Enfilade

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.

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

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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 below. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here.

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1  Presidential Session | Venice, Real and Imagined
Irene Zanini-Cordi (Florida State University), izaninicordi@fsu.edu

Venice, hovering above its lagoon waters, was dismissed by Chateaubriand as a “city against nature” after his first visit, but defended by the Venetian salonnière Renier Michiel as “a city above nature.” This difference in perceptions, speaks to the fascinating protean quality of the city. Its beauty, traditions, architecture, culture and diversity have mesmerized and puzzled grand tourists, and have attracted artists, writers, singers, and actors from all over the world. This session welcomes papers focusing on any aspect of eighteenth-century Venice, both real and imagined.

2  Presidential Session | New Horizons in Enlightenment Studies (Roundtable) Meghan Roberts (Bowdoin College), mroberts@bowdoin.edu; and Daniel Watkins (Baylor University), daniel_watkins@baylor.edu

Twenty years after Keith Baker and Peter Hanns Reill published What’s Left of Enlightenment?, the Enlightenment is in the news. Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance became a bestseller in the wake of the 2015 attacks in Paris. David Hume’s racist statements in Essays, Moral and Political drew widespread notice and condemnation, resulting in Edinburgh University renaming David Hume Tower in 2020. In 2021, conservative talking heads claimed that Benjamin Franklin fought against “cancel culture.” The heritage of the Enlightenment is up for grabs. As Christy Pichichero has convincingly argued, it is necessary to complicate pristine notions of the Enlightenment and “make transparent the aspirations and the drastic omissions in Enlightenment ‘philosophie.’” We propose a roundtable that addresses the complicated and contested status of the Enlightenment in our current historical moment and contemplates new paths forward for Enlightenment teaching and scholarship. Among many possible questions, what is new for Enlightenment studies, and why does it matter? What does it mean to speak of Enlightenment in global and colonial contexts? Has studying race, gender, and Enlightenment changed in our moment of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter? We hope to represent a wide array of perspectives and particularly encourage graduate students and early career researchers to apply. Panelists working on any facet of the Enlightenment, broadly defined, are welcome.

3  Presidential Session | Undergraduate Research (Roundtable)
Rachael King (University of California, Santa Barbara), rking@english.ucsb.edu

This roundtable invites considerations of the role that undergraduates play in research into the eighteenth century. As major requirements and undergraduate interest are changing at many universities, many ASECS members are not teaching primarily, or at all, in the field of eighteenth-century studies. But at the same time, cross-rank research groups in fields such as the digital humanities, book history, and critical making are increasingly common, a trend that can attract undergraduates to the field. How is the move toward undergraduate research initiatives affecting our work? How can we encourage more undergraduate research? Presentations by or including undergraduate researchers are particularly welcomed.

4  Innovative Course Design
asecsoffice@gmail.com

ASECS invites proposals for a new course on eighteenth-century studies or a new unit (1–4 weeks of instruction) within a course. Proposals may address a specific theme, compare related works from different fields (music and history, art and theology), take an interdisciplinary approach to a social or historical event, or suggest new uses for instructional technology. The unit/course should either have never been taught or have been taught recently for the first time. Applicants should submit a 750–1500 word proposal that focuses sharply on the leading ideas distinguishing the unit/course. The proposal should indicate why particular texts and topics were selected and (if possible) how they worked; ideally, a syllabus will be provided. The competition is open to current members of ASECS. Up to three proposals will be selected for presentation during the Innovative Course Design session at the Annual Meeting; a $500 award will be presented to each of the participants, who also will be asked to submit an account of the unit/course, a syllabus, and supplementary materials for publication on the ASECS website.

5  Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon (Workshop) [Digital Humanities Caucus]
Collin Jennings (Miami University), jenninc@miamioh.edu

The ASECS Digital Humanities Caucus invites proposals for supporting a Wiki Edit-A-Thon focused on creating and expanding Wikipedia entries for marginalized figures and groups of the eighteenth century. Proposals may come from either scholars with experience editing Wikipedia entries or from scholars with plans for expanding particular entries. Speakers will prepare brief presentations (~5 minutes) on best practices or plans for editing Wikipedia entries, and the majority of the session will consist of attendees contributing to eighteenth-century entries. Although the Edit-A-Thon during the session will be relatively short, we will also set a goal for the number of entries to be created or expanded over the course of the entire conference.

