Enfilade

From ArtHist.net (which also includes the Call for Papers in Italian). . .

Rimini in the 18th Century: Between Art, Science, Antiquarianism, and the Grand Tour
Rimini nel Settecento: Tra arte, scienza, antiquaria e Grand Tour
Online / Università degli Studi di Bologna, Campus di Rimini, 26 January 2024

Proposals due by 23 December 2023

During the eighteenth century, Rimini opened to Europe, becoming a destination for artists, travelers, and curious intellectuals. These visitors came to discover the archaeological and artistic testimonies of the city and to observe its rediscovered natural realities. A center of “European local learning” (Raimondi) in dialogue with Enlightenment Europe, Rimini became a necessary stop of the Grand Tour to and from Rome along the Adriatic coast. Science, art, architecture, and erudite interests acted as catalysts to spotlight the city.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Rimini was in constant relationship with Rome and Bologna, and it thrived thanks to the contribution of many scholars and scientists, including the physician Giovanni Bianchi (1693–1775), refounder of the Lincei in Rimini and papal archiatra of honor, together with his most famous disciples (such as Giovanni Antonio Battarra, Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi, Gaetano Marini, Giuseppe Garampi), and the architect Gianfrancesco Buonamici (1692–1759), an antiquary and man of letters, an academician of honor of the Accademia Clementina in Bologna and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.

This international workshop will investigate the different aspects of Rimini culture and the impact of foreigners on the coastal city through original, unpublished papers. The focus of this study will encompass the testimonies of travelers and amateurs, the role of architects and artists in the exchanges between Italy and Europe. If you would like to participate in the workshop by presenting a paper (20–25 minutes), please send an abstract (as a PDF file) to ilaria.bianchi5@unibo.it and valeria.rubbi2@unibo.it before 23 December 2023. The document should contain the title of your presentation, your name and affiliation, a 300-word abstract, and a brief CV. Applicants will be notified on the acceptance of proposals by 8 January 2024.

Coromandel Screen, Kangxi reign (1662–1722), Qing dynasty, carved lacquer, 258 × 52 × 3.5 cm
(Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.0660)

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From the City University of Hong Kong, as posted at ArtHist.net:

Unfolding the Coromandel Screen
Online and and in-person, City University of Hong Kong, 22–25 November 2024

Organized by Wang Lianming with Mei Mei Rado

Proposals due by 20 January 2024

With the generous support of the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, the Department of Chinese and History at City University of Hong Kong will host a two-part academic event titled Unfolding the Coromandel Screen in celebration of the department’s tenth anniversary. This four-day event will bring together an international group of art historians, museum curators, conservators, collectors, and global historians to delve into various facets of the Coromandel screen and its intricate histories of interrelations with paintings, prints, decorative arts, palatial and interior designs, global maritime trade, and the fashion industry. The conference, organized by Wang Lianming (City University of Hong Kong) in collaboration with Mei Mei Rado (Bard Graduate Center, New York), will take place on-site at City University of Hong Kong and via Zoom on November 22–23. The keynote speech will be delivered by Jan Stuart, the Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Washington D.C. Following the conference, participants will be invited to join a two-day traveling seminar from November 24 to 25, visiting lacquer and conservation workshops and museum collections in and around Guangzhou.

Context and Scope

During the second half of the seventeenth century, the production of the Coromandel screens, also known as kuancai (‘carved polychrome’), thrived along China’s southeast coast. These screens gained immense popularity domestically and in European markets, fostering connections between regional artisans, merchants, and prominent European figures such as royalty and nobility. In the last two decades of this century, the Coromandel screens emerged as one of China’s most frequently exported commodities, rivaling porcelain and challenging Japanese lacquerware exports. Their significance extends far beyond the general perception of being merely mass-produced craftwork of subpar quality. The conference will focus on two interconnected yet distinct lines of development: the screens encapsulated social cohesion, domestic networks, and transoceanic encounters while simultaneously becoming entwined in global histories that positioned them as coveted commodities, commemorative gifts, sites of maritime connectivity, and evocative artistic expressions originating from the Orient. Following this view, three key areas of investigation are at the forefront of discussions:

A) Transported Visions and Spatial Mobility unravels the role of the Coromandel screens in facilitating visual communication during the early modern world. Drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg’s concept of the ‘Image Vehicle’ (Bilderfahrzeuge, 1932), this inquiry delves into the dynamic and creative exchange of ideas, compositional elements, and ‘pictorial formulas.’

