the wake of this research, the conference will question the special relationship that developed during the eighteenth century between utility and value, be that economic, scientific, artistic, moral, or literary. Contributions will thus shed new light on the emergence of utility as a criterion for evaluating knowledge, goods, and cultural production. Particular attention will also be paid to the relationship between utility and improvement, how this was translated into the implementation of social, agricultural, or industrial reform, and the conditions of such practical application.

During the eighteenth century, the increasing valorisation of ‘useful’ knowledge, that is to say, practical, experimental and innovative knowledge, challenged the former hierarchy between the ‘liberal’ and the applied, ‘mechanical’ arts. This shift caused significant disruption in how the sciences were viewed in relation to nature and society. It also had a significant impact on both nature and society themselves, creating new means of exploiting human and natural resources according to such new criteria as not only utility but also productivity, efficiency, and progress. These changes gave rise to the debates that animated the political and intellectual reforms of the Enlightenment in the areas of slavery, luxury, and the control of wheat prices—to name but a few examples.

If, in the course of the century, utility did indeed become a central value in the construction of modern Western societies, it is essential to question the causes of this valorisation and relativise its supposed universality, particularly from extra-European points of view or by considering dissident voices, victims, and those excluded, who have questioned or suffered from the growth model centred on the politics and economy of useful knowledge.

Contributions may focus on issues such as the following:
• The relationship in eighteenth-century thought between the notions of interest, profit, or efficiency and those of utility, usefulness, and use.
• The different criteria used to assess utility in various fields of economics, literature, science, technology, or morality and the expertise or institutions needed to carry out such assessments.
• How the usefulness of certain types of knowledge, technologies, or reform projects was evaluated, for whom they were deemed useful, and how this evaluation was carried out.
• The role of learned societies such as academies and economic, patriotic, agricultural, or improvement societies in defining, disseminating, and implementing useful knowledge.
• The importance of non-Western knowledge in the development of a global economy in the eighteenth century.
• How the notion of utility can be used to reshape and reconceptualise the Enlightenment, particularly in terms of the relationship between centre and periphery.
• Voices against the valorisation of utility: scientists, gens de lettres, religious figures; those victimised or left behind by the implementation of public interest projects; those excluded from the determination of utility (colonisation, alternative conceptions of usefulness, criticisms of utility).
• The relationship between innovation, useful arts, science, and technology.
• The evolution of the notion of utile dulci in art and literary theory; the usefulness of rhetoric; fiction and representation; ‘useful’ passions; exemplarity and morality of the arts and literature.
• Growth, progress, sustainability, and usefulness: the agricultural Enlightenment; exploitation of resources and land; agrarian profitability and the acclimatisation of (useful) exotic plants in Europe and the colonies.
• Women and useful knowledge; women and the sciences; the usefulness of women’s labour; social reform projects aimed at women.
• Scientific research deemed futile: squaring the circle, metaphysics, alchemy, etc.
• Pedagogy and usefulness: educational programmes and reforms, popular schools and education and the ‘popular Enlightenment’.
• The utility of the Enlightenment in contemporary political, historiographical, or scientific debates.

Proposals, including an abstract and a short biography and list of publications, should be sent by 31 December 2024 to jean-alexandre.perras@izea.uni-halle.de.

Organised by Jean-Alexandre Perras, Humboldt Research Fellow, with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the IZEA (Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg), the Voltaire Foundation (University of Oxford) and the Pôle Europe des Lumières (Sorbonne Université)

i n d i c a t i v e  b i b l i o g r a p h y

Berg, M., and P. Hudson. (2023). Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge, Polity.

Böning, H., H. Schmitt and R. Siegert, eds. (2007). Volksaufklärung: eine praktische Reformbewegung des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Bremen: Edition Lumière.

Brockmann, S. (2022). The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks, and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838. Cambridge University Press.

Burnard, T., and G. Riello. (2020). “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism.” Journal of Global History 15.2: 225–44.

Butterwick, R., et al., eds. (2017). Peripheries of the Enlightenment. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation.

Crogiez-Labarthe, M. and A. J.-M. S. Ibeas, A., eds. (2017). Savoir et civisme: les sociétés savantes et l’action
patriotique en Europe au XVIIIe siècle: actes du colloque de Berne. Geneve, Slatkine Érudition.

de Vries, J. (2008). The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge University Press.

Fox, C. (2009). The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Hilaire-Pérez, L. (2000). L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières. Paris, Albin Michel.

Hilaire-Pérez, L., et al. (2016). L’Europe des sciences et des techniques, XVe–XVIIIe siècle: Un dialogue des savoirs. Presses universitaires de Rennes.

Holenstein, A., et al., eds. (2007). Nützliche Wissenschaft und Ökonomie im Ancien Régime. Akteure, Themen, Kommunikationsformen. Cardanaus. Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 7. Heidelberg, Palatina Verlag.

Howes, A. (2023). Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation. Princeton University Press.

Jacob, M. C. (2014). The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850. Cambridge University Press.

Jones, P. (2016). Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840. Oxford University Press.

Khan, B. Z. (2020). Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy. Oxford University Press.

Klein, U. and E. C. Spary (2010). Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and
Laboratory. University of Chicago Press.

Krueger, R. (2017). The Enlightenment in Bohemia. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation.

Kühn, S. (2011). Wissen, Arbeit, Freundschaft: Ökonomien und soziale Beziehungen an den Akademien in London, Paris und Berlin um 1700. Göttingen, V&R unipress.

