Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

The English Georgian North, 1714–1830: Rethinking Cultures and Connections
Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University, 15 September 2023

Proposals due by 14 July 2023

This symposium builds on conversations that have been taking place at Durham University over the last fifteen months as part of the IMEMS research strand The Georgian North, designed and led by Professor Fiona Robertson. It sets out to develop new approaches to the intellectual and creative cultures of the northern counties of England in the Georgian period, 1714–1830. Important contributions to knowledge, interpretation, creative practice, and scientific advance were made in the north country during this still largely rural and early industrial period in its history. They took shape in social, professional, and discursive networks of considerable complexity and reach, bringing together artists, abolitionists, antiquaries, architects, writers, theologians, musicians, astronomers, philosophers, mathematicians, botanists, landscape designers, linguists, clergy, social and political reformers, actors, and archaeologists. Yet there has been little connected cross-disciplinary exploration of these cultures, their significance, and their legacies.

J.M.W. Turner, Durham Cathedral with a Rainbow, ca.1817, graphite and watercolour on paper, 55 × 37 cm (London: Tate, D25247).

We invite proposals for 15-minute papers or presentations to contribute to a day of informal and investigative discussion. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to
• Environment and conservation
• Abolition, reform, and intervention
• Originality and innovation
• Scientific enquiry, speculation, and new worlds
• Practices of collecting, curation, and display
• Performance: players, theatres, audiences
• Composition: music, painting, poetry, prose fiction, architecture, design
• Ancient pasts: theories and artefacts
• Cultures of belief
• Depletion and rediscovery (buildings, communities, habitats, traditions)
• International and intercultural connections; connections across languages and traditions
• Conversation and exchange (social, professional, and discursive networks, philosophical and historical societies, bookshops, print cultures)

The region under discussion comprises the historic counties of northern England: County Durham, the North Riding of Yorkshire, Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland. Of particular interest, because especially under-researched, is present-day County Durham and the areas immediately bordering it, but we welcome work on all relevant locales and communities. Of the many individuals active in the intellectual and creative cultures of the period, some were permanently settled in the northern counties, while others were here for shorter periods, often under-researched relative to the wider body of scholarship on their work. They are all of significance to our discussion, as are, also equally, the natural and constructed environments of the northern English counties—private and public buildings, landscapes and treescapes, theatres and observatories. All these environments helped shape the formation and development of ideas and many are now lost or under-regarded.

This is a free, in-person symposium, open to researchers across disciplines, with papers and roundtables and an emphasis on discussion and exchange. Teas, coffees, and a light lunch will be provided. There will be at least one online-only follow-up session later in 2023. We invite 300-word proposals for 15-minute papers or presentations. Please submit your proposal via this form by 14 July 2023.

If you cannot attend but are interested in receiving information about the Research Strand and follow-up sessions, you can use the above link to register your interest. We shall respond to all proposal submissions no later than 28 July, after which time further details and the registration link will be made available.

From CIHA, whose 2024 conference is organized around the theme ‘Matter Materiality’:

Materialising Loss: Absence and Remaking in Art History
36th Congrès du Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), Lyon, 23–28 June 2024

Chaired by Francesca Borgo and Felicity Bodenstein

Proposals due by 15 September 2023

Paper proposals are currently invited for the session “Materialising Loss: Absence and Remaking in Art History” at the 36th Congrès du Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) in Lyon, 23–28 June 2024, co-chaired by Francesca Borgo (University of St Andrews/ Bibliotheca Hertziana) and Felicity Bodenstein (Université Sorbonne).

The material turn in art history has reinstated a sensibility for the ‘thingness’ of things (Brown, 2001), the properties of their constitutive materials (Ingold, 2007), and the activity of their matter (Miller & Poh, 2022; Latour 1991; Gell 1998; Bennett, 2010). More recently still, interest has extended beyond making and materials: processes of unmaking, deterioration, care, and preservation have become subjects of investigation, accompanied by growing critical engagement with conservation (Fowler, 2019; Fowler & Nagel, 2023) and increasing attention to the behaviour of matter across the deep time of geological history (Borgo & Venturi, CIHA 2019).

But what happens when—despite all our best efforts to conserve, protect, and make last—things disappear? Taking this question as its starting point, we invite papers that reconsider matter and materiality from an unusual point of view: the object’s loss or inaccessibility and the practices undertaken to compensate for its absence, via physical replicas or virtual reconstructions. In centring itself on what has long been considered an epistemological endpoint in art historical studies—the disappearance of the original object—the session proposes a critical assessment of material and virtual remaking as site of art-historical knowledge. It asks how we might integrate that knowledge into the analytical methods of art history.