B) Inscribed Surfaces and Social Cohesion delves into the societal aspects of the Coromandel screens within domestic contexts. They were widely circulated as inscribed gifts among middle- and low-ranking, yet affluent, Qing officials stationed on the frontier. Their indexical nature provides a distinct perspective to unravel the interconnected social networks, political gatherings, interactions among officials and merchants, and intertextuality within and across regions.

C) Deconstruction and (Re)Framing: The Afterlives encompasses a wide range of transcultural practices applied to Coromandel screens after their removal from their original context. This scope analyzes and conceptualizes the procedural aspects of integrating Coromandel screens into new displays, such as European palatial interiors, marquetry furniture, and new works of art created by fragmenting, reassembling, refurbishing, and (re)appropriating lacquer panels.

Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• The mobility, intermingling, and dissemination of certain pictorial formulas through the Coromandel screen, such as the ‘Han Palace’ (estate celebration) or ‘Wenji Returning to Han’
• The interplay between various types of screens, porcelain, lacquerware, carpets, wallpaper, prints, furniture, and other decorative arts
• The interplay between various formats, materiality, and techniques along China’s southeast coast
• Regional divergences in terms of style, motif, lacquer and carving techniques, overall designs, etc.
• Recent discoveries in museum conservation
• The entangled histories with other screens produced in East Asia, such as the Nanban screen, the gilt biombo produced in Macao, and the painted screen in Korea
• Inscriptions, gift-giving, official-merchant interaction, political manifestos, social cohesion, and practices, etc.
• Sawing, reassembling, refurbishing, and (re-)appropriating lacquer panels in new contexts, and other framing practices
• Imitation and transmedial practices, such as leather imitation of the Coromandel screen
• The Coromandel screen’s entanglement with Japonisme painting, haute couture, and the fashion industry
• Theoretical discourses on the Coromandel screen’s valence in Orientalism, transculturalism, and global (art) history, etc.

Proposals from all disciplines are welcome. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a brief bio, to unravelingcoromandel@googlemail.com by 20 January 2024. Presentations in English or Chinese (with pre-translated lecture notes required) should not exceed 20 minutes. The proposals accepted will be announced in early April 2024.

The Bei Shan Tang Foundation, in conjunction with the Department of Chinese and History of City University of Hong Kong, will cover the costs of lodging and travel. We also encourage speakers who can fund their own travel to participate. For further inquiries, please contact lianming.wang@cityu.edu.hk.

The organizers envision publishing selected conference papers in an edited volume.

Advisory Board
Ching May Bo, City University of Hong Kong
Burglind Jungmann, UCLA
Mei Mei Rado, Bard Graduate Center, New York
Anton Schweizer, Kyushu University
Wang Lianming, City University of Hong Kong
Xu Xiaodong, CUHK Art Museum

From the Call for Papers:

The Public Country House: ‘Treasure of Quiet Beauty’ or a Site for Public Histories?
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 16–17 May 2024

Proposals due by 2 January 2024

§ “I venture to think that the country houses of Britain with their gardens, their parks, their pictures, their furniture and their peculiar architectural charm, represent a treasure of quiet beauty.”  –Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian and former owner of NT Blickling Hall, 1937.

§ “[There is] a growing awareness of the complexity and significance of the country house in all is manifold and multifarious ways, from slavery to gender, the local community to the British Empire, horticulture to transport, politics to recreation.”  –David Cannadine, “The British Country House Revisited,” in D. Cannadine and J. Musson (eds), The Country House: Past, Present, Future (Rizzoli, 2018), p. 15.

§ “Understanding the importance of imperial wealth and artefacts to the purchase, building and furnishing of … country houses underscores how these built environments—far from being exclusively British or English—were shaped by long histories of global interaction.”  –Margot Finn and Kate Smith, “Introduction,” in M. Finn and K. Smith (eds), The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (UCL Press, 2018), p. 12.