6  Centering Marginalized Voices in Digital Humanities Projects (Roundtable) [Digital Humanities Caucus]
Mattie Burkert (University of Oregon), mburkert@uoregon.edu

How can scholars use digital tools, ranging from databases, to digitization, to visualization, to center marginalized voices of the eighteenth century? To what extent can new methods produce new perspectives on the figures and groups of the period? We seek proposals describing DH projects that have foregrounded marginalized voices of the eighteenth century. The projects can be at any stage of development, from planning to completion, but the speakers should be able to share concrete steps they took for centering underrepresented groups in their projects. These might include using digital research techniques for discovering under-researched figures, or they might entail using publication and exhibition platforms for representing projects designed around such figures.

7  Disability Performances [Disability Studies Caucus]
Annika Mann (Arizona State University) Annika.Mann@asu.edu; and Emily Stanback (University of Southern Mississipi), Emily.Stanback@usm.edu

This panel seeks to investigate disabilities, bodyminds, and performances in the long eighteenth century. How do we recover an archive of disability performance, broadly speaking? How might disability performance render new insights about the formation of disability as a socially constituted and contested identity? What insights can eighteenth-century archives offer about the performativity of the everyday when thinking through diverse bodyminds?

By “performance” we hope to signal not just theatre, the playhouse, and the repertoire, but also larger moments that feel “performative.” As Tracy C. Davis, Willmar Sauter, and Judith Butler theorize, performance time, performance events, and performative self-making raise concerns about layered temporalities, polychronicity, repetition, hiccups, ruptures, and revisions. Tobin Siebers calls attention to the multiple offstage performances like passing, masquerading, and other ways to navigate the social. How can eighteenth-century performances extend, complicate, or reshape our understanding of disability performance? We invite 250-word abstracts about these or related topics on disability performance in the long eighteenth century.

17  Transformation, Idealization, Animation: Contemporary Perspectives on the Pygmalion Myth [New Lights Forum]
Jennifer Vanderheyden (Marquette University), jennifer.vanderheyden@marquette.edu

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore holds Falconet’s renowned sculpture Pygmalion and Galatea. According to the museum’s website, “This statue is very likely the one exhibited by the artist at the Salon of 1763 (in Paris). Pygmalion is depicted in rapturous amazement at the feet of his love object, a nude sculpture, just at the moment when it is given life by Venus, the goddess of love.” This panel invites interdisciplinary proposals that consider the enduring influence of the Pygmalion myth from a contemporary perspective. In all disciplines one encounters love and its idealization, disappointment of imperfections, animation of the inanimate, transformations of the allegory, the aesthetics of mimesis… to name only a few. For example, in his Salon of 1763, Denis Diderot praises Falconet for his animation of Pygmalion, but continues with a critique and proposal of another version of the statue that would be even more lifelike. Diderot’s theories of this animation (including his proposal that one can consume marble by pulverizing it, mixing the powder with soil and compost, then sowing vegetables that will be consumed) continue to engage dialogue, as do other reworkings of the Pygmalion story.

19  Teaching the Eighteenth Century (Poster Session) [Pedagogy Caucus]
Linda Troost (Washington & Jefferson College), ltroost@washjeff.edu

How do we continue to engage students with the eighteenth century in innovative ways? All aspects of pedagogy are welcome for poster presentations that cover an entire course or focus on a particular element of a course. Brief presentations (5 minutes) will be followed by time for conversation. Participants in panels or roundtables are also welcome to participate in the poster session. Posters will remain on display throughout the conference and then be placed online.