Looking at materiality from the seemingly paradoxical standpoint of absence reveals how much material studies takes for granted in terms of the object’s presence, permanence, and accessibility. Loss forcefully confronts us with the enabling operations and grounding conditions that go into writing material art history. It permeates everything we do, and yet it is distinctively undertheorized (Fricke & Kumler, 2022). What are the stakes of absence and reclamation? How does loss help us rethink the relationship between matter and form beyond the hylomorphic model? How do art historians deal with missing evidence, and how does its resurfacing or remaking change the canon and the narrative? Whose loss is worth talking about and why?

The threats of war, climate change and mass tourism give these questions a pressing relevance today, amplified by debates over sustainability, inclusion, and property rights. But art history seems sceptical of efforts to work against these risks: despite recent calls for ‘militant reproductions’ (Bredekamp, 2016), campaigns to widen the notion of originality (Lowe & Latour, 2010) and emphasize the seriality of the Classic (Settis & Anguissola, 2015), and appeals to the greater inclusivity of digital heritage (Terras, 2022; Michel, 2016), much of the discipline remains ambivalent about the remade, regarding it as ludic and nostalgic.

We live in a world in which heritage is constantly de- and re-materialised, formed and reformed in an unprecedented interplay between the material, immaterial, and neomaterial. And although the implications for objects and their histories are manifold, they remain largely unexplored. This session aims at remedying that imbalance, reflecting on the impact of physical loss on material art history and examining the value of remaking as historical method. In the interests of crafting a more inclusive narrative of loss and remaking and of fostering exchange between scholars from different geographical and professional backgrounds, we especially welcome papers offering global perspectives.

Proposals are due 15 September 2023 and must be submitted via the CIHA platform. Instructions on how to submit your proposal can be found here.

From ArtHist.net:

Material and Visual Culture Seminar Series
Online, University of Edinburgh, Autumn 2023

Proposals due by 31 July 2023

The Material and Visual Culture of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Research Cluster is pleased to announce that the Material and Visual Culture Seminar Series (MVCS) will be continuing for a fifth year. We therefore invite proposals for twenty-minute papers from PhD candidates, early-career researchers, and cultural heritage professionals addressing any aspect of material and visual culture studies.

The seminars aim to explore a wide variety of themes, and localities within the long seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (broadly defined) to foster methodological and interdisciplinary dialogue. Topics might include but are not limited to: object or subject case studies, material/visual culture and identity especially with respect to marginalized peoples or communities, material/visual culture and literature, craft, consumer cultures, global ‘things’, etc. Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 250 words, with a short biography (about 100 words) to materialcultureresearcheca@ed.ac.uk by 31 July.

The seminars are scheduled for Wednesday evenings online, at 5pm BST/GMT fortnightly throughout semester one of the 2023/24 academic year.

Twitter: @mvcseminar
Instagram: mvccluster

From ArtHist.net:

Challenging Empire: Women, Art, and the Global Early Modern World, ca. 1400–1750
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, 1–2 March 2024

Organized by Tanja Jones, Doris Sung, and Rebecca Teague

Proposals due by 1 September 2023

The symposium Challenging Empire: Women, Art, and the Global Early Modern World, part of the project Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe and Asia, aims to extend and expand knowledge of cultural production by and for early modern women—particularly those associated with courts—on a global scale. While numerous conferences, symposia, and resulting publications in the past several decades have addressed women as producers, consumers, and subjects of European art during the early modern period (ca. 1400–1750), less consideration has been given to women’s roles in the courts—particularly as informed by the steadily increasing cross-cultural interactions (i.e. between Europe and Asia, the Americas, Africa, etc.) that characterized the period. This symposium aims to address this lacuna whilst simultaneously de-centering the traditional Euro-centric model of study in the analysis of women’s cultural production, presentation, and consumption surrounding courts and empires (institutions associated with ruling power). The goal is to encourage a more equitable view of early modern women’s experiences of and with art globally, across traditionally held national and continental boundaries.