The British country house: family home or public cultural asset? Glorious exemplar of historic taste or contested site of public history? A visually enthralling historic stage set, or a site to inform understanding of our national histories? There are millions of visits to country houses every year in the UK, and recent events have demonstrated how the public country house is emerging as a new front line of public history. In England, the Country House Scheme, first established in the 1930s by Lord Lothian, has allowed many of the most significant country houses and their estates to transfer ownership to the National Trust through acceptance in lieu of taxation. This has meant that in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, country houses—sometimes with their collections—could be saved for the nation to enjoy as a “treasure of quiet beauty.” Nearly ninety years on, the research landscape surrounding country houses has transformed, encompassing topics beyond questions of patronage, the histories of interior taste and style, to also address collective histories of people and place, and local, regional, national and global histories and object provenance.

The country house is no longer only a unique index of aristocratic or elite artistic and architectural taste over time, it is also a living cultural resource for its increasingly diverse audiences. How are these multi-layered sites—at once former and present family homes, public museums, heritage attractions, and exemplars of global exchange networks in microcosm—curated, presented and interpreted in the present? What does this shift and the accompanying research mean for the way these sites present and interpret their houses, gardens and collections? And what might the country house of the future look like?

Taking place online and at the V&A South Kensington on 16th and 17th May 2024, this two-day conference explores what role the country house plays in our national understanding of social and global histories, art and culture, and the axes of change around which such sites are turning, including diverse audience expectation, the climate crisis, and national historical narratives. The conference will focus on public country houses: i.e. those owned, opened, and managed by charitable organisations with an obligation to provide public benefit.

The Public Country House: ‘Treasure of Quiet Beauty’ or a Site for Public Histories? will bring together an international community of colleagues working across heritage, museums, arts and culture, and academia to explore the past, present, and potential future/s of the country house. Through panels, roundtable discussions, and creative interventions, together we will map the barriers to presentation and interpretation in publicly accessible country houses, share ideas and examples of innovative curatorial and interpretative practice internationally, and develop tools and methodologies for change that cut across disciplinary boundaries. We invite proposals for 15- to 20-minute presentations of any format. We also welcome full panel proposals as well as roundtable discussions, workshops, and creative submissions.

Proposals might engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

Researching the Country House
• Narratives of loss and destruction: the history of the saving of the country house in the 21st century, fifty years on from the V&A’s Destruction of the Country House exhibition
• Authenticity: Understanding the significance and preservation of the material past
• The potential for country houses to act as case studies in shared national histories
• Exploring the received family histories of place alongside the plural significance of local, regional, national, and global histories, including of contested histories or marginalised histories

21st-Century Meanings of the Public Country House and Its Evolving Roles
• Imagining and celebrating the country house of the future
• Country houses and estates as the nuclei around which entire communities and big historical moments are contingent
• Climate change, the environment, and the country house
• Country houses as sites of creativity and innovation: the dialogues between historic collections and contemporary art

Evolving Methodologies for Interpretation and Display for a Range of Different Audiences
• The future of country house audiences and visiting trends
• Critique of country house re-presentations for different audiences: national and international case studies
• Tools and methodologies for audience engagement, particularly regarding presentation and interpretation—e.g. immersive and sensory presentation, interpretation and experience

The above themes may be interpreted as broadly or creatively as you wish. We are particularly keen to hear from those working in heritage spaces, museums, galleries, cultural organisations, or as creative practitioners. Abstracts of about 250 words (with a brief bio) should be sent to the project’s principal investigator, Dr Oliver Cox (o.cox@vam.ac.uk) by 9.00am (GMT) on Tuesday, 2 January 2024. We would be grateful if you could also let us know if you have any access requirements (e.g. online-only attendance). If you’re not sure how or where your proposal might fit, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

This conference is part of ‘Private’ spaces for public benefit? Historic houses as sites for research and knowledge exchange innovation, a collaborative project led by the V&A and the National Trust. The project is generously supported by a British Academy Innovation Fellowship Award.

William Burges, H. W. Lonsdale, and Thomas Nicholls, Banqueting Hall, Cardiff Castle, Wales, ca. 1870s.