20  Aiding the Anxious: How Non-Specialists Can Navigate Teaching about Race and Empire (Roundtable) [Race and Empire Caucus]
Kimberly Takahata (Villanova University), kimberly.takahata@villanova.edu

Building on the series of Presidential Sessions including Concepts in Race and Pedagogy for 18th-Century Studies (2021), Teaching Race in the 18th Century in the 21st-Century Classroom (2019), and Addressing Structural Racism in the 18th-Century Curriculum” (2018), this session invites facilitators for a discussion and workshop for non-specialists of critical race and anticolonial studies on integrating matters of race and empire into the 18th-century classroom. Pushing past strategies of syllabus “inclusivity,” this session asks: how can we center race and empire as critical paradigms across a variety of courses in eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history? What strategies can expand and deepen our engagement with race and empire in the classroom? In particular, this conversation will be interested in techniques that are helpful for early career, sessional, and adjunct instructors.

21  Eighteenth-Century Studies in Dialogue with the Work of Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe (Roundtable) [Race and Empire Caucus]
Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster University), zuroski@mcmaster.ca

At this moment of intensified calls across “traditional” academic fields for more sustained engagement with antiracist frameworks, decolonizing movements, and Black life and liberatory thought, how might eighteenth-century studies of race and empire better think with and learn from work in Black and African/African Diasporic studies? This roundtable invites participants to focus on the writing and scholarship of Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe—three thinkers whose work on ontologies, geographies, and narratives of Black life since the eighteenth century seems more crucial than ever to any scholarly approach to the long eighteenth century. Papers may focus on one, two, or all three writers, and should call attention to how a specific text, figure, concept, or method from these scholars’ work generates possibilities for future approaches to the study of race and empire.

48  Crafted Lives
Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), chloe.wigstonsmith@york.ac.uk; and Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent), J.E.Batchelor@kent.ac.uk

We invite proposals that address the teaching and making of needlework by women and girls in the transatlantic eighteenth century. In recent years, the “material turn” has generated new approaches to material culture and maker’s knowledge in eighteenth-century studies. Yet skills such as needlework and embroidery often remain underestimated, falling under the collection of “female accomplishments” perceived, then and now, as symptomatic of the undereducation and oppression of women and girls. “Crafted Lives” seeks to reorient attention to the transfer of knowledge, aesthetics and techniques that circulated back and forth across the Atlantic. We’re especially keen on proposals that make visible the politics of needlework and the complexities of women’s handicrafts and their experiences of learning, making and teaching needlework over the lifecycle. How did material literacy intersect with or diverge from textual literacy? How did needlework forms articulate their makers’ emotions and their cultural, religious and political beliefs? How did some of these material contributions engage debates about abolition, empire and women’s rights? How did eighteenth-century craft knowledge circulate within/between classes, households and institutions, the provinces and the metropole, and within colonial spaces? We welcome abstracts from across the disciplines represented by ASECS members, as well as abstracts that draw on a range of archives.

From the Call for Papers:

Journal18, Issue #14 (Fall 2022) — Silver
Issue edited by Agnieszka Anna Ficek and Tara Zanardi

Proposals due by 1 September 2021; finished articles will be due by 1 March 2022

Ornamental plaque (mariola or maya), one of a pair, 1725–50, Moxos or Chiquitos missions, Alto Peru (present-day Bolivia), silver, 42 × 31 × 3 cm (Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Gift of Landon T. Clay, 1992.346).

Silver has held an illustrious place within early modern decorative arts as well as histories of empire, slavery, and colonialism. From cutlery and serving dishes to liturgical goods and medals, silver graced the collections of rulers and churches. During the eighteenth century, silver’s mutability lent itself well to the rococo’s penchant for metamorphosis. Highly regarded for its pliability, sheen, and virtuosity, silver was also esteemed for its inherent value. Silver’s capacity for transformation—from raw material into objects of beauty or currency—made it a valuable medium for artists, a tool for global expansion, and income for rebuilding state treasuries. As a currency standard in the eighteenth century, silver did not share the same vacillations as paper money, but it was subject to the fluctuation of quantities available in quarries, such as Zacatecas or Potosí, since its mining production could directly impact the consumption of goods for which it was traded.

In addition, silver’s mineralogical value became a source of appreciation so that silver, in its raw form, was placed in natural history cabinets. Complementing developments in the natural sciences, including geology and mineralogy, as they became more specialized, silver invited close scrutiny by artists, natural historians, and collectors. Silver’s discovery in quarries sparked the development of silversmithing sites, terrestrial exploration, and mining activities, including novel processes for extraction and the growth of enslaved labor and human trafficking. This intermingling of silver’s multifaceted roles—silver as a source of artistry, revenue, curiosity, and subjugation—positions it directly within the complexities of the eighteenth-century global world.

