Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

Exploring the Mental World of the Country House
20th Annual Historic Houses International Conference
Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates, Maynooth University, 9–11 May 2022

Proposals due by 19 November 2021

Country houses are masterpieces of material culture, they are triumphs of architecture, fine and decorative art, and landscape design, but they are also about the history and transmission of ideas.

In varying degrees their occupants (above and below stairs, indoors and outdoors) thought, conversed, read, and responded to their milieu through books, newspapers, as well as other media and forms of knowledge. In recent years country house libraries and archives have steadily revealed more evidence for how people in country houses fashioned themselves and their views of the world. In 2022 the Twentieth Annual Historic Houses Conference will examine the intellectual background to the country house. What is the meaning of all those volumes in bookcases, did they do more than just decorate a room? How were they acquired, read, and put to use?

By what means did elite society exchange ideas, absorb new trends, and engage in wider debate, especially when at home in the country? To what degree was this knowledge valued and displayed in terms of stylish library design, and how did houses preserve, or neglect, their books and other records? How did members of a household entertain or better themselves, what was popular to read with whom —men, women and children? The classics, natural history, literature, genealogy, fiction, and other subjects feature in many country house libraries, and very often a battered, plain copy of a publication will reveal more than the most pristine edition in a lavish ornamental binding. In what ways did books furnish minds as well as interiors?

Beyond the demesne walls how has the world of the country house been perceived and understood in fiction, poetry, drama and, more recently, film? How have these treatments shaped a wider understanding of the country house as a cultural and literary phenomenon? Exploring the Mental World of the Country House will examine these and other related questions, and mark the twentieth anniversary of the Centre; the conference is likely to be a mix of real and online proceedings. Papers on any of the above topics relating to country houses in Ireland, the UK, Europe, or further afield will be considered. Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to Professor Terence Dooley and Professor Christopher Ridgway before 19 November 2021 at the following addresses: terence.a.dooley@mu.ie and cridgway@castlehoward.co.uk.

From ArtHist.net (5 October 2021) . . .

Grinling Gibbons and the Story of Carving
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 24–25 June 2022

Organized by Jenny Saunt, Kira d’Alburquerque, and Ada de Wit

Proposals due by 10 January 2022

Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) is the most celebrated carver in British history. His closely observed depictions of full-bodied natural forms, executed in hyperreal detail, captivated audiences of his own time as much as they captivate us today. But how much is really known about this man, his work, and its implications in terms of the way we think about carving now? As part of the year-long Gibbons tercentenary celebrations of 2021/22, this conference explores the story of Gibbons but also investigates broader themes around the subject of carving in a European context from 1600 to 1800.

On day one, an invited panel of speakers will present the latest research on Grinling Gibbons and his work. For the second day, we invite papers that explore all aspects of the processes of production and design in the story of carving in early modern Britain and in terms of international exchanges. Topics of interest are wide ranging and include design, sources, materials, methods, training, tools, techniques, business and workshop structures, branding, professional networks, and nineteenth- and twentieth century engagement with and reinterpretation of the carved work produced in this period. Intersections and interactions are of particular interest. In what ways did the lives and careers of practitioners contemporary to Grinling Gibbons and the careers of his assistants and apprentices relate to each other and how did this impact the work produced? What were the exchanges between carving and other related disciplines of the time, such as ship building, furniture production and frame making? Using examples of early modern practice, how can we expand our understanding of the meaning of design sources and processes, be that through print or other material or social cultures of the time; how did these interplay and how can they be questioned and quantified? How can we develop methodologies to investigate these makers and their understanding of their own working processes, their relationships with materials and tools, and what new insights can be gained from this type of exploration? How did such factors work together to create the type of physical forms that are so recognisable as the product of Gibbons’ world?

Papers should be 20 minutes in length and include a PowerPoint. Please send an abstract of 250–300 words, with name, title, institution, and short bio (100 words max) to grinling.gibbons@vam.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 10th January 2022. Notification for acceptance will be sent by 7th February 2022.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Scourge of the Serpents (detail), 1732–35, oil on canvas
(Venice: Gallerie dell’Accademia)

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From ArtHist.net and the Accademia:

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries at the Gallerie dell’Accademia: New Studies
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, 22–23 February 2022

Organized by Giulio Manieri Elia and Michele Nicolaci

Proposals due by 10 December 2021

The inauguration of the new Seicento and Settecento rooms at the Gallerie dell’Accademia represents a fundamental part of the re-installation of the museum’s collections that has finally been completed with the ground floor organized around 13 rooms, with a chronological arc from the seventeenth to the ninenteenth centuries. Among the 62 works now visible to the public—including absolute highlights of the period’s artistic production—many are included in the museum itinerary for the first time, and many have returned to view after significant restoration campaigns. The long gestation of this moment has enabled scrupulous examination of the works, stimulating new research and unexpected discoveries, and a rich dialogue between the museum and both the Italian and international scholarly communities.