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From the Call for Papers:

Revivalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, 19 February 2024

Organized by Peter Lindfield

Proposals due by 24 November 2023

Keynote Speaker: Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin (University of Cambridge)

The past often informs the present in many, interconnected ways. For example, Howard Colvin in his well-known essay on the “Gothic Survival and Gothick Revival” offers a nuanced reading of medieval architecture’s perpetuation in C17–C18 Britain (‘Gothic Survival’) and the style’s quite separate revival. Like the ‘Gothic Revival’, references to and recreations of the past can take many different forms across the arts and humanities; these revivals can leverage mimesis, or perhaps they are more frivolous and based upon loose associationism. Revivals’ form, fidelity, function, and motivation are therefore varied and crucial to understanding and mapping the materiality and ideas from history to its continued relevance, recycling, and recreation in the present.

This conference wishes to examine the legacies of the past and the past’s recreation under the broad label of ‘revival’ across time, place, and discipline: how and why has the past been reworked, recreated, or revived; what are the minimum requirements for work(s) to be considered a revival; can revivals be counter-cultural? The conference also wishes to examine how revivals have been interpreted (both positively and negatively); and how revivals can be and are set against the source material that inspired them.

20-minute papers on any aspect of revivalism across the arts and humanities are solicited for this in-person conference. Proposals that explore interdisciplinary manifestations of revivalism are especially welcome. Topics could include:
• Art, architecture, or applied design
• Literature (fiction and non-fiction)
• Revivalism, pastiche, and forgery
• Historiography of revival
• Interdisciplinary revivals
• Motivation(s) for revivals/ism
• Comparisons between revivals and the revived

300-word proposals should be sent to the conference organiser, Dr Peter N. Lindfield, FSA, Welsh School of Architecture (LindfieldP@Cardiff.ac.uk) no later than 24 November 2023.

From the Call for Papers:

Mind, Body, and the Arts, 1100–1800
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, 28 March 2024

Organized by Alexander Wragge-Morley and Carmel Raz

Proposals due by 15 November 2023

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK as part of The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health Research Networking Grant

In recent decades, scholars across the humanities have grown increasingly interested in historical understandings of the effects of art on the mind and body. In the Middle East, for instance, Islamicate medics regarded certain musical modes (maqāmāt) as having therapeutic properties, linking them to states of mind and body thought to depend on the four humors. In pre-modern China, writers such as the Song historian Lu You (1125–1210) identified poetry as a means of healing a mind that was closely interwoven with the body. Meanwhile, in Europe, emotional states such as melancholy, nostalgia, or hysteria were theorized as stemming not only from an imbalance of the humors but also to stimulants ranging from the eerie tones of the glass armonica and the disturbing effects of romantic fiction, to the therapeutic effects of the color green.

This workshop asks whether we can reconfigure our understandings of art and health by decentering modern Western accounts of aesthetic experience and psychology. To this end, it will emphasize global early modern perspectives on the links between the body, health, and artistic production/experience. It will bring historical accounts of embodied experience into dialogue with artistic productions—and their associated cosmologies—found across a wide range of early modern cultures around the world. In particular, it will investigate whether there were links between the notion of balance/imbalance in the body, and the notion of harmony / dissonance in artistic productions and aesthetic experiences.

This conference forms part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project The Arts as Medicine? New Histories of the Arts and Health, led by Alexander Wragge Morley and Carmel Raz. It will consist of three workshops: this workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany and subsequent workshops at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, UK and at Lancaster University, UK.

For the current workshop, we are soliciting papers that will be submitted for a special issue of a leading peer-reviewed journal in the humanities. Draft versions of those papers will be circulated ahead of the workshop, so that participants can discuss them together. We welcome proposals from scholars working on the period 1100–1800 in (but not necessarily limited to) the fields of: history of science and medicine, musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, dance studies, literary studies, the history of music theory, history of art, or literary studies. Funding will be available to assist with the travel and accommodation costs of invited participants. Please send an abstract of 250–500 words by 15 November 2023 to a.wragge-morley@lancaster.ac.uk.

From the Call for Papers:

On the Eve of Independence: Art and Architecture in the British Empire
The Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, 31 May — 2 June 2024

Proposals due by 15 November 2023

In 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, George Washington began a major expansion of his home, a building whose foundations dated to the 1730s. It was a project that he maintained throughout the war and that he continued after his triumphant return to Mount Vernon. Inspired by the work that began 250 years ago, and that endures today through the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the George Washington Presidential Library is hosting an international and interdisciplinary symposium in the spring of 2024 that explores the art and architecture of the British Atlantic in the long-eighteenth century. The symposium is especially interested in exploring the Atlantic connections between and comparisons of British and American practices in the years preceding and surrounding the American Revolution.