Kwass, M. (2022). The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800. Cambridge University Press.

Leckey, C. (2011). Patrons of Enlightenment the Free Economic Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newark, University of Delaware Press.

Lehmbrock, V. (2020). Der denkende Landwirt: Agrarwissen und Aufklärung in Deutschland 1750−1820.
Gottingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Lilti, A. (2019). L’héritage des Lumières : ambivalences de la modernité. Paris, Le Seuil.

Lowood, H. (1991). Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion of Science in the German Enlightenment: The Economic and Scientific Societies, 1760–1815. New York, Garland.

MacLeod, C. (2007). Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914. Cambridge University Press.

Maerker, A., Elena Serrano, and Simon Werrett. 2023. “Enlightened Female Networks: Gendered Ways of
Producing Knowledge. 1720–1830.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 77: 225–34.

McClellan, J. E. and F. O. Regourd (2011). The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. Turnhout, Brepols.

McClellan, J. E. and V. Saint-Louis (2010). Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. University of Chicago Press.

McOuat, G. and L. Stewart (2022). Spaces of Enlightenment Science. Boston, Brill.

Nigro, G. (2023). Economia della conoscenza: Innovazione, produttività e crescita economica nei secoli XIII–XVIII Firenze University Press.

Melton, J. V. H. (2001). The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Menon, M. (2022). “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia.” South Asian History and Culture 13.1: 1–18.

Mokyr, J. (2002). The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press.

Mokyr, J. (2018). A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press.

Morel, T., et al., Eds. (2016). The Making of Useful Knowledge. Berlin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

O’Brien, P. (2013). “Historical Foundations for a Global Perspective on the Emergence of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development, and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge.” Journal of Global History 8.1: 1–24.

Paquette, G. B. (2009). Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830. Farnham, Ashgate.

Rabier, C. (2007). Fields of Expertise: A Comparative History of Expert Procedures in Paris and London, 1600 to Present. Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars.

Raj, K. (2006). Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Delhi, Permanent Black.

Roberts, L., et al. (2007). The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation. Amsterdam, Koninkliijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.

Roy, T. (2021). “Useful & Reliable: Technological Transformation in Colonial India.” Technology and Culture
62.2: 494–520.

Schäfer, D, and Simona Valeriani. 2021. “Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate.” Technology and Culture 62: 327–47.

Schilling, L. and J. Vogel (2019). Transnational Cultures of Expertise: Circulating State-Related Knowledge in the 18th and 19th Centuries. München, De Gruyter Oldenbourg.

Serrano, E. (2022). Ladies of Honor and Merit: Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Slack, P. (1999). From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Stapelbroek, K. and J. Marjanen (2012). The Rise of Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotic Reform in Europe and North America. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Statman, A. (2023). A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science. The University of Chicago Press.

Stuber, M., et al. (2009). Kartoffeln, Klee und kluge Köpfe: Die Oekonomische und Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft des Kantons Bern OGG, 1759–2009. Bern, Haupt.

From  ArtHist.net (which includes the CFP in German). . .

Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints —
Part IV: Fake News? Fantasy Antiquities
Bildwerdung der Antike: Zur Episteme von Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken der Frühen Neuzeit — IV: Fake-News? ­­Fantasie-Antiken
München, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 14 February 2025

Organized by Ulrich Pfisterer, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch

Proposals due by 15 September 2024

The academy project Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, hosted at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (thesaurus.bbaw.de/en), and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (zikg.eu) are organizing a series of colloquia in 2023–2025 on the topic Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Drawings and Prints in the Early Modern Period. The significance of drawings and prints for ideas, research, and the circulation of knowledge about ancient artifacts, architecture, and images in Europe and neighboring areas from the late Middle Ages to the advent of photography in the mid-19th century will be examined.

The three previous colloquia were dedicated to the topics of the ‘unrepresentable’ properties of the depicted objects and the documentation of various states and contexts of ancient objects from their discovery to their presentation in collection catalogues. The fourth and final event will examine the problem of invented or imitated antiquities.

In fact, all types of objects from the arts and crafts of antiquity—aegyptiaca, coins and gems, statuettes and statues, objects of everyday culture from jewellery to weapons and much more —were reproduced as real artefacts and/or in graphic illustrations on all kinds of different occasions over the centuries following antiquity. The father of modern ‘forgeries’ is undoubtedly Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), who knew how to create new objects (‘capricci’) from numerous ancient spolia, which were highly sought after, in particular by northern European collectors. But this is not about him.

In addition to the physical ‘fakes’ on the marketplace of the antiquities trade, their pictorial representations or even antiquities ‘invented’ solely on paper often played a decisive role in the dissemination of a partially distorted, tendentious or ‘false’ idea of past cultures and their materiality.

Starting from the counterfeit imitations of the early modern period, our colloquium is interested in a very broad spectrum of ‘fantastic’ antiquities or ‘forgeries’ of antiquities and their motivations. The following aspects are of particular interest, but other suggestions are also welcome:
• ‘Forgeries’ of ancient art in drawings and prints
• Historical backgrounds, intentions, and contexts of the illustrations
• Techniques and methods of ‘forgeries’ in drawing and printmaking
• The influence of ‘fakes’ on the reception of ancient art
• The role of printmaking in the dissemination of ‘fake’ antiquities
• The use of images of ‘forgeries’ in certain lines of argumentation
• The influence of images on the collective imagination of antiquity
• Debates about ‘forgeries’, their quality, and value

Solicited for the fourth colloquium are papers in English, French, German, or Italian, 20 minutes in length, ideally combining case study and larger perspective. Publication in extended form is planned. Proposals (max. 400 words) can be submitted until 15 September 2024, together with a short CV (max. 150 words) to thesaurus(at)bbaw.de keyword ‘Episteme IV’.

