Enfilade

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

From HNA:

HNA Conference | Britain and the Low Countries: Cultural Exchange Past, Present, and Future
London and Cambridge, 10–13 July 2024

Proposals due by 29 September 2023

2024 marks the first time in the forty-year history of the Historians of Netherlandish Art that the biennial conference will be held in the UK. Cultural, political, and economic exchange has been pivotal to the histories of the UK and the Low Countries, and these relationships have taken on new significance and have new potential as the UK renegotiates its relationship with Europe after Brexit. Britain and the Low Countries: Cultural Exchange Past, Present & Future considers the extraordinary depth and breadth of the relationships between the constituent nations of the UK, Belgium, and The Netherlands.

The conference is comprised of workshops in London and Cambridge on 10 and 13 July and 40 paper sessions to be delivered at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge on 11 and 12 July. Thirteen of the sessions relate to the subject of Britain and the Low Countries. These fall under three broad themes: technology and the natural sciences, key themes in scholarship on British-Netherlandish culture, and medium-based scholarship in the British-Netherlandish context. There are 25 further sessions on a broad range of themes and 2 career-development sessions.

The call for papers is now open for all sessions. Each session is 90-minutes long and, unless otherwise specified, will comprise three 20-minute papers and 30 minutes for discussion. Applicants must be HNA members and are allowed to submit multiple proposals but may not participate in more than one session. We ask that applicants inform the session chairs about the other sessions they are applying to. Unless specified otherwise, please send proposals of about 500 words, clearly stating the goals of the paper, along with a CV (no longer than one page) to the email address(es) ascribed to the session descriptions below.

The deadline for proposals is Friday, 29 September 2023. Applicants will be notified by the programme committee no later than four weeks after the submission deadline.

Please consider contributing to HNA IDEA’s appeal for contributions to an equitable conference.

s e s s i o n s  a t  a  g l a n c e

• Copies and Reproductions in Netherlandish Art, 1400–1800
• Existential In(ter)ventions: Modernity as Makeability in the Dutch Republic
• Infinite Concordances: Elaborating on Visual Typology in Early Modern Netherlandish Art
• The ‘Inventions’ of Early Netherlandish Painting: Thirty Years since Hans Belting and Christiane Kruse’s Die Erfindung des Gemäldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei (1994)
• Embracing the Digital Age: New Prospects for Researching Northern European Art with Computational Methods
• The ‘More-Than-Human World’ in 17th-Century Dutch Visual and Material Culture
• The Multidimensionality of Netherlandish Grotesques
• What is Anglo-Dutchness?
• Netherlandish-isms: Making Nationhood and Art History
• Reading Pendants and Multiples in Dutch and Flemish Art
• Gender and the Home across Cultures
• Remarkable Women Artists, 1500–1700
• Multiple Masculinities in Netherlandish Art
• Sound and Silence: Soundscapes, Noise, Music, and Quiet Pauses in Dutch and Flemish Art
• New Views on Vermeer: Reflections, Opinions, Reconsiderations
• Moving Dutch Knowledge: Collections as Knowledge Repositories and Sites of Transformation and Transfiguration (ANKK sponsored session)
• Museums in Conflict: Lessons Learned, 1930–1950
• Technical Art History: Material Stories – Object Itineraries
• Do We Belong Together? Case Studies into Portrait Pendants
• The Interconnected Nature between Britain and the Low Countries in the Production and Decorating of Glass
• Art and Nature in the Dutch Colonial World
• Worldly Images and Images of the World in Netherlandish Art
• Half the World Away: Cultural Circulations between Isfahan and the Early Modern Low Countries
• Mutual Appreciation and Exchanges between Artists of Northern and Southern Europe, 1590–1725
• Culture and Climate Change
• The Landscapes of Artists from the Netherlands Who Worked in Britain during the Long 17th Century
• ‘Soft Power’: The Material Legacy of William and Mary
• Netherlandish Migrant Artists and the emergence of Creativity in Late 17th-Century London
• Collecting and Exchange between North Sea Neighbours
• Netherlandish Art in Renaissance Florence: Architectural Exchanges from North to South?
• Print Culture between the UK and the Low Countries
• Print Exhibitions in the Making and Related Research
• New Research on Dutch and Flemish Drawings in the UK
• Immigrants and Excellence: Sculptors from the Low Countries at the English and Scottish Courts in the 17th and 18th Centuries
• Connecting Threads: Tapestries and Cultural Exchange in the Low Countries and England
• Material Depiction and (Cut-out) Trompe l’oeils: The Enchantment of Material Depiction by Netherlandish Painters and the Development of British Traditions
• Visual Sovereignty in Dutch and Indigenous Histories
• Visual Cultures of Cartography in the Low Countries, 1500–1800
• Professional Insights and Practical Advice for Early Career Researchers
• Pecha Kucha Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Researchers