The symposium organizers invite applications from scholars from any field whose work can bear new insight into the art and architecture of the British Empire, especially its North American colonies, during the colonial era and the American Revolution. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
• The role of cultural emulation and ideas of independence in colonial North America before and after the American Revolution
• Artistic and architectural taste-making in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World
• Styles of British and American artwork, and changes to them, in the age of the American Revolution
• The training and practice of artists in the eighteenth century
• British influences on American art, and the creation of distinct American styles
• House and building design and use in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World
• Regional differences in architecture, and the environmental, social, and cultural factors that created these differences
• The practices, skills, and trades behind housebuilding in colonial America
• The role of labor and gender in art, architecture, and uses of space
• The effect of urban and rural landscapes on architecture
• The influence of Indigenous and African practices and knowledge on American art and architecture in the Atlantic World
• Influences outside of the British Empire on American art and architecture
• Analysis of current historic preservation practices at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sites and homes and discussions of what this work has revealed and continues to reveal about the past

Presenters are asked to submit a detailed 500- to 750-word proposal for their talk along with a CV. Each presenter will be asked to deliver a thirty- to forty-minute lecture with PowerPoint encouraged. The audience is a mix of scholars, professionals, highly informed collectors and specialists, and history enthusiasts. Proposed talks should be delivered with this type of audience in mind. Selected presenters will have travel expenses covered and receive an honorarium. Mount Vernon may commission a volume after the symposium, and presenters may have an opportunity to publish in it. Conference organizers may compose panels, but they are not accepting panel proposals at this time. Proposals are due by the end of day 15 November 2023. Decisions will be made by early 2024. Please direct questions and email complete packages to SymposiumCFP@MountVernon.org.

From the Call for Papers:

Art in Times of War and Peace: Legacies of Early Modern Loot and Repair
Bibliotheca Herztiana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, 8–10 May 2024

Organized by Julia Vázquez and Francesca Borgo

Proposals due by 15 December 2023

A category of objects that exists entirely as a function of violence, the term ‘loot’ describes a relationship of possession, if not more specifically of dispossession. Neither an historically nor materially specific typology of artifacts, loot is instead primarily a legal category that cuts across place and time. And while it is also not an art-historical classification, it is one with which the discipline of art history must constantly contend, given its repercussions for what is accessible, where, and in what condition. This international, interdisciplinary conference invites papers addressing the ways in which conflict and its resolution have historically moved, modified, and reclassified art objects in the long early modern period. We invite contributions on the material, ethical, legal, political, and narrative implications of the claiming and reclaiming of objects in times of war and peace, as well as the ongoing resonance of these issues today, particularly for institutions that are their present-day repositories.

Studies on looting have a tendency to focus on canonical episodes, most often drawn from Roman, Napoleonic, and Nazi-era plunder. But the early modern period saw the steady transfer of booties, trophies, and spoils over the European continent and across the Atlantic and the Pacific. In Europe, this transfer triggered a moral, theological, and legal debate around property rights, as well as the development of codified criteria governing correct modes of wartime conduct, regulating who was permitted to plunder, what, when, and from whom. The act of looting was itself a strategy of violence, especially in the colonial context; but looted objects themselves were also particularly susceptible to damage, neglect, and even deliberate melting down. Moreover, although often thought of as an entirely modern phenomenon, the return of seized objects was also first theorized in this period as a tool of diplomacy and cultivated alongside a nascent legislation for the protection of art against damage, destruction, or unlawful export.

This conference revisits the early modern origins of the discourse around cultural property with an eye to the challenges facing museums today. Recently, scholarly meetings including Plunder: An Alternative History of Art (panel, Annual Meeting of the Association for Art History, 2022) and The Material Cultures of War and Emergency (conference, University College London and Oxford University, 2023) have brought attention to the long history of the taking away of things as a result of conflict. We hope to continue this conversation, expanding its purview beyond the object’s capture, to its framing, display, and possible restitution, while spotlighting medieval and Renaissance loot and its contemporary stakes.