We invite paper submissions from scholars (including advanced graduate students) whose work addresses topics including, but not limited to:

Early modern (court) women’s roles in
• transcultural artistic production, movement, and collecting across geographic or temporal spaces (across or between Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas)
• moments of cultural exchange, intersection, or reciprocity

Those that, in relation to early modern women’s roles in artistic production
• problematize or challenge long-held notions surrounding early modern gender, ‘court’, and ’empire’ as hegemonic and culturally conditioned concepts; encourage consideration of cultural differences in the definition, production, or reception of visual and material culture
• address issues of colonialism, imperialism, or patriarchy
• approach concepts of the body, exoticism, or gender performance across cultures
• address the movement of people, ideas, or objects

Those that incorporate emerging methods in the study of early modern (esp. court) women and art on a global scale (including digital humanities tools such as mapping and social network analysis)

While identifying the ‘early modern’ as the period from around 1400 to 1750, we recognize this datation as a Euro-centric, historiographic concept; therefore, we encourage papers addressing the central themes of the symposium, but with dates that may deviate slightly, especially those problematizing epochal differences in varied geographical and cultural contexts in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and beyond. Following the conference, a selection of papers will be chosen by the organizers for inclusion in a proposed edited volume. A limited number of travel subsidies will also be available for advanced graduate student presenters. This symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Alabama, and the Alabama Digital Humanities Center.

To submit a proposal, please send the following in one PDF file to the symposium organizers by Friday, 1 September 2023:
• Paper title
• Paper abstract (250-word maximum)
• CV with your full name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), title, and email address

Organizers
Dr. Tanja L. Jones, The University of Alabama, tljones10@ua.edu
Dr. Doris Sung, The University of Alabama, dhsung@ua.edu
Rebecca Teague, PhD student, University of California, Riverside, rteag001@ucr.edu

From the Call for Papers:

New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium
Online, 22–24 February 2024

Proposals due by 15 September 2023

What does it look like for historical expressions of dancing and movement arts to break out of traditional academic and performative boxes? How do scholars and practitioners escape the boundaries of discipline, chronology, geography, and methodology subsumed under the conventional appellation of ‘early dance’? Conversely, how can we demonstrate the ways in which our work complements and completes the work of other disciplines in light of these distinctions? This symposium explores early dance as an idea, a time, a place, a locus of cultural meaning and aims to draw together scholars working across disciplines and geographies who are nevertheless invested in ‘early’ dance and movement.

We invite papers for this virtual symposium from scholars across disciplines, exploring aspects of dance and movement from all methodological perspectives, nding commonality in the antecedental nature of their work. Whether looking at the musical, literary, cultural, political, religious, or social contexts of dance, or expanding knowledge of its somatic and kinesthetic dimensions, we nd unity in the chronological earliness of our work. We encourage papers that explore dance outside of Western European frameworks of knowledge and movement production, including comparative or transhistorical perspectives on pre-1800 or ‘early’ dance.

Possible Themes for Papers
• Dance, music, and choreomusicology
• Notation and choreographies
• Transmission, translation, and circulation
• Expanding geographies (pre-1800 dance across Asia, SWANA, the Americas and beyond)
• Race and racialization in pre-1800 dance practices
• Literature, textuality, and dance
• Representations of dance in art and literature
• Dance as metaphor/metaphors of dance
• Intersections of dance and/in theology, philosophy, theory, theater, art, philosophy, economics, etc.
• Theories and philosophies of dance
• Dance practices from page to stage: recreation, reconstruction, reenactment
• Costuming, clothing, and vestments
• Body politics/political bodies in historical dance
• Sociability and social life
• Translation problems: languages, historical periods, cultures
• Dance or movement as aide-memoire/embodied cognition
• Dance ontologies and dance as a way of knowing

Possible Themes for Roundtables and Forums
• What is ‘early dance’? Definitions and boundaries
• Early dance in global perspectives: expanding geographies
• Scholar/Practitioner: How does dance training aid or hinder research on early dance?
• Methodologies in research
• Graduate studies in early dance studies
• Interdisciplinary scholarship and dance studies: barriers and openings?
• Dance as knowledge production within academia

The program committee welcomes proposals for presentations in a variety of formats. Alternative formats may also be proposed. Graduate students, junior scholars, and unaffiliated scholars and performers are especially encouraged to submit proposals.
• Paper presentations (20 minutes)
• Work-in-progress presentations (5–10 minutes)
• Lecture-performances
• Workshops
• Roundtables (for themes listed above or entirely new roundtables)
• A collaborative performance, paper, manifesto, video, etc.

Please submit a proposal via the submission portal by 15 September 2023. Proposals should include your name, affiliation (if any), and email address; an abstract of 250–350 words; a short bibliography (optional); and a brief bio (100 words). All submissions materials must be in English, though presentations in other languages may be possible (please contact organizers).

This symposium is organized by members of the Early Dance Working Group of the Dance Studies Association. Please contact chair of the Organization Committee, Mary Channen Caldwell (maryca@sas.upenn.edu), with any questions.