The reopening of these spaces, which singularly represent the art of painting over these two centuries, should be considered a cue for new departures, a field of investigation for new research. Plenty of the works remain little known, and many diverse and fascinating themes merit further research: from authorship to dating, from patronage to provenance, from iconographic questions to those linked to the materials and techniques of painting and restoration history. To further this endeavour, the Gallerie will organize a workshop intended as an opportunity to share inquiries and to enrich our knowledge about the museum’s patrimony with the aim of attracting the most innovative and cutting-edge studies on the Seicento and Settecento works in the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The conference will foreground not only artworks hanging in the new rooms 5 and 6, but also the rest of the display, as well as the many works in the museum’s stores and those visible in other institutions in Venice and the Veneto (external stores). It is further hoped that the meeting will constitute a preliminary contribution to complex effort of updating the catalogue raisonné of the collections.

The workshop will be held in the Gallerie dell’Accademia over two days, one dedicated to the Seicento and one to the Settecento, with individual talks lasting 30 minutes. A portion of the conference will address restoration conducted in the museum, providing the opportunity to share conservation discoveries, doubts, and decisions with the workshop participants. The conference will take place in person, with a limited number of places available respecting the rules in place with regards to the containment of the diffusion of Covid 19 (distancing, masks, and other measures required by relevant safety protocols). Plans are also in progress for the transmission of the talks via the YouTube channel of the museum.

Candidates who wish to present should send an abstract of no more than two pages and a brief CV, in Italian or English. Research concentrating on one or more works in the museum will be privileged along with talks that significantly and concretely advance the current state of knowledge, or which offer a novel approach to understanding the works, their original context, creation, or material history. Participants may expect the costs of travel and stay in Venice to be partially or totally covered. Publication of the conference proceedings is foreseen. Proposals should be sent to michele.nicolaci@beniculturali.it by the 10th of December 2021.

Baltimore’s Inner Harbor
(Photo by Patrick Gillespie, September 2016; Wikimedia Commons)

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Please note that the deadline has been extended to 8 October; you still have time!

2022 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor, 31 March — 2 April 2022

Proposals due by 8 October 2021 (extended from the original date of 17 September)

Proposals for papers to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, in Baltimore, are now being accepted. Proposals should be sent directly to the session chairs no later than 17 September 2021. Along with our annual business meeting, HECAA will be represented with the Anne Schroder New Scholars Session, chaired by Dipti Khera and Aaron Wile (see #173). A selection of additional sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members is included here. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here.

Sequitur 8.1 (Fall 2021): Aftershock
Submissions and Proposals due by 18 October 2021

The editors of Sequitur, a graduate student journal published by the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University, invite current and recent graduate students to submit content on the theme of Aftershock for our Fall 2021 issue.

For some, this past year and a half was marked by painful experiences. For others, lockdown and physical distancing created opportunities to reevaluate the importance of the social bonds that compose our lives. Since the start of the pandemic, we have experienced history in the making. As we adjust to a ‘new normal’, urgent questions remain about the aftershock of the recent past on our personal and collective experiences. Is the pandemic over; is it yet a thing of the past? How will we and generations to come remember the lost lives, jobs, rituals, and routines?

At this pivotal moment in the fight against the surging Delta variant, and coming on the heels of the tumultuous exit from Afghanistan and the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, we hope to bring together emerging scholarship that considers how art, architecture, and material culture respond to and address the immediate and/or long-term consequences of distressing and traumatic events.

Possible subjects may include, but are not limited to: the after-effects of natural and man-made disasters; social upheavals, economic crises, military conflicts, and unforeseeable events; calamities, and cataclysms; experiences of disorder, trauma, and post-trauma; the fall of civilizations, ruins, decay, and decomposition; structural shifts; monuments, memorials, and forms of commemoration and reparation; pandemics; humanitarian aid and relief efforts; survival and resilience; repairs, recovery, and reconstruction; enduring legacies; rebirth and rejuvenation; reencounters, reconciliations, recomposition of social bonds, and community building; and visions of the future.

We welcome submissions from graduate students in the disciplines of art history, architecture, archaeology, material culture, visual culture, literary studies, queer and gender studies, disability studies, memory studies, and environmental studies, among others, to apply. We encourage submissions that take advantage of the digital format of the journal. Previous issues of Sequitur can be found here.

Founded in 2014, Sequitur is an online biannual scholarly journal dedicated to addressing events, issues, and personalities in art and architectural history. Sequitur engages with and expands current conversations in the field by promoting the perspectives of graduate students from around the world. It seeks to contribute to existing scholarship by focusing on valuable but often overlooked parts of art and architectural history.

We invite full submissions in the following categories:

• Featured essays (1,500 words)
Essays must be submitted in full by the deadline below to be considered for publication. Content should present original material that falls within the stipulated word limit. Please adhere to the formatting guidelines available here.

• Visual and creative essays
We invite M.Arch. or M.F.A. students to showcase a selection of original work. The work must be reproducible in a digital format. Submissions should include .jpegs of up to ten works and must be prefaced by an introduction or artist’s statement of 250 words or less. All images must be captioned and should be at least 500 DPI. We are open to expanding this field to involve various kinds of creative projects.

We invite proposals (200 words max) for the following pieces:
• Exhibition reviews (500 words)
• Exhibitions currently on display or very recently closed are especially sought.
• Book or exhibition catalogue reviews (500 words)
• Reviews of recently published books and catalogues are especially sought.
• Interviews (750 words)
Preference may be given to those who can provide audio or video recordings of the interview. The author must include a full transcript.
• Research spotlights (750 words)
Short summaries of ongoing research written in a more casual format than a formal paper.