We welcome proposals for contributions that examine silver from diverse perspectives—metallurgical, artistic, imperial, and financial—and within a wide range of geographical locales. By situating silver within the context of geopolitics, economics, diplomacy, newly specialized sciences, and art, we aim to offer a broad analysis of silver’s vital roles in scientific, economic, and artistic circles across the eighteenth-century world.

Issue Editors
• Agnieszka Anna Ficek, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Tara Zanardi, Hunter College, City University of New York

Proposals for issue #14 Silver are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: 1 September 2021.

To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography to editor@journal18.org and taramzanardi@gmail.com. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due by 1 March 2022. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

Plate 419, Silver-plating in L’Enclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers by Denis Diderot.

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From the Call for Papers:

Hidden Hands: Untold Stories of the Object
Rienzi Biennial Symposium
Online, Rienzi, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 6 November 2021

Proposals due by 1 September 2021

Rienzi, the house museum for European decorative arts of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents the virtual symposium, Hidden Hands: Untold Stories of the Object. Geographic exploration and colonial expansion led to the introduction of new materials and technological innovation in the early modern period. These developments created an increased demand for goods made of ceramics, glass, exotic woods, textiles, and metals. The refining of raw materials and the production of these goods depended upon a diverse labor force made up of men, women, and children from across the globe. Despite the integral roles played by these workers in all of these varied enterprises, their names and contributions have often been lost to history. Who were these people? How did they interact and engage with these new materials and goods? What social, political, and economic forces contributed to the exclusion of their narratives? The symposium invites scholars to reconsider established ideas of craftsmanship and artistic authorship through the telling of these ‘hidden’ stories.

All presentations will be given Saturday, 6 November 2021, virtually via Zoom webinar organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The symposium will be held in conjunction with the exhibition Hidden Hands: Invisible Workers in Industrial England, on view at Rienzi from 1 September 2021 to 3 January 2022.

Graduate students as well as entry-level and mid-career professionals are invited to submit a 400-word abstract outlining a 20-minute presentation, along with a CV, by 1 September 2021, to rienzisymposium@mfah.org. Selected participants will be notified by 15 September 2021 and offered a $250 honorarium. Possible themes for investigation may include, but are not limited to:
• Transatlantic trade
• Workshop traditions
• Empire and colonialism
• Technology
• Gender
• Race
• Economics
• Labor
• Class

Education programs at Rienzi receive generous funding from the Sterling-Turner Foundation, The Brown Foundation, the Carroll Sterling and Harris Masterson III Endowment, and the Caroline Wiess Law Endowment for Rienzi.

From ArtHist.net:

Wood: Between Natural Affordance and Cultural Values in Eurasia
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (and online), 31 March — 2 April 2022

Organised by Aleksandra Lipińska and Ilse Sturkenboom

Proposals due by 30 September 2021

In “The Theory of Affordances” of 1977, the American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term affordance to denote that which environment offers an animal [or a human for that matter] for good or ill. This concept resonated broadly within humanities and, more recently, especially within material culture studies. Wood can be understood as a natural affordance that is one of the most universally available materials in a vast area of the world. Wood comes with its natural and physical characteristics that determine its workability. The use of various kinds of wood is, however, not only determined by the availability and applicability of the material itself but also by cultural values and specific requirements within a society.

This conference aims at bringing together scholars from diverse fields within humanities and science to discuss similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities in the notions surrounding wood in various cultural contexts within Eurasia until the ‘material revolution’ that followed after 1900. We would like to address the question of the relationships or tensions between the naturally determined affordances of timber and their cultural coding.