Hotel and travel expenses (economy-class flight or train; 2 nights’ accommodation) will be reimbursed according to the Federal Law on Travel Expenses (BRKG).

From ArtHist.net:

Microhistories of Architecture: Conference of the European Architectural History Network
ETH Zurich, 12–15 June 2025

Proposals due by 15 September 2024

What can an idiosyncratic detail tell us about the history of an entire building or the people that built it? What is the importance of a single edifice for the history of a city? Can we rewrite the history of a canonical work of architecture by adopting the viewpoint of an anonymous craftsperson or a passer-by? More broadly, what does the life of one individual—perhaps an anonymous commoner, who lived centuries ago and left only scant evidence—matter for the grand narratives of history?

A few decades ago, such questions were at the centre of a historical method known as Microhistory. Microhistorians devoted their efforts to foregrounding the voices, subjectivities, mentalities and experiences of historical subalterns such as peasants, slaves or women. Around the same time, the Subaltern Studies group, pioneered by Ranajit Guha, sought ways to amplify such “small voices of history” in colonized and post-colonial contexts. The aim of all of these authors was to use marginal evidence and hyper-specific case studies as a lens through which to revisit larger historical narratives: to zoom in, in order to eventually zoom out again.

Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, first published in 1976, is often seen as a foundational work of the microhistorical method. The book opens with the evocation of a poem by Bertold Brecht, in which a “literate worker” wonders: “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” Ginzburg adds: “The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.” Already from its start, the method of Microhistory offered itself for investigations in architecture: who was it that actually built the famous works of architecture that make up the historical canon? Who inhabited them and how? What did these people think of the famous monuments of antiquity or the works of famed architects? Did they leave their own marks on these monuments?

This EAHN Thematic Conference engages with the methodological tradition of Microhistory as a way to both interrogate our discipline’s capacity to rethink its own canons, and to question the historiographical challenges that come from applying the microhistorical method to architecture. At a time when architectural history joins the rest of the humanities in bringing to the fore marginalized, suppressed or minoritarian voices, such questions acquire new urgency.

Rather than limiting its scope to a particular theme, period, or geography, this conference instead places emphasis on a specific method. We ask historians of architecture, cities, and landscapes to come together to discuss the promise of Microhistory for our field and its particular relevance for the current moment. We invite our participants to bring their trifles, marginalia, and scant evidence and to use these to write architectural histories from perspectives, subjectivities, and mentalities that have hitherto been excluded from our accounts. We welcome papers on any geography and chronology, from antiquity to the very recent past, but we will prioritize those that focus on under-represented geographies and periods of history, or those that shed light on previously unknown aspects of canonical projects and topoi and bring them in contact with broader narratives and historiographical traditions.

Contributions may include
• Close examinations of architectural or material details (which contradict canonical typologies, stylistic and cultural taxonomies, or periodologies).
• Close readings of text sources on architecture beyond canonical architectural discourse: accounting books, minutes of trials, ownership records, correspondence, etc.
• Close readings of marginalized voices that were involved in the making of the built environment or specific buildings, as evidenced through archival sources, but also speculative or counterfactual history and critical fabulation (albeit on the basis of historical evidence and context).
• Histories of dissonant voices or of conflict within an architectural project or the life of a building or city (particularly if they can help de-centre the voice of the architect and the patron by bringing in those of the craftsperson, labourer, servant, etc.).
• Local, vernacular, indigenous and non-academic accounts of specific buildings and cities, including non-canonical archaeologies and uses of the past and its monuments (from vernacular spolia to popular lore).
• Depictions of canonical architecture from a lay-person’s or subaltern perspective, as well as depictions of the subaltern, or of subaltern architecture in canonical works of painting, literature and art in general.
• Histories of Microhistory in architecture: how architectural writers and historians have tried to apply the method of Microhistory to the study of the built environment—whether successfully or not.

Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 400 words and an author bio (ca. 200 words per author). Abstracts will be evaluated primarily on the basis of the suggested method and their relevance to the conference theme, but also in terms of thematic originality and exploration of previously unknown or marginalized topics or perspectives. Contributions should be the result of original research and should not be previously published or in the process of being published elsewhere. Please send your abstracts and bios to gregorio.astengo@gta.arch.ethz.ch and nikolaos.magouliotis@gta.arch.ethz.ch by 15 September 2024. Authors will be notified of the committee’s decision by the end of December 2024.

From the Call for Papers:

Sculptural Models, Themes, and Genres between Britain and Italy, ca. 1742–1854
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 16–17 May 2025

Organized by Adriano Aymonino, Albertina Ciani, and Kira d’Alburquerque

Proposals due by 30 September 2024

The University of Buckingham and the Victoria and Albert Museum are organising a two-day interdisciplinary conference on the role played by British-Italian artistic exchanges in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The conference adopts a longue durée approach, focusing on the century when these exchanges were most intense: from 1742, when Prince Hoare of Bath the Elder arrived in Rome—the first documented English sculptor to spend a period of study in the city—to the opening of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1854, whose sculptural decoration was directed by the Milanese Raffaele Monti. Throughout this period, the two traditions became interdependent, developing an artistic dialogue that influenced sculptural models and themes not only in Italy and Britain but also across Europe and the territories of the expanding British Empire, from the Indian subcontinent to the Americas.