When submitting, please remember:
• All submissions and proposals are due by 18 October 2021.
• Direct all materials to sequitur@bu.edu.
• Text must be in the form of a Word document, and images should be sent as .jpeg files. While we welcome as many images as possible, at least one must be very high resolution and large format.
• Please adhere to the formatting guidelines available here.
• Include a recent CV and a brief 50-word bio.
• Include ‘SEQUITUR Fall 2021’ and type of submission/proposal in the subject line, and your name, institution and program, year in program, and contact information in the body of the email.

Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their submission or proposal no later than 22 October 2021, for publication in January 2022. Please note that authors are responsible for obtaining all image copyright releases before publication. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Sequitur editors at sequitur@bu.edu.

Sessions of potential interest for folks working on the eighteenth century (see especially the panel chaired by Emma Barker and Carla Benzan); full offersings are available here:

Association for Art Historians Annual Conference
Goldsmiths, University of London, 6–8 April 2022

Proposals due by 1 November 2021

The Association for Art History’s 2022 Annual Conference will take place in London at the world renowned art college, Goldsmiths. Over the three days of the conference, there will be up to 36 live parallel sessions with 4, 6, or 8 papers delivered in each session. All sessions are open to 25-minute paper proposals. Please email your proposal directly to the convenor, including in your proposal a clear paper title, a short abstract (max 250 words), your name, and email. The deadline for paper proposals is 1 November 2021.

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The Artist’s Friend
Jamin An (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville) and Anne Rana (Independent Art Historian), theartistsfriend2022@gmail.com

Being identified as a great friend of artists, or ‘artist’s friend’, often elevates ancillary art historical figures, past and present. For some collectors, critics, curators, dealers—consider broadly drawn examples like Giorgio Vasari, Alain Locke, Gertrude Stein, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Okwui Enwezor or Geeta Kapur—friendship has represented a deep connection with a particular artist or signaled bonds of loyalty and support with many. Notwithstanding its assumed virtue and frequent invocation, the idea of the ‘artist’s friend’ has escaped meaningful definition.

This panel seeks to undertake a critical analysis of the ‘artist’s friend’, examining case studies that leverage friendship as a conceptual model of relation between artists and non-artists. Our inquiry aims to engage the broad theoretical terrain of friendship: its nature and value, the reciprocal self-knowledge and self-formation it cultivates, and the moral quandaries it raises. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions across geography and chronology, and encourage papers that help us consider such questions as:
• What are defining features of friendship with the artist? How is ‘friend’ distinct from positions such as muse, lover, donor, or patron?
• A friend is said to be ‘another self.’ How might we understand artistic identity or the status of the artist from the standpoint of figures who are considered the ‘artist’s friend’?
• When partiality is an essential feature of friendship, how does friendship enrich or complicate scholarship, curating, or criticism, conventionally predicated on distance and impartiality?
• How do friendship’s ethical and moral commitments intersect with the cultural field’s conditions of production, circulation, and legitimation?

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Critical Perspectives on Disability in Art and Visual Culture
Lynn M. Somers (Independent Scholar), lmsomers@mac.com, @lynn_somers

Critical disability studies over the last thirty years have examined systems of power that shape codes of representation within images, objects, collections, and by extension, prevailing historiographies that define the limits of acceptability among human bodies, or what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of ability. Advancing a theory of complex embodiment, he writes that disability, as a critical social concept, “enlarges our vision of human variation and difference, and puts forward perspectives that test presuppositions dear to the history of aesthetics” (2010: 3). The materiality of art is invested in affective embodiment, and from the classical period onward, historical narratives are rife with bodies deemed beautiful, perfect, and proportionate to their built environments. Although in the 19th and 20th centuries bodily discourses began shifting toward fragmentation, prostheses, and pain, those representations were labeled degenerate by oppressive political institutions. Interdisciplinary and intersectional disability studies—for example, “crip time” (McRuer, 2018) and “misfitting” (Garland-Thomson, 2011)—posit disability as a cultural minority identity (in opposition to medical models centered on individual pathology). These analytics expand the ways artists and scholars approach embodiment as an elastic human continuum. Two volumes on art history and disability (Routledge, 2016, 2021) offer important global correctives to ideologies of agency that have devalued disparate, contingent, and nonconforming embodied subjectivities. This session welcomes transdisciplinary studies of art in all media that (re)figure disability and theoretical approaches that look to enact radical change, reparation, or reforms to sociopolitical and aesthetic constructions of disability at both historical and contemporary moments.

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Towards an Affective History of Art: Vision, Sensation, Emotion
Emma Barker (Open University), emma.barker@open.ac.uk; and Carla Benzan (Open University), carla.benzan@open.ac.uk

Art-historical considerations of instinctive, non-rational forms of human experience tend in two directions. On the one hand, there are contributions that examine the representation of emotion in works of art, as exemplified by the essay collection, Representing Emotions (ed. Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, 2005). Following a broadly historicist agenda, such contributions are predicated on the assumption that emotions can only be accessed in mediated form, through representational codes. On the other hand, since the publication of David Freedberg’s The Power of Images (1989), scholars have become increasingly concerned with the intense, even visceral, experiences that works of art can elicit from the beholder. Closely associated with the so-called ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, this type of approach asserts the primacy of the material and experiential over cultural frameworks. Attempts to bridge the gap between representation and experience by scholars working in the sub-discipline known as the history of the emotions have as yet made only limited use of visual sources (see, for example, the special issue of Cultural History, 7:2, 2018).