Questions addressed may include, but need not be limited to:
• The relation between the substance and the produced object as a result of the tension between natural affordances and cultural practices
• Religious, philosophical, and historical notions of wood in various cultural contexts within Eurasia and their impact on the application of wood in artefacts
• Relationships of wood with other materials within material hierarchies, as a combination in objects/architecture, or as a carrier of designs that may also occur in other materials
• The mobility of wooden objects and their impact in diverse cultural contexts
• The use of wood as a tool or medium, e.g. imprint
• The specificity of working in wood and resulting identities of woodworkers and their works
• Scientific/ dendrochronological analyses of wood and their impact on the interpretation of cultural meaning of wooden objects

The conference is planned to take place as an in-person event, but online attendance will also be made available in a hybrid format. As far as attendants cannot be reimbursed by their home institutions, travel and accommodation costs will be reimbursed by the conveners.

The conference is organised by Aleksandra Lipińska (Professor for Art of the Early Modern Period, Institute for Art History, LMU Munich) and Ilse Sturkenboom (Professor for Islamic Art History, Institute for Art History, LMU Munich).

We kindly ask interested participants to submit, by 30 September 2021, a working title, a maximum 250-word abstract, and a short CV to Ilse.Sturkenboom@LMU.de and aleksandra.lipinska@kunstgeschichte.uni-muenchen.de.

From the Call for Papers:

Seminars in the History of Collecting, 2022
The Wallace Collection, London, last Monday of the Month (possibly online)

Proposals due by 17 September 2021

The seminar series was established as part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Paris and London. We are keen to encourage contributions covering all aspects of the history of collecting, including:
• Formation and dispersal of collections
• Dealers, auctioneers, and the art market
• Collectors
• Museums
• Inventory work
• Research resources

The seminars—normally held on the last Monday of every month during the calendar year, excluding August and December—act as a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research into the history of collecting. Seminars are open to curators, academics, historians, archivists, and all those with an interest in the subject. Papers should generally be about 45–60 minutes long. Seminars take place between 5.30 and 7pm. While we hope that the seminars can resume in situ at the Wallace Collection at some stage during 2022, the Collection will follow government guidelines about best practice as it evolves in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is quite possible that the seminars will continue to take place on Zoom throughout the year.

If interested, please send a short text (500–750 words), a brief CV, and indicate any months when you would not be available to speak, by Friday 17 September 2021. For more information and to submit a proposal, please contact: collection@wallacecollection.org.

Please note that if seminars take place at the Wallace Collection we are able to contribute up to the following sums towards speakers’ travelling expenses on submission of receipts:
• Speakers within the UK – £80
• Speakers from Continental Europe – £160
• Speakers from outside Europe – £250

From ArtHist.net (10 July 2021) . . .

Rethinking Race and Representation in Art History and Material Culture of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Francosphere
H-France Salon

Abstracts due by 15 August 2021, with accepted papers due by 1 February 2022

H-France Salon invites contributions for a Salon series addressing the theme of “Rethinking Race and Representation in Art History and Material Culture of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Francosphere.” This Salon builds on the H-France Salons Series entitled “Race, Racism, and the Study of France and the Francophone World Today” [H-France Salon 11.2 (2019)] and seeks to offer new ways and tools for thinking specifically about constructions of race in history, art history, and material culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The editors are open to many directions, but possible angles may include:
• What overlooked artists or artwork should we include to shift our understanding–or what well-known works should we reconsider in the light of new narratives and questions? We welcome essays that focus either on one artist or representation, or on a set.
• What approaches are particularly thought-provoking or effective pedagogically?
• What methods can help us recover the agency of the people who modeled for, or were depicted in, artworks?
• How can we use objects or aspects of material culture?
• How do choices for representing eighteenth and nineteenth century works, i.e. museum displays and curation, renaming or questioning the titles of artworks, decisions about where and how art is displayed in urban and national settings, etc, shape our understanding of those works?
• How do modern ways of representing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (from graphic histories to public murals to video ) affect our understanding of the past?
• How do we engage contemporary debates, like French debates around race as an ‘American’ category?

Interested contributors should e-mail an abstract (max.1000 words) and CV to the editors Jennifer Heuer (heuer@history.umass.edu), Gülru Çakmak (gcakmak@umass.edu), and Robin Mitchell (robin.mitchell@csuci.edu) by August 15, 2021. Papers (2500–4000 words) will be submitted by February 1, 2022.

As H-France Salon supports multi-media resources, we welcome possibilities that take advantage of the platform. Please contact us with any questions or ideas!