This conference is organized by Julia Vázquez and Francesca Borgo. Following Wastework in 2023, this is the second yearly conference convened by the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, furthering the Research Group’s ongoing inquiry into the consequences that different forms of loss, disappearance, and degradation bear for the discipline. For more information, see our webpage. A series of special presentations and pre-conference visits to local collections will launch the event. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered for speakers. Proposals will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume on loot and its recovery in the early modern period. To submit a proposal, please send your CV (including current position and affiliation), a 250-word abstract, and paper title to john.rattray@biblhertz.it by 15 December 2023.

Keynote speakers will include Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University) and Erin Thompson (CUNY).

From ArtHist.net:

People, Books and Models: The Order of St John and the Circulation of Architectural Ideas between Malta and Europe, 16th–18th Centuries
Online and in-person, Valletta, 17–19 April 2024

Proposals due by 30 September 2023

This conference aims at encouraging a multidisciplinary discussion, set in a broad European and Mediterranean context, of the spread of ideas, models for architecture, and construction techniques in Malta during the early modern age, via the networks of the Order of St John. In particular, it intends to investigate this dissemination of architectural theoretical and technical knowledge through the circulation of sources such as books, treatises, manuals of mathematics and geometry, catalogues, and collections of architectural images and drawings, as well as people, from architects to patrons, from engineers to intellectuals. The conference also aims to address a thorny methodological issue: the origin, dispersion, and fragmentation of the Hospitaller conventual library and, at the same time, the genesis of the library collections in Malta that include architectural sources, especially (but not only) at the National Library, for a better understanding of their provenance and context.

Taking Valletta and its civil architecture and historical construction sites as the main starting point of this investigation, the key role played by the city-convent was twofold. On one hand, the city was the core of the Hospitaller network, mirroring in its palaces, construction sites, and library collections the European dimension of the Order’s political, social, and cultural relationships. For this reason, the intense exchange between Malta and the Hospitaller offices in Europe will also be considered as well as the reciprocal influences between the Order and various political powers. On the other hand, there were also in Malta other important political stakeholders—from the Diocese to the Inquisition, from the many religious orders (like the Jesuits) to private individuals and travellers—that diversified the cultural scenario in Malta. These all need to be further investigated.

Finally, interpreting the Order as a powerful engine for the European circulation of drawings, books, and architectural models, the conference aims at serving as a forum where new research and methodologies can be discussed and fostered, not only to explore Malta and the other European nodes of the Hospitaller network, but also to better understand the broader European context from an original perspective.

Contributions delving into the following key topics are very welcome: migration of architectural languages, construction techniques, and circulation of drawings for architectural projects between the Maltese environment and Europe; analysis of architectural models from printed sources in the context of Hospitaller patronage; and the genesis of the Maltese and Hospitaller libraries and book circulation and production (with a focus on architectural sources).

The conference will be held as a hybrid event, with a Zoom link provided closer to the date of the conference. After the conference, participants will be invited to contribute to an edited volume to be proposed for inclusion in a peer-reviewed publication. Participants who wish to contribute are invited to send their text in English, along with related illustrations (including permission for publication) by 1 June 2024.

Abstract submissions will be open from 21 August 2023 to 30 September 2023. The submitted abstracts will be evaluated by the scientific committee and acceptance will be communicated by 23 October 2023. Selected speakers are invited to prepare 20-minute contributions. To apply, please send the following items to peoplebooksmodels2024@um.edu.mt
• 400-word abstract in English
• Contact information and affiliation
• Short CV (max 150 words) in English

The conference is the first step in an international project entitled Malta & Europe, Europe & Malta: Dissemination of Knowledge, Sources, and Architectural Models through the Network of the Order of St John run jointly by the University of Palermo (Dr Armando Antista), Politecnico di Torino (Dr Valentina Burgassi), and the University of Malta (Dr Valeria Vanesio).

Conference Directors
• Armando Antista (University of Palermo)
• Valentina Burgassi (Politecnico di Torino)
• Heléna Perez Gallardo (Complutense University of Madrid)
• Valeria Vanesio (University of Malta)

Scientific Committee Chairs
• Fernando Bouza Álvarez
• Sabine Frommel
• Marco Rosario Nobile
• William Zammit