This session seeks to build on these various developments in order to realise the as yet unfulfilled promise of an affective history of art. It aims to bridge the gap identified above by investigating the interaction between works of art and beholders with reference not only to visual strategies and sensory experiences but also to discursive articulations and cultural formations. We especially welcome contributions that analyse such interactions with close reference to historically-specific vocabularies of affective experience in the broad period from around 1400 to 1900, such as the humours, passions, sentiments or emotions. Contributions may seek to examine claims for the compelling power of canonical works or, alternatively, to account for the emotional impact of works that no longer move the beholder as they once did. The central aim is to illuminate the changing role that art and visual culture have played in the understanding of affective experience over time.

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Global Anatomies
Keren Hammerschlag (Australian National University), keren.hammerschlag@anu.edu.au; and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez (University of Essex), natashar@essex.ac.uk

Spanning from Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica in the sixteenth century through to Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body in the nineteenth, European anatomical illustration has a venerated history that has been documented, studied and made the subject of major exhibitions. A few names dominate the historical record—Leonardo da Vinci, William Hunter, George Stubbs, Frank Netter—all men, all white. In the case of some of the most lavishly illustrated anatomical atlases, only the names of the doctors who directed the production are remembered; the men and women who produced the images are relegated to the footnotes, while the names of those pictured are entirely lost to history. The aim of this panel is to re-evaluate and decentre Western anatomical image-making traditions by bringing them into dialogue with different national, cultural and religious understandings of the inside of the human body. These may include Asian, Latin American and Islamic medical and scientific image-making traditions, among others. By developing accounts of human anatomy and its depiction that are global in outlook and scope, we hope to be able to address the following questions: what does anatomical imagery, broadly conceived, reveal about the people who produced it and about how they thought of particular bodies and body types? Is anatomy universal, local or individual? Is the anatomical body stable or shifting? Areas of inquiry may include but are not limited to anatomy and typology; mobility; geography; power; ideology; colonialism; slavery; race; gender; and (the body’s) borders.

From ArtHist.net:

Milan in a European Context: Tradition, Persistence, and Innovation in Artistic Craftsmanship and in Building and Architectural Production between the Napoleonic Era and the Restoration
Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio, 24–25 February 2022

Proposals due by 31 October 2021

International study seminar organised by Romain Iliou (AHTTEP, ENSA Paris-La Villette), Serena Quagliaroli (Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Archivio del Moderno) and Stefania Ventra (Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Archivio del Moderno). Promoted by the Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Archivio del Moderno and HICSA, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

With Milan proclaimed first the capital of the Cisalpine Republic in 1797 (from 1802, Italian Republic) and then in 1805 the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, the city was challenged to reconsider and rebuild its image and its urban spaces in order to adapt them to its new role. Part of a network of capitals responding to a single central power, both political and cultural, Milan experienced a period that featured significant incentives for public and private architectural building works and for the transformation of urban spaces. These conditions make the Lombard capital a privileged context in which to investigate the multiple forms of organization of artisanal and artistic work, as well as the circulation of people and materials. The seminar aims to reflect on the dialectic between the new status quo and the centuries-old stratified traditions inherent to the Milanese territory, also taking into consideration the Restoration period, when, in the new political-administrative structure of the Lombard-Veneto Kingdom, Milan, while remaining the capital, found itself in a new context that established a variety of artistic geographies.

The workshop aims to provide a meeting point for ongoing research that analyses the organization and definition of professions, materials, tools and the techniques of artistic craftsmanship, and of building and architectural production and design. It will reflect both on the transformations and the phenomena of continuity and persistence that characterize the city of Milan between the Napoleonic era and the Restoration, in an artistic, architectural, social, and economic context, with regard to the political administrative management of urban spaces and links with the surrounding territory.

Events in Milan can be better understood if placed in dialectical comparison with what occurred in other cities in both Italy and Europe: contributions will be welcomed, therefore, which, in a comparative perspective, present case studies aimed at exploring other urban realities. Particular attention might be paid to the relationship between Milan and the Canton of Ticino and to the changes that this centuries-old bond underwent over the period of time under consideration.

Proposals for contributions must concern one or more of the following topics, with particular attention to the connections with events relating to government policies, to administration and to the organization of the artistic and cultural system:

Artistic craftsmanship, building and architectural production, and society: Actors and materials
• What are the particularities of the considered period in the context of the commissioning, design and organization of the building works that redefined the space of the city?
• What was the impact on the shape of the city of an artisanal presence, with its workshops, warehouses, transport networks, and economic activities?
• Alongside architects and engineers, which other professional figures emerge from archival documents and sources? What was their status, their education and training, what were their forms of aggregation and organization? What was the impact of the presence of workers from Ticino?
• What materials were used, what were their trade routes and the supply chains for their production processes? What were the mechanisms of exchange and circulation?

Tradition, continuity, and innovation
• New materials, new techniques, and new construction ambitions, linked to market and bureaucratic requirements, joined the established crafts, practices and knowledge. This created a new form of professionalism which needed not only know-how but also the ability to organize, to establish relationships and to mediate between different skills and different social contexts.
• How did education and training change and how did these subordinate practices establish a relationship with academic artistic and architectural teaching, its programs based on consolidated tradition? What skills and techniques were available as part of artisanal training? How, from a historiographical point of view, can we trace the changes and innovations in production techniques, which are often not codified? And how did the survival of traditional practices and figures fit in with the new context? How and to what extent did political authority intervene in the regulation and systemisation of professions and the transmission of knowledge? Was innovation actively encouraged or, on the contrary, were disincentives employed?