François Denis Née, after Joseph Barthélemy Le Bouteux, Le Concert (detail) in Jean Benjamin de Laborde, Choix de Chansons, 4 vols. (Paris: De Lormel, 1773). Binding with the arms of Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cotes RES-YE-778, Cotes RES-YE-779, Cotes RES-YE-780, Cotes RES-YE-781). The Bibliothèque Condé at the Château de Chantilly possesses a unique example printed on vellum bound with the original designs for the engravings; more information is available here.

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From the Call for Papers:

Sound, Image, Text
Australian National University, Canberra, 24–25 August 2023

Proposals due by 23 June 2023

This symposium hosted by the Centre for Art History and Theory in the ANU School of Art and Design will be of interest to scholars, curators, or creative practitioners interested in the relationship between sound, image, and text in the history of music, art, and literature. The event is inspired by the digital critical edition of Jean-Benjamin de Laborde’s Choix de Chansons (1773), developed by an interdisciplinary team of art historians, musicologists, and literary scholars from the Australian National University, University of Sydney, University of Oxford, and the Sorbonne. The project explores the interrelation and interactivity of images, music, and text in the Choix de Chansons and similar cultural objects in the eighteenth century.

François Denis Née, after Joseph Barthélemy Le Bouteux, Le Concert in Jean Benjamin de Laborde, Choix de Chansons, 1773 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cotes RES-YE-778, Cotes RES-YE-779, Cotes RES-YE-780, Cotes RES-YE-781). The inscription below the image reads “Vos yeux commencent nos tourmens, / Et vos doigts charmans / Achévent leur ouvrage” (Your eyes commence our torments / And your charming fingers / Accomplish their work). More information is available here.

We seek papers and interventions from artists, curators, publishers, and academics that include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
• Digital publication
• Multimedia research
• Interrelations of sound, image, and text.
• Digital methods for art history/musicology/literary studies
• Digital methods for researching the eighteenth century
• Book history (especially relating to music)
• History of image and text in performance
• Print culture and music

We strongly encourage participation from scholars, visual artists, and musicians who seek to develop, remake, rework, or remix the sound, image, and text of the digital critical edition of Choix de Chansons.

The symposium runs in conjunction with the Choix de Chansons exhibition at the School of Art and Design Gallery, which opens on Thursday, 24 August, and a concert of selected music from the Choix de Chansons held at the School of Music on Friday, 25 August. Modest bursaries to contribute towards travel and accommodation will be provided to international and interstate delegates. Please direct enquiries and paper submissions to Robert Wellington, Director, Centre for Art History and Art Theory, ANU at robert.wellington@anu.edu.au.

From the Call for Papers:

Women, Opera, and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, 11–13 April 2024

Proposals due by 15 August 2023

This conference is organised within the framework of the 5-year research project Women, Opera, and the Public Stage in Eighteenth-Century Venice (WoVen), funded by the Norwegian Research Council and based at the Music Institute, NTNU. The project explores the role of women in European operatic culture during the Enlightenment. More specifically, WoVen focuses on Venice, a hub for critical debate and a prominent operatic centre of international significance in the eighteenth century. WoVen seeks to uncover how opera and operatic women contributed to the ‘women question’ through their multiple activities within and around the opera world in Venice at a time of profound change for women throughout Europe. We invite contributions for 20-minute papers (or 30-minute papers with performance/demonstration) within these four thematic areas:
1  Women’s Roles and Images of Femininity on the Venetian Stage
2  Performing Celebrity on the Venetian Stage
3  Audiences, Patrons and Women’s Participation in the Opera Business in Venice
4  Performing Eighteenth-Century Operatic Women and Gender: A Practice-Based Approach

Proposals for unpublished individual papers must be submitted as Word files with the following information: presenter’s name, paper title, session for which the paper is being proposed, abstract (maximum of 300 words), short biography (maximum of 150 words), institutional affiliation, and email address. The official language of the conference is English. Proposals must be sent to woven@musikk.ntnu.no by 15 August 2023 to be evaluated by 15 September 2023. Please indicate the subject of your email as: ‘WoVen—Call for Papers’. The scientific committee will select the best papers presented at the conference for peer-reviewed publication.

Accommodation for three nights is covered by WoVen. WoVen will also cover or contribute towards travel expenses for participants without or with only limited institutional support. For more information about the potential for travel support, please see the full Call for Papers.

Scientific Committee
Melania Bucciarelli (NTNU)
Tatiana Korneeva (NTNU)
Francesca Menchelli-Buttini (Conservatorio di Musica ‘G. Rossini’, Pesaro)