This conference adopts a typological approach, investigating how academic frameworks and patronage networks influenced the diffusion of sculptural models, themes, and genres, and how market dynamics—along with the industrial production of new materials—either reinforced or challenged these aspects. We are interested in exploring the evolution of established genres such as busts, ideal sculptures, funerary and public monuments, copies, and adaptations after the Antique, as well as the diffusion of models and themes in decorative figurative sculpture, including reliefs, medallions, chimneypieces, and in smaller artworks such as gems, cameos, impressions, ivories, or in objects produced in porcelain, earthenware, and various new artificial ‘stones’. While concentrating on sculpture, the conference embraces an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate how the development of new models, themes, and genres reflected or shaped cultural and national identities, social values, evolving canons, and shifting audiences in the different contexts of Italy and the Anglophone world.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in monographic publications and PhD dissertations by art historians, social historians, and scholars focused on material culture, examining individual artists and themes connected to this trans-national movement. This two-day conference aims to assess the current state of research and explore future directions in the discipline.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on topics that could include, but are not limited to:
• The impact of the academy and academic aesthetic and pedagogical frameworks in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres, and their diverse manifestations.
• The influence of patronage and collecting in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres, and their diverse manifestations.
• Industry and the market’s role in the production and dissemination of ‘high art’ models, themes, and genres, as well as commercial, religious, garden, and decorative sculpture.
• The impact of casts, copies, and adaptations on reinforcing or challenging academic canons and establishing new models, themes, and genres.
• The role played by new materials (such as porcelain, biscuit, Wedgwood ‘basalt’ and Jasperware, Coade stone, Parian ware, electrotyping, etc.) in the diffusion and transformation of models, themes, and genres.
• The impact and adaptation of classical or early modern Italian models and themes in the Anglophone world and vice versa.
• The tension/dialogue between themes after the Antique and medieval or early modern themes from literature or history.
• The tension/dialogue between classical and Christian themes.
• The relationship between European and non-European models, themes, and genres.
• The relationship between painting and sculpture, and the links between making and viewing.
• The relationship between sculpture and prints in the diffusion and transformation of models, themes, and genres.
• The changing audiences of sculpture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the progressive ‘commercialisation’ of models, themes, and genres, exemplified by events such as the 1854 opening of the Crystal Palace (Sydenham).

Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 200 words, along with a short biography (about 100 words – please do not send CVs) to Albertina Ciani (2127054@buckingham.ac.uk) by noon (BST), 30 September 2024. The abstract and biography should be combined in a single Word document and submitted as an email attachment. Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Notification of the outcome will be communicated via email by 31 October 2024.

The conference is part of a series of events organised to celebrate the launch of a new edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique in October 2024.

From ArtHist.net:

Emergence, Transformation, Maintenance: Private Collections Open to the Public from the 18th Century to the Present Day
Rogalin Palace Museum / Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 29–31 May 2025

Proposals due by 6 September 2024

The relationship between private collecting and public museums formation has a long trajectory in the history of museums. Over the last three centuries, private collecting has developed swiftly around the world. Although initially it was an activity reserved for privileged groups, reflecting acquisitive interests of a wealthy individuals and their advisers, over the time it covered almost all circles of society.

Since the 18th century private collectors have been opening their collections to the public. Apart from the princely and aristocratic collections, in the 19th century also bankers, industrialists, art dealers and connoisseurs, as well as doctors, artists and representatives of the intelligentsia more and more often made their collections available. The existence of collections opened to the public frequently ended with the death of collectors and the subsequent sale of their property. Sometimes, however, private collection turned into a private museum, which material existence was ensured by funds left by collectors and managed by their family, heirs or a special foundation. Established in this way centuries ago, private museums often function to this day in private hands, as a part of foundations formed by the collectors themselves, or transformed into a state institution. Private collections and museums currently owned by the state and managed by public museums are often arranged with respect for the private history of the collections and the original concept of the founder. Usually, the latter are located within the collectors’ residences as to some extent, it was almost a rule that private collections were made available within collectors’ homes—in apartments, city palaces or country residences. Less often, collectors founded special buildings dedicated to gather, display and make their collections available to the public.

The conference will be dedicated to private collections open to the public. Although there are many important aspects related to the functioning of private collections, we are not interested in the history of private collections, their establishment and content, nor in the shaping of collections on the art market. Investigating the relationship between private collections and public sphere we are interested in different types of private museums, from art and science collections open to the public, to houses of famous personalities (e.g. artists’ ateliers, writers’ houses). We aim to reflect mostly on such problems as:

1  Accessibility of collections (On what terms collections were accessible and available for the public? What was the legal and organizational framework and principles of visiting the collections? How museums facilitate access to the collection and how the idea of accessibility has change over time base, since the moment of foundation of collection to the present day?).

2  Display of collections (How individual concepts of collectors are visible in a display? What was the impact of exhibitions in public museums on the arrangement of private collections? What are the methods of displaying private collections after transformation into public institution – preserving the arrangement proposed by the collector or rethinking the old concept, and opening to new exhibition trends?).