Territory, materials, and techniques
• In addition to insights into the processes of the acquisition of technical knowledge, at the centre of the investigation lie tools and materials: were there tools designed to standardize and serialize work? Can divisions be found in the broad sphere of materials between those intended for the public and those intended for the private sector, or can their interactions be investigated? What is the contribution made to artisanal and building production by surrogate materials and materials designed for ephemeral projects?
• Other issues contributors are invited to explore include the importation, exportation, and adaptation of models, techniques and solutions, as well as the relationship between the city and the territory: what impact did the availability or lack of materials and infrastructures have on what was built?

It is planned that the workshop will be held in a blended format with a mix of online and on-site presentations on 24–25 February 2022 at Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio (CH). Depending on the evolution of the international health situation, the organisers will endeavour to guarantee the best solution in compliance with national recommendations. Proposals (in Italian, French, or English) should be sent to workshop.artigianato2022@gmail.com in the form of abstracts (300–500 words) and be accompanied by a short biographical presentation (150–200 words) by 31 October 2021. The selection will be communicated by 30 November 2021.

This Call for Papers addresses both a workshop and publication:

The Art of Copying in Early Modern Europe
The Medici Archive Project, Florence, 21 January 2022

Organized by Maddalena Bellavitis and Alessio Assonitis

Proposals due by 1 October 2021

In recent years, attention has been directed towards copies, with a particular emphasis on their meaning, function, provenance, production, patronage, collecting, and dating. The aesthetic and conceptual tenets underlying this corpus of scholarly research focused primarily on works of art. However, this impulse to recreate images has also been transferred to other artistic and intellectual media. As such, the copy carries within itself a great number of intrinsic nuances, depending on the cultural context and the historical moment.

The organizers of this workshop—Maddalena Bellavitis and Alessio Assonitis—invite papers that address issues that can shed new light and provide new interdisciplinary research trajectories on the mechanisms that regulate the practice and reception of copies. For this reason, we encourage submission for presentation proposals from disciplines other than painting, such as book history, media history, history of science, history of medicine, history of food, and history of diplomacy.

The workshop will take place at The Medici Archive Project, Via dei Benci 10, Florence on 21 January 2022. To be considered for participation, please provide a single document in Microsoft Word, consisting of a one-page proposal for a 20-minute presentation of unpublished work, followed by a short curriculum vitae. Presentations can be in Italian or English. Applications may be sent to education@medici.org by 1 October 2021 (participants will be notified by the end of October).

Furthermore, and separate to that workshop, we are planning a volume with original articles on the topic. We invite papers that address issues that can shed new light and provide new interdisciplinary research trajectories on the mechanisms that regulate the practice and reception of copies. For this reason, we encourage submission for paper proposals from disciplines other than painting, such as book history, media history, history of science, history of medicine, history of food, and history of diplomacy. To be considered for participation, please provide a single document in Microsoft Word or pdf, consisting of a one-page proposal of unpublished work, followed by a short curriculum vitae. Applications (as well as questions) may be sent to maddalena.bellavitis@gmail.com by 1 October 2021 (selected papers will be notified by the second week of October).

Listed below is a selection of panels relevant (or potentially relevant) to the eighteenth century. Please pay particular attention to two items: the HECAA-affiliate session on “Eighteenth-Century Women Artists in Context,” chaired by Melissa Hyde and Paris Amanda Spies-Gans; and the ASECS-affiliate session on “Eighteenth-Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias,” chaired by myself and Jennifer Germann. The full listing is available here (bear in mind that since some sessions have already been formed, this Call for Papers provides only a partial guide for what to expect in February and March). –Craig Hanson

110th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
In-Person, Hilton Chicago, 16–19 February 2022
Online, via Zoom, 3–5 March 202

Proposal due by 16 September 2021

CAA will deliver the 110th Annual Conference with in-person and virtual, live sessions in two components. In-person sessions will be held at the Hilton Chicago, February 16–19, and virtual, live sessions will be held on Zoom, March 3–5. All sessions will be 90 minutes long, organized at the discretion of each session chair. To submit a proposal, send a completed proposal form and a two-page CV to the chair(s) by 16 September 2021.

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Abolitionist Aesthetics (Virtual)
Chair: Eva McGraw, mcgraw.eva@gmail.com

The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a burgeoning abolitionist visual culture as anti-slavery activists on both sides of the Atlantic seized upon images as a powerful weapon in their crusade against human bondage. With Britain’s withdrawal from the international slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, abolitionist images increasingly focused on domestic American slavery. Utilizing various media, black and white activists employed images as potent tools for moral suasion, illustrating the essential humanity of enslaved people and exposing the cruelty of the peculiar institution. While the most iconic abolitionist images—including that of the slave ship Brookes and the illustrations for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—have been frequently considered, scholars have yet to examine the full range of abolitionist imagery. This panel seeks new approaches to the study of anti-slavery imagery across national contexts from the eighteenth century to the present day. Submissions may address but are not limited to the following questions: What visual strategies did abolitionists use to further their cause, and how did the particularities of media impact their productions? How did abolitionist image-makers combat censorship? What sorts of patronage networks existed for the creation and dissemination of abolitionist art? How did the contributions of black abolitionists impact anti-slavery imagery? Finally, does the history of abolitionist aesthetics inform present-day efforts to memorialize abolitionists and/or resonate with renewed efforts to achieve racial justice in America, including Black Lives Matter and the Prison-abolition Movement?