Session descriptions are available here»

The Call for Papers for three related workshops, from ArtHist.net:

Traveling Objects: The Material Culture of the Atlantic Routes
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 21 February 2024

New Towns and Old Settlements in Latin America: City Planning, Architecture, and Building Decorations in the Shadow of European Influence
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 17 April 2024

Leaving a Trail: Memories, Reports, and Maps beyond the Fascination and Fear of the New World
Palacio de Maldonado – Centro de Estudios Brasileños, Universidad de Salamanca, 15 May 2024

Organized by Maddalena Bellavitis and José Manuel Santos Pérez

After more than two years of careful and laborious preparation (slowed down and hindered several times by the difficulties that have arisen due to the global pandemic), this project finally gets underway. A Different Perspective for the Atlantic Routes intends to go back once more to questioning issues that already count important in-depth studies, like the transoceanic relations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also has the ambition of wanting to integrate the results already obtained with new reflections and achievements, and above all with a different point of view.

The idea, in fact, is not to propose an approach which is purely targeted to how European society had received and used the travel reports and products arrived from American lands, but to also to evaluate on the one hand the influences and consequences—cultural, technical, artistic, and social—that the exchanges had had overseas on local populations, and on the other how items and symbols closely linked to the cultures of the American territories after being brought to Europe had been reinterpreted and deprived of their original meaning in the new environment in which they had been introduced to, thus also involving the sphere of memory and the Intangible Cultural Heritage. If the common thread proposed is that of the activity of the Dutch West India Company, the project also aims to consider the whole vast cultural, diplomatic, artistic, scientific, anthropological, and gastronomic panorama that the approach to such a topic necessarily brings with itself, and will therefore also evaluate the tangencies and interactions with travels and exchanges also made by other European states and kingdoms in the period considered.

The first opportunity for comparison will be dedicated to the material aspects—that is the objects that have been used and obtained in exchanges, explorations or raids—and to the engineering aspects of the ships used to transport them. The second meeting will focus on the urban installations and the architectural and social aspects of the new settlements, while the third session will concern travelers, travel impressions, and cartography. Workshops will be held in Paris and Salamanca, hosted by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and the Centro de Estudios Brasileños of the Universidad de Salamanca.

In addition to those who have already been involved in the discussions and in the preparation of the preliminary phases of this project, scholars interested in any discipline that can offer points of contact with the proposed theme—from collecting to memory, from travel literature to material culture, from engineering to anthropology—are encouraged to send a proposal for a contribution.

Please submit an abstract for an unpublished contribution and a short bio by 30 September 2023 to maddalena.bellavitis@gmail.com, specifying the title of the workshop you are applying for. Presentations will be in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese and will last a maximum of 20 minutes. The organizers, Maddalena Bellavitis and José Manuel Santos Pérez, director of the Centro de Estudios Brasileños of the Universidad de Salamanca, will notify the selected proposals by the second week of October 2023.