3  Collectors and their vision (How collectors’ original intentions manifested themselves in their museums and how is it maintained present day? How the original concept or a will of the collector may impact the current appearance of the collection?).

4  Work of museologists with private collections (How to research private collections in public display or transformed into public institution? How these collections evolved over time, and how have museums reinterpreted these collections to remain relevant to contemporary and diverse audiences? How museum cooperate with collector’s descendants? What is the legal situation of the collections, especially in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, where the collections were plundered and dispersed during World War II, and then nationalized during communism?).

Applicants are kindly asked to submit a brief abstract (250 words) and a short biographical note (100 words) by Friday, 6 September 2024. Please email your proposals to m.lukasiewicz@amu.edu.pl and kamila.kludkiewicz@amu.edu.pl.

From the Call for Papers:

Skillful Hands: Apprentices and Networks of Learning, 1650–1950
Rienzi’s Biennial Symposium
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 9 November 2024

Proposals due by 15 August 2024

Rienzi, the house museum for European decorative arts of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents the symposium Skillful Hands: Apprentices and Networks of Learning 1650–1950.

William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness, Plate I: The Fellow ‘Prentices at Their Looms, October 1747, etching and engraving (Houston: Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, BF.1983.5.45).

Until the late 19th century, apprenticeship was the primary way people were trained in craft trades in Europe and the Americas. Formal education was mainly out of reach for many children from middle-class and low-income families. Apprenticeship training, a legal contract between a student and a master craftsperson, became an advantageous alternative to traditional education. Apprenticeships were regulated and monitored by European craft guilds established during the medieval period to control craft production. Their influence extended beyond the training period, and apprentices were generally closely linked to master craftspeople through cultural and social ties, including intermarriage. Within the traditional guild system, females, immigrants, Indigenous and enslaved peoples, and children from low-income families were often excluded.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, informal apprenticeships were introduced to adapt to innovations and technologies. Colonial expansion provided a range of new raw materials and new demands for skilled labor. Outside traditional European apprenticeship models, skills were acquired through forced migration, local environments, and informal training in various colonial regions. These varied experiences resulted in a diverse network of skilled craftspeople, both anonymous and renowned. The symposium critically considers the networks of learning available—and unavailable—to diverse groups of people and how access to training and materials through apprenticeships helped to shape craft traditions. Who had access, and who did not? How did skills and ideas travel? How did apprenticeship systems affect the material, form, and quality of crafted objects? How did political, social, and cultural conditions in colonies such as British and French North America, New Spain, and the Caribbean influence trade training modes?

Graduate students and entry-level and mid-career professionals are invited to submit a 400-word abstract outlining a 20-minute presentation, along with a CV, by Thursday, 15 August 2024, to rienzisymposium@mfah.org. Selected participants will be notified by Friday, 30 August 2024, and offered a $600 honorarium for travel and lodging. All presentations are given Saturday, 9 November 2024, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Possible themes for investigation may include, but are not limited to:
• Transatlantic trade
• Workshop traditions
• Empire and colonialism
• Technology
• Gender
• Race
• Economics
• Labor
• Class
• Education
• Childhood

From the Call for Papers:

Collecting Past and Present: Women as Collectors
The Wallace Collection, London, 1 November 2024

Proposals due by 2 August 2024

In 2024, the Wallace Collection launched Collecting Past and Present. This new research series takes the format of biannual, themed study days, which include fascinating talks from specialists, exploring collecting through the ages to the modern day. Exclusive interviews with contemporary collectors also feature, revealing tantalising glimpses of extraordinary objects and how they are brought together. These are followed by drinks receptions that act as unique forums for discussion. For those further afield or unable to make it to the museum, the talks can be watched online.

We are now inviting abstracts for our November study day that explore women as collectors and patrons of all art forms. Talks should be 45-minutes long and illustrated by a presentation. They will be held in the Wallace Collection Theatre on Friday, 1 November 2024, between 10.15 and 17.30 GMT. We would like to encourage all those with a specialist interest to share a short text (500 words) and CV with Collecting.PastandPresent@wallacecollection.org by Friday, 2 August 2024. If your submission is accepted, we will require your talk’s title (maximum seven words), an abstract (60 words), and a bio (60 words). We can contribute up to the following amounts towards speakers’ travel expenses on submission of receipts:
• Speakers within the UK – £100
• Speakers from Continental Europe – £180
• Speakers from outside Europe – £300

From the Call for Papers:

Book of Nature, Nature of Books: Practices of Female Botanists
Livre de la nature, nature du livre: Pratiques des femmes botanistes
Dijon, 19–20 June 2025

Proposals due by 31 October 2024

The research centres TIL (Université de Bourgogne) and EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) are organizing a bilingual (French-English) international interdisciplinary conference on the role of women in the development of botany as part of visual, manuscript and print cultures, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period. We propose to foster discussions at the intersections of the history of natural sciences, print culture, book history, illustration studies, gender studies, plant studies, and ecocriticism. Papers may focus on a wide variety of case studies pertaining to any geographical area, from herbals to non-fiction writing, from publishers’ and libraries’ archives to museum collections, or from the garden to the diary and to the printed book. They will address the role of women as amateur or professional botanists, gardeners, members of clubs, illustrators, diarists, writers, publishers, and in any other capacity where their individual practices bear on forms of manuscript and print artefacts.