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Appraising Your Research as Data: Managing, Visualizing, and Preserving Your Scholarship
Art Libraries Society of North America (In-Person)
Chair: Jill E. Luedke (Temple University), jluedke@temple.edu

The scholarship used and produced by art historians and visual artists is no longer limited to journal articles, research notes, and works of art. Today, new approaches to art historical research and visual arts practice utilize media-rich and technology-robust sources of data such as GIS coordinates, 3D scans and prints, video games, Twitter feeds, Instagram images, and virtual and augmented reality tools. Research data management, data visualization, and data preservation play increasingly important roles in the evolving landscape of scholarly endeavors; and, academic libraries are expanding their services, creating new spaces, and developing frameworks to support new fields of inquiry by art history practitioners. Moreover, academic administrations are establishing institutional repository standards for all disciplines, and grant-funding agencies are requiring data management plans. Innovative faculty and students partner with librarians and library specialists for guidance on the discovery, use, and maintenance of diverse data formats. This panel will address useful research management practices, skills and methods to visually represent research, and processes and tools to archive and preserve data in all phases of the research lifecycle.

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Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish ‘Golden Ages’
Historians of Netherlandish Art (In-Person)
Chairs: Carrie J. Anderson (Middlebury College), carriea@middlebury.edu; and Marsely L. Kehoe, marselykehoe@gmail.com

The artistic flourishing of the so-called Dutch and Spanish ‘Golden Ages’ was built upon the labor and suffering of people across global empires, which extended from Europe to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Not just vestiges of the past, these issues are indeed quite urgent, as they underpin contemporary dialogues around race, violence, and representation. As scholars of the early modern period, we have an opportunity and an obligation to center long-suppressed voices, redress historical imbalances, and challenge racist narratives that persist to this day. But how can we present a more balanced version of the past when we are dependent upon archives, texts, objects, and images that are both byproducts of and mechanisms for systemic oppression?

This panel seeks methodologically innovative projects that challenge or disrupt the narratives that attach to early modern Dutch, Hispano-Flemish, and Spanish archives, texts, objects, and images. Proposals may include, but are not limited to, the following: studies that prioritize voices and identities that are absent—or purposefully excluded—from the textual, archival, or pictorial record; research that recontextualizes and/or localizes the commodities of global trade; data-driven projects that challenge the semantic structures of the early modern archive; studies that decenter imperial narratives or examine productive failures in research, scholarship, and teaching.

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Constructing Art History in and through Eighteenth-Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (In-Person)
Chairs: Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College), jgermann@ithaca.edu; and Craig Hanson (Calvin University), chanson@calvin.edu

Notwithstanding an impressive body of scholarship addressing eighteenth-century encyclopedias generally—particularly Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert—art history as a discipline has yet to produce anything like a comprehensive account of how various artistic discourses of the period were shaped by such reference works—either by ambitious universal dictionaries or by more focused, specialized volumes. In fact, however, the long eighteenth century saw the publication and often significant distribution of a wide range of art and architectural dictionaries, books like Filippo Baldinucci’s Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681), Neve’s The City and Country Purchaser’s and Builder’s Dictionary (1703), John Barrow’s Dictionarium Polygraphicum (1735), François Marie de Marsy’s Dictionnaire abrégé de peinture et d’architecture (1746), Joachim Christoph Gottsched’s Handlexicon, oder, kurzgefasstes Wörterbuch der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (1760), and Diego Antonio Rejon de Silva’s Diccionario de las nobles artes para instrucción de los aficionados, y uso de los profesores (1788).

This panel invites papers that explore how dictionaries and encyclopedias (broadly defined) mediated and shaped the emerging field of art history for both artistically sophisticated readers and a wider general audience. How were these texts used in the past (and by whom) and how might art historians engage them productively today? And what to make of how these texts have worked to legitimate some objects of art historical inquiry, even as the omissions have also profoundly shaped the field?

For all our twenty-first-century hopes of advancing a comprehensive, global scope, how effectively might any reference work, dependent upon existing scholarship, break from the biases and narratives that have dominated art history as an academic discipline? Should such works continue to be produced and, crucially, in what form? Narrowly focused papers are welcome so long as they also position their subjects within a larger framework. Contributions that reconsider well-known eighteenth-century publications (including universal dictionaries) as well as essays addressing underexplored reference books are encouraged.