Historically, a putative association between women and plants shaped the views on both (Greene; Taiz and Taiz). Even after the discovery of sexuality in plants in the late seventeenth century, the idea remained so prevalent that Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Right (1821) that men were “like animals, active and combative,” and women “like plants, essentially placid” (Schiebinger 2). It was probably for this reason that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among many others, recommended botany to ladies. By the early nineteenth century, botany was viewed as a feminine science, and a distinction was emerging between scientific botany, for men, and popular, literary botany, for women (Shteir). The conference aims to explore the way the spaces and boundaries of women’s contributions to botany were redefined in the face of institutional and societal conventions and restrictions. Along with histories of suppression, we will also examine the way women gained prominence in certain fields, such as illustration and shaped aspects of manuscript and print cultures. Specific case studies as well as papers looking at long-term processes will shed light on past and contemporary trends so as to assess legacies and propose revaluations.

We invite academics and young scholars, librarians, visual artists, and publishers to contribute papers exploring the following themes:

• The Book of Nature and its legacy — We would welcome papers on the legacy of the medieval trope of nature legible as a book, materialized from the 12th century by such productions as herbals. This theme could include issues around the vexed notion of ‘nature’ when it collides with ‘the feminine’ and if/how practices can be seen as gendered in the domain of botany.

• Itineraries of women and plants — Papers may include biographical accounts that trace the itineraries of female botanists in relation to the type of plants that they study. It may be fruitful to underline the implicit or explicit hierarchies that underscore gender divisions: is there a link between unobtrusive species such as moss, fungus and ferns, and their being studied by women? We will also examine the usual association between women and care, as for instance in relation to medicinal plants.

• Records, archives, and exchanges — We would like to hear about the way researchers can gain access to the role of female botanists. How much of their work has been recorded, compared to their male counterparts, and how are such records organized and archived? We also welcome contributions that explore institutional funding of research and travel, as well as traces of transnational networks and discussions with domestic and foreign correspondents. Can we imagine unknown treasures still waiting to be discovered?

• Circulation of manuscript and print artefacts — Papers may examine the specific ways women circulated their findings. This may bear on the history of publishing: how have publishers approached the female botanist? What is the role of women working as publishers themselves, or as popularizers of botany and educationalists in print? The connection between print and manuscripts may also lead us to address the interplay between restriction, emancipation and creativity, in such instances as the diary, the private circulation of manuscripts and private archives.

• Spaces of practice and display — Attention will also be paid to the spatial and medial dimension of the circulation of manuscript and print artefacts, from the page of the book, periodical and diary to museums, drawing rooms, gardens, lecture theatres, gendered spaces, all the way to the internet today. This provides an opportunity to assess the alternative function of certain spaces such asthe garden and domestic spaces when they are redefined as botanical laboratories. Space may also provide clues to how women have been confined by their social backgrounds or have moved across social boundaries.

• Botany, illustration, and nature writing — Working as illustrators often allowed women artists to engage in scientific pursuits whilst being deprived of institutional support.This limitation may have nevertheless been a way of consolidating iconic and textual models and modes of inquiry that found their way in the illustrated book, in nature writing, and in theoretical and popular views of plants’ lives. Therefore, we also invite papers that explore how the material conditions of textual and visual practices, as well as attitudes to plants have been tropedinto a “botanical poetics” (Rosenberg 10–14). We would also like to know how contemporary illustrators, botanists, and nature writers come to terms with such legacies.

• Amateur and professional science — The papers may focus on the way fully recognized or overlooked women negotiated the boundary between private and public spheres, how they construed the porosity between certain fields, and which educational spaces they had access to. This could lead to investigations of women’s contribution to the development of botany as an individual and/or institutional pursuit, as an intimate source of personal development as opposed to a professional career, and of course to assessments of overlooked contributions to the history of science.

• Female crafting and the intermedial circulation of models — We welcome contributions that highlight the material, technical, and intermedial aspects of women’s practices. Are there specific experimental productions such as Mary Delany’s paper mosaics and Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes that lend themselves to a critical analysis of their marginal status and alternative visualizations of nature? Certain types of material objects have been associated to botanical practices and the intermedial dissemination of models, as, for instance, the models of flowers made by the Brendel firm in Germany, still preserved in European universities such as Dijon. What was the role of women in the manufacturing of these models? What was their impact on the careers and aesthetics of female botanists?

Please send a 300-word abstract and a biobibliography (in English or French) before 31 October 2024 to bookofnature2025@gmail.com. Notification will be given by 15 December 2024, and the program will be finalized in January 2025. After the conference, the deadline for the submission of papers for publication will be 30 September 2025.