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Britain in (and out of) Europe: Unity, Separation, and the Arts of Leave-Taking
Historians of British Art (Virtual)
Chairs: Marcia Pointon, m.r.pointon@manchester.ac.uk; and Keren Hammerschlag, Keren.Hammerschlag@anu.edu.au

The 2016 referendum and eventual withdrawal of Britain from the European Union in 2020 has brought about a protracted and painful repositioning of Britain in relation to the rest of Europe. As existing partnerships are dissolved and new partnerships sought, Brexit has also revived interest in the British Commonwealth, Britain’s alliance with America, and its role as a global middle-power. This panel will consider artistic and cultural responses to Brexit and the political, economic and social rupture it represents. It also seeks more generally to re-examine historical and contemporary artistic and material reflections on the relationship of Britain to Europe. For many, Brexit was experienced as an enforced separation—a one-sided divorce. From maritime subjects and migration imagery to genre paintings and deathbed scenes, Britain has long-standing pictorial traditions representing leave-taking of a variety of sorts. The arts of leave-taking, divorce and separation speak to the movement of people, goods and capital, and reflect on the passage of time and nature of death. This panel will consider all media from any period that grapples with these themes in British art, visual and material culture. (British art here includes art produced in and about the former British Empire.) Examinations of the visual cultures of mourning, migration, deportation and resistance to enforced separations, especially in the context of Brexit and other recent political crises, are encouraged. We welcome proposals that are broad and creative in their interpretation of the theme.

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Centering the Caribbean: The Long Eighteenth Century, Hemispheric Perspectives, and ‘American Art’ (In-Person)
Chairs: Marie-Stephanie M. Delamaire (Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library), sdelam@winterthur.org; and Katelyn D. Crawford (Birmingham Museum of Art), kcrawford@artsbma.org

How different does early American art look when viewed from the Caribbean? Histories of colonial and vice-royal American art, tend to privilege art produced in continental spaces as they came to be organized as nation states, overlooking the interrelatedness of early Caribbean and continental colonies. This interconnectedness had a profound impact on artistic creation in the early Americas. Artists like José Campeche, Peter Bentzon, John Greenwood, Josef Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza, and Agostino Brunias, worked outside and across borders; between social classes and races; and beyond sovereignties which historical narratives have organized for the eighteenth century.

This panel centers the Caribbean region—hub of colonial, revolutionary, and hemispheric activity—a pivot for eighteenth-century visual culture that offers avenues to address art making beyond national paradigms and the continental weight of North American and Latin American art histories. At a time when a synthetic view of ‘American’ art history seems no longer feasible nor desirable, the Caribbean region opens onto the importance of art making between American spaces. We seek papers that focus on works of art, artists, networks of exchange, patronage, collecting or destruction that emerged from or were driven by the Caribbean region. We welcome papers that address specific artists and works of art even if the visual record is missing or destroyed (such as José Antonio Aponte’s “libro de pinturas”), mis-catalogued (for instance the portrait formerly identified as Hercules Posey, the cook who George Washington enslaved), or displaced (such as John Smibert’s Bermuda Group).

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Dismantling the Patriarchal Canon: Foregrounding Women Artists and Patrons through Digital Art History
Digital Art History Society (Virtual)
Chairs: Tracy Chapman Hamilton, tracychamilton21@gmail.com; Dana Hogan (Duke University), dana.hogan@duke.edu; and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (California State University, Long Beach), mariah.proctor@csulb.edu

As premodern feminist art historians we have found that the digital allows, inspires, and even requires us to reassess women’s contributions to history and, in so doing, challenge and disrupt the male-centered canon. Through examples like Gealt and Falcone’s A Space of Their Own, Barker and The Medici Archive Project’s Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists, and the Clara database, launched in 2008 by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, we have witnessed the impact digital tools—made even richer because of their collaborative nature—have had in the last decades on our ability to conduct research on women’s roles in advancing visual arts and culture globally. Digital Art History methods, such as data analysis, virtual and augmented reality, digital mapping and networking, and dynamic archive databases, have allowed us to dig deeply into the record; raise ethical questions of privilege, bias, accessibility, and audience; reckon with the limitations of representation to reveal the often unseen in our histories; and find new inspiring ways to visually interact with and contextualize people, place, and material. We aim to expand even further upon the work that has been done by soliciting papers on digital projects—or those holding theoretical or historical perspectives—that offer new methodological applications in the study of women as integral to the full breadth of our chronological and geographical past and present. Each project should refute the concept of a single patriarchal canon and illustrate how the digital makes this essential reassessment possible and unavoidable.

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Eighteenth-Century Women Artists in Context: Not Apart, but a Part
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (In-Person)
Chairs: Melissa L. Hyde (University of Florida), mhyde@arts.ufl.edu; and Paris Amanda Spies-Gans (Harvard University Society of Fellows), pspiesgans@fas.harvard.edu

The history of women artists does not stand outside or even on the periphery of art history, but is integral to a full understanding of the history of art. That conviction is the starting point for this ASECS/CAA session. We invite papers that make a substantive case for women’s presence in aesthetic culture during the long eighteenth century, that consider the training and practices of women artists in dynamic interaction with the men who were their colleagues, collaborators, teachers, students, patrons and collectors, and sometimes also their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Thus, special consideration will be given to papers that trace the complex circumstances that conditioned women’s making of art, their careers and their lives. Papers might take up questions of how women artists appropriated, changed, or even subverted the dominant trends in art making, and how and why they affiliated themselves with certain traditions and not with others. Other topics to be addressed might include: in addition to women who worked as painters, those who practiced printmaking, or natural history illustration; interrogations of the categories of professional and non-professional (or ‘amateur’); ways in which women used the visual arts to claim agency and be recognized as individuals at a time when they had few sociopolitical rights; and women who traveled. In sum, we seek papers that advance knowledge about the significant role that women artists played in the overall production of visual culture during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

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Imagined Geographies: (Trans)regional Visual Practices in South and Southeast Asia (Virtual)
Chairs: Katherine Bruhn, katiebruhn@gmail.com; and Shivani Sud (UC Berkeley), shivanisud05@gmail.com

How do artists in Indonesia claim the formation of a Nusantara Islamic identity through the transferral of linguistic and cultural constructs such as alam (universe), an Arabic term that can also be found in Mughal manuscripts? Or, how do regional court painters in India construct an imagined vision of firangistan (the west) in local visual practices? With a desire to rethink the ways in which geographies are constructed, studied, and defined in the context of South and Southeast Asia, we invite proposals that explore artistic practices which disrupt prescriptive geopolitical boundaries like the nation-state and region. From colonial histories to post-War regional categorizations, the regions of South and Southeast Asia have been defined and reinvented in accordance with geopolitical interests and cultural usages. In contrast, recent scholarship has demonstrated that vernacular social and cultural practices contributed to the formation of imagined geographies, shared communities, and coeval artistic practices beyond the political borders and territorial boundaries of these regions (Tajudeen, 2017). From the eighteenth century to the present, we aim to foreground the power and agency of artists and art in constructing new visions of the world in and across these regions. Our objective is to move beyond current geopolitically bounded framings of South and Southeast Asian art history to instead examine the ways in which the transregional circulation of people, ideas, and objects shaped notions of identity and belonging. In doing so, we hope to offer fresh possibilities for the study of non-Western art practices in and beyond these regions.

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New Age of Teaching the Art of the Islamic World
Museum Committee (In-Person)
Chair: Xenia Gazi (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), agazio@saic.edu

Scholars and museum educators interpreting and teaching the art of the Islamic world (MENASA’s art*) have an indisputably challenging role: they need to re-interpret the history of the region from textbooks steeped in colonial discourses while sheltering the art they study from negative portrayals by many Western media. The purpose of this panel is to ask museum educators to explain strategies and tactics they use to mitigate stereotypes about MENASA’s art and its context while also engaging the public. We especially welcome female educators and/or papers that explain how educators address stereotypes about the art of the Islamic world. We aim to spotlight innovative case studies that portray this groundbreaking work, revealing how art history and museum education can help bridge understanding and revitalize the discourse on MENASA’s art in museums and classrooms alike.

*Middle East-North Africa-South Asia

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Sacred Images in a Secular Age: Religious Art in 19th-Century Europe (In-Person)
Chairs: Aaron Wile (National Gallery of Art), aaron.m.wile@gmail.com; and Mary Morton (National Gallery of Art), m-morton@nga.gov

According to the standard accounts of nineteenth-century European art, modernity did away with the viability of sacred subjects. In an industrialized, urban society defined by science and progress, religion slid into obsolescence. In response, artists abandoned religious themes to focus on the social realities of modern life or the material possibilities and limitations of their medium.

In recent years, this narrative has come under strain. Religious art, art historians are recognizing, flourished in nearly every medium and movement in the nineteenth century—but not on the same terms it did during the Renaissance and Baroque. If religion did not necessarily decline in the nineteenth century, as the first theorists of secularization, such as Comte, Marx, and Durkheim, believed it would, its status changed. Scholars increasingly conceive of secularization as a reordering of the relationship between God and creation. In modernity, it became possible to understand nature, society, and the self without reference to a transcendent reality. Faith persisted, but in its own sphere.

This panel explores how artists navigated the shifting terrain of the sacred in modernity. To what extent was it possible to access the divine in a disenchanted age? How should sacred subjects be represented in a society that defined itself without religious referents? How did artists seek to reconcile religion with science, individualism, nationalism, urbanization, imperialism, and advanced capitalism? And how did religious painting and sculpture respond to the unprecedented proliferation of mass-media and other developments in visual culture in the period?

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The Interstices of Print
Association of Print Scholars (In-Person)
Chairs: Sarah Bane (University of California, Santa Barbara), sbane@umail.ucsb.edu; and Michelle Donnelly (Yale University), michelle.donnelly@yale.edu

This session will interrogate the interstices of printmaking across geographies and time periods. David Landau and Peter Parshall’s foundational text, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550, suggests that “printmaking developed early on as a trade capable of eluding conventional practices and consequently attracting artisans with the initiative to work in the shadowy interstices that lay between the guilds and local governments” (12: 1994). From this early history of the medium to the present, printmaking has had an ability to produce and thrive within interstitial spaces both for working artists and in the art historical canon. Interstices are also essential to printmaking’s technical processes. For example, in aquatint, the interstices between resin grains that the acid etches into create the print’s design. Yet, scholars and collectors have tended to overlook interstitial objects that fall between the categorical boundaries of intaglio, relief, planographic, and stencil printing.

This session invites papers that examine printmaking and its interstices across a wide range of visual and material cultural practices. Examples of welcome topics include but are not limited to the following: gaps in canonical art historical narratives; liminal spaces of making, such as Mabel Dwight’s movement between her home and studio while creating lithographs; physical intervals between printed marks, such as cross-hatching used to depict the Black body in Phillis Wheatley’s engraved frontispiece to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); and hybrid works that push against conventional print taxonomies such as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s seventeenth-century monotypes and Pati Hill’s xerographs from the 1970s–80s.