Keynote Speakers
Anne Hodge (curator of drawings and prints, National Gallery of Ireland)
Valérie Chansigaud (historian of science, independent scholar and author)

Scientific Committee
Marie-Charlotte Anstett (CNRS, Université de Bourgogne), Anna Cabanel (KU Leuven), Kathleen Davidson (University of Sydney), Rodolphe Leroy (Université de Bourgogne), Katherine Manthorne (City University of New York), Clélia Nau (University Paris-Cité), and Ann Shteir (York University, Canada)

Organizing Committee
Sophie Aymes, Marie-Odile Bernez, Ali Hatapçı, Candice Lemaire (Université de Bourgogne), Valérie Morisson (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)

b i b l i o g r a p h i e  i n d i c a t i v e

Bending, Stephen. Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.
Chansigaud, Valérie. Histoire de l’illustration naturaliste. Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 2009.
Chansigaud, Valérie. Une histoire des fleurs: entre nature et culture. Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 2014.
Davis, Rebecca. “The Book of Nature.” Nature and Literary Studies. Ed. Peter Remien and Scott Slovic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. 31–48.
George, Sam. Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.
Greene, Edward Lee. Landmarks of Botanical History. Part 2. Ed. Frank Egerton. Stanford UP, 1983.
Johnson, Nuala. Empire, Gender, and Bio-Geography: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe and Colonial Burma. New York: Routledge, 2023.
LaBouff, Nicole. “Public Science in the Private Garden: Noblewomen Horticulturalists and the Making of British Botany c. 1785–1810.” History of Science 59.3 (2021): 223–55.
Laroche, Rebecca. Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650. London: Routledge, 2016.
Libster, Martha. Herbal Diplomats: The Contribution of Early American Nurses (1830–1860) to Nineteenth-Century Health Care Reform and the Botanical Medical Movement. Golden Apple Publications, 2004.
Lightman, Bernard, ed. A Companion to the History of Science. Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Manthorne, Katherine. Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art. Lund Humphries, 2023.
Page, Judith and Elise Lawton Smith. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
Rosenberg, Jessica. Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2022.
Rudolph, Emanuel. “Women in Nineteenth-Century American Botany: A Generally Unrecognized Constituency.” American Journal of Botany 69.8 (1982): 1346–55.
Sagal, Anna. Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2022.
Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Rutgers: Rutgers UP, 2004.
Shteir, Ann. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Strocchia, Sharon. Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2019.
Taiz, Lincoln and Lee Taiz. Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017.

Paul Fourdrinier, after George Jones, A View of Savannah as it stood the 29th of March 1734, detail, ca. 1734, engraving, 20 × 26 inches.

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From SEASECS, with a selection of panels of particular interest for art historians:

51st Annual Meeting of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
The Past is Still Present: Reclaiming the Eighteenth Century
The DeSoto, Savannah, Georgia, 6–8 February 2025

Proposals due by 16 September 2024

Conference Highlights
• Plenaries by Kurt Knoerl (underwater archaeologist and historian) and Celeste Guichard (architectural historian)
• Walking tour of historic Savannah led by Christopher Hendricks
• Reacting to the Past pedagogical workshop led by David Eick
• Writing (and submitting!) a pedagogy article led by Martha Bowden

Three ways to submit proposals
1. For any of the 23 outstanding Panels Seeking Participants, send your paper proposal (230–300 words) directly to the panel organizer by Monday, September 16. Include your full name, your institutional affiliation, and your email address (if possible, your ‘official’ institutional/professional email address).
2. For all other individual paper submissions on any topic related to the long 18th century, send your proposal to Elizabeth Kuipers by Monday, September 16, Elizabeth.Kuipers@asurams.edu. Include your full name, your institutional affiliation and your email address.
3. Send information on fully formed panels (including but not limited to undergraduate research panels) to Elizabeth Kuipers by Monday, September 16. Organizers, please send the title of your panel, your name, your institutional affiliation, and your email address along with the names of each of your participants, the titles of their papers, their institutional affiliations, and their email addresses.
Notifications of acceptances will be sent the first week of October.

Graduate students: We will have extra graduate student travel stipends this year to defray costs, thanks to the generosity of SEASECS members! Application details will be available in the fall.

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Illustrating the Past: The Long 18th Century in Graphic Novels, Comic Books, and Comic Strips
Joe Johnson, joejohnson@clayton.edu

This panel seeks presentations on graphic novels, comic books, and comic strips produced during or after, set in, and/or responding to the long 18th century. These comics can be adaptations of period works (such as renderings of Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, and Frankenstein) or original stories depicting the era, its events, and people, such as Isaac Newton, the noted artist Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon, France’s loss of Canada in 1759, or its Revolution thirty years later.

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Art & Nature: Landscape in the Long 18th Century
Kasie Alt, kalt@georgiasouthern.edu

Ars et natura, art/skill and nature, form a foundational pairing, or tension depending on the source, in Enlightenment thinking. At the intersection of art and nature the concept of ‘landscape’ pervades the 18th century. Beneath what was, in European artistic hierarchies, a relatively lowly genre lies a complex matrix of identities and questions about the nature of the world and one’s place in it. Throughout the 18th century, art, literature, and philosophy, on a global scale, grappled with ideological, aesthetic, and cultural approaches to land in a manner that blurs, tests, and renegotiates the very identity of humans vis à vis nature and each other. Landscape was often used to locate oneself—to develop, negotiate, or reappraise one’s identity, place, and/or relationship to the world in which we live. Leveraging the interdisciplinary nature of the concept, this panel invites presentations examining landscape, broadly defined, in any discipline including visual and material cultures, architecture and design, literature, history, and philosophy, in any geographic area during the long 18th century. Given the theme of this year’s conference, presentations that discuss the lasting presence, effects, or ideological implications of 18th century landscape in today’s world are particularly welcome.

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Teaching Symposium
Martha F. Bowden, mbowden@kennesaw.edu

The teaching symposium invites teachers of the 18th century in all disciplines to contribute their particular strategies for introducing their 21st-century students to the world of the long 18th century. The 18th century offers challenges to our students: it is so near and yet so far, its developing consciousness of race, ethnicity, and gender like ours in its struggles but often so foreign in its approaches and conclusions. You may want to describe a syllabus for a class specifically about the 18th century, or a unit in a survey or freshman seminar that includes the 18th century but is not confined to it. Teachers at all levels, from AP and honors high school courses through graduate courses, are invited to submit proposals.
As time goes on, the challenges to our teaching change; how did the disruptions of the Covid pandemic change the needs of your students? Do you have strategies for dealing with AI, including teaching your students to use AI-powered tools? How has the increased availability of Digital Humanities resources affected your teaching strategies? The symposium takes the form of short, focused presentations about specific strategies, ideally accompanied by handouts that the audience can take home. While the presenters are usually the instructors, we have also had professor/student dialogues; I encourage participants to consider this dialogic approach to the pedagogy of the 18th century. Historically, the sessions have been very well attended, and the audiences not only ask really significant questions but also contribute wisdom of their own. I think of it as a conversation as much as a traditional panel. Send your proposal as a Word attachment containing the description of your teaching strategy.

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From Textile to Fashion and Beyond
Arlene Leis, Aleis914@gmail.com

What histories might emerge when we explore simultaneously textile and fashion practices and examine the possibilities between and beyond the two? Over the past fifty years research into the synergies between textile and dress histories continue to gain momentum. Ground breaking research by Lou Taylor, Evelyn Welch, Peter McNeil, Luca Molà, Rebecca Arnold, and John Styles have studied how dress and textiles were sources of innovation and economic and cross-cultural influences. More recently, Christopher Breward, Beverly Lemire, and Giorgio Riello’s substantial The Cambridge Global History of Fashion presents broader contextualization and investigates a range of key topics pertaining to fashion practice across time and space, including synergies between dress and textile, while also providing sharp analysis of wider visual and material cultures. There is also a continuing interest in how science and technology as seen in photography, conservation, reconstruction, and digitization help us better understand complex textiles and garment histories.
Our panel focuses on the interdisciplinarity between two seemingly separate histories: textile and fashion. Examining closely the relationship between the two, including across diverse media and genres, our goal is to utilize this panel as a way to explore, encourage, and foreground a range of interactions, and it attempts to further grasp and understand, at historical, practical, and theoretical levels, the possible links between these practices. The papers explore the cultural and social histories of apparel and textiles as well as their preservation, with the aim of presenting and making way for new and emerging research on textiles, fashion, and beyond.

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Artist’s Signatures
Sarah Sylvester Williams, willisj@millsaps.edu

During the 18th century, artists did not always sign their artworks. Scholar Charlotte Guichard has written about artists who did, such as Chardin, François Boucher, Hubert Robert, and Jacques-Louis David. These signatures were evidence of the changing status of the artist and art market, as well as political developments. But what about other artists who did not regularly sign their work? This panel seeks papers that deal with rare or infrequent artistic signatures. What do the odd occasions when the artist included their signature tell us about the artist, the artwork, or the circumstances of its commissioning or reception?

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Material Culture of Gender
Lauren DiSalvo, Laurendisalvo4@vt.edu

This is an open session exploring the relationships between material culture and gender in the long 18th century. Of interest are papers that use material culture to explore how social behavior relating to gender might be communicated or reinforced through material objects. For example, Ryan Whyte writes about miniature women’s almanacs as a subversive mode of women’s participation in Enlightenment knowledge. The miniaturizing of paintings in the almanacs’ pages and their decorative covers presented a feminized knowledge, yet the same material object allowed women to participate in the discourse of history painting. Especially welcome are papers that use material culture to challenge or complicate 18th-century understandings of gender. Participants may choose to focus discussions on gendering in relationship to individual objects or their materiality.

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Representations of Indigenous Perspectives
Patty Hamilton, phamilto@uu.edu

To follow up on LeAnne Howe’s plenary presentation at our 2024 conference at Furman, “The Art and Craft of Image Production in Fiction: Depictions of Native Americans in Historical Fiction,” I propose to broaden the conversation from ‘depictions’ (which may or may not be historically accurate depending on who is doing the depicting, as Prof. Howe illustrated) to ‘representations of indigenous perspectives’ in the long 18th century. Spanning genres, these representations may be literary, historical, or artistic, but they should share in common an attempt to accurately represent the perspective (beliefs, values, social fabric, experience) of indigenous peoples (as Olaudah Equiano does in the opening chapter of his autobiography). What insights or re-visioning can such representations yield? For the purposes of the panel, ‘indigenous’ may be broadly construed as the native peoples of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean as well as West Africa, India, or other sites of European empire in the 18th century. Orientations may be critical or pedagogical.

From the SHARP listserv (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) . . .

The Material Text in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Digital Humanities
El texto como objeto material en las humanidades digitales latinoamericanas del periodo colonial y del siglo XIX
Online, Fall 2024

Proposals due by 12 July 2024

The Alliance for Digital Research on Early Latin America (adrela.net) seeks proposals for a virtual symposium examining ways that digital methods and tools enable us to ask new questions about the materiality of manuscript and print texts from the colonial period and nineteenth century. This will be a multilingual session, or series of sessions, in English, Spanish, and potentially other languages that will take place sometime between September 2024 and January 2025. Please send a title, 250-word abstract, and a short bio (150 words maximum) to Clayton McCarl, clayton.mccarl@unf.edu, by July 12.