Call for Papers | Reproductive Prints in the 18th and 19th Centuries
From the Call for Papers:
La Storie dell’Arte Illustrata e la Stampa di Traduzione, 18 e 19 Secolo
(Online, via MS Teams) Università di Chieti Gabriele d’Annunzio, Chieti, 10–11 June 2021
Proposals due by 25 January 2021 (for papers in Italian or English)
“E per le Arti poi l’incisione è quel che la stampa è per le scienze”
–Francesco Milizia, Dizionario di Belle Arti del Disegno (Bassano: Giuseppe Remondini, 1797)
La Cattedra di Storia della Critica d’arte del Dipartimento di Lettere Arti e Scienze Sociali, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti – Pescara terrà una giornata di studi dedicata alla stampa di traduzione e storia dell’arte. Se gli studi sugli artisti incisori e lo sviluppo di un mercato di stampe europeo vivace e ben delineato hanno visto un crescente interesse negli ultimi anni per i secoli XVII– XVIII e XIX, l’indagine rimane ancora aperta per la stampa di traduzione utilizzata a corredo della storiografia artistica di quei secoli.
Partendo dall’affermazione dell’incisione di traduzione a contorno semplice nel Dizionario di Belle Arti del Disegno di Francesco Milizia (1797), la giornata di studi si propone di presentare nuove ricerche sull’utilizzo delle incisioni e delle stampe per lo studio della storia dell’arte, esplorando le tematiche seguenti pur non limitandosi solo ad esse, anzi auspicandone un ampliamento sia in termini geografici che cronologici:
• singoli contributi su artisti, disegnatori e incisori
• singoli contributi su album o raccolte di stampe ed incisioni
• il mercato delle stampe di traduzione e dei libri d’arte illustrati: stamperie, librai, mercanti e collezionisti
• stampa di traduzione e studio dell’arte: trattati, cataloghi, recueils, quotidiani a stampa, riviste d’arte, descrizioni, letteratura periegetica illustrata
• illustrare per promuovere: i cataloghi di vendita delle collezioni
• nascita e sviluppo delle monografie d’artista illustrate
• stampa di traduzione per la storia della letteratura
Le proposte di partecipazione alla giornata di studi dovranno pervenire all’indirizzo valentina.fraticelli@unich.it in forma di abstract (350–500 parole, con titolo e parole chiave), ed essere accompagnate da CV e affiliazione accademica o breve profilo biografico (300 parole) entro il 25/01/2021. Le giornate di studio si svolgeranno sulla piattaforma Microsoft Teams; gli interventi selezionati, di cui è prevista la pubblicazione, avranno una durata di circa 20-30 minuti e verranno presentati online. Lingue: italiano, inglese. Per ulteriori informazioni contattare la dott.ssa Valentina Fraticelli all’indirizzo email valentina.fraticelli@unich.it.
Comitato scientifico: Ilaria Miarelli Mariani, Valentina Fraticelli, Tiziano Casola, Vanda Lisanti
Segreteria organizzativa: Laura Palombaro
Call for Papers | BU Graduate Symposium, Crowd Control
From Boston University:
Crowd Control
The 37th Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture
(Online) 23–24 April 2021
Proposals due by 15 December 2020
Crowd control—as both an idea and an act—raises questions about agency, authority, and influence. From ancient Rome to Boston City Hall, state-sponsored architecture has policed the body and shaped the ideal of a citizen.Yet subtler forces such as painting, prints, and photographs also exert powerful influence. The events of this past year have heightened our awareness of both the power of the people and the contours of the systems which surround them. We have seen the wide array of structures that seek to order, pacify, neutralize, inspire, repress, or control the collective. The 37th Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture invites submissions examining images, objects, and structures that engage with the regulation and redirection of peoples and their social behaviors.
Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, the following: architecture, urbanism, and the organization of private and public spaces; monuments, memory, and civic structures; masquerade, carnival, and festivals; ceremonies and processions; exhibitions and viewing conditions; pilgrimage and religious institutions; protest, policing, the carceral system, and surveillance; population control, eugenics, urban growth and decline; collective and mass culture; conquest, colonialism, coloniality, xenophobia; caste, race, and social hierarchies.
We welcome submissions from graduate students at all stages of study, from any area of study. Papers must be original and previously unpublished. Please send an abstract (300 words or fewer), a paper title, and a CV to bugraduatesymposiumhaa@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2020. Selected speakers will be notified by early February. Papers should be 15 minutes in length and will be followed by a question and answer session. The symposium will be held virtually on Friday, 23 April, and Saturday, 24 April 2021, with a keynote lecture by Dr. Paul Farber, Director of Monument Lab and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.
This event is generously sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities; the Boston University Department of History of Art & Architecture; and the Boston University Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture Association.
Call for Papers | Art and Nature
From ArtHist.net:
Art and Nature: 6th Conference for Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Students in Humanities and Social Sciences
Online / Center for Iconographic Studes, Rijeka, 8 October 2021
Proposals due by 15 May 2021
This conference will address how the natural world has been presented, reflected or interacted by visual artists through centuries. Papers from PhD students and recent PhD graduates will debate on various topics from the pragmatic view of the natural world, existed simply to serve society, through the idea of natural phenomena, animals, plants etc. as allegories and symbols utilized to draw morality tales or aesthetic principles, which were viewed with as much importance as scientific information, to nature as a source of inspiration for new ideas and movements reflected in the fields of arts. Specific focus is put on the modern technologies and media, as well as the artists’ addressing social and political issues relating to the natural environment.
Topics of the conference include, but are not limited to:
• Art as mirror of nature: interpretation of nature in various historical periods, artistic contexts and individual artistic opuses
• Art and nature: allegoric and symbolic representations, illustrations in the books of nature (botanical and zoological studies), flora and fauna in emblems, design and applied arts;
• Art and natural context: landscape painting, Animalists, Wanderers Art Movement, Land Art, Earth Art, Environmental Art
• Art and new technologies: biotechnological arts (BioArt), Genetic art, Evolutionary art, ethical problems considering using modern technologies and bio materials in art etc.
• Art and contemporary aspects and dilemmas: climate changes, environmental problems, ecological awareness represented through visual arts (EcoArt, Crop art, Sustainable art)
Proposals should be sent to phd.conference2020.lj@gmail.com by 15 May 2021 and should include an abstract of maximum 400 words and a short CV. More information is available here.
Call for Papers | Upcoming Issue of Perspective, On Inhabiting
From the Call for Papers (with the French version available here) . . .
Special Issue on Inhabiting / Habiter
Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art (2021–22)
Proposals due by 10 January 2021; final articles due by 15 June 2021
For its coming issue, the journal Perspective asks the question of what it means to inhabit: to inhabit a space, a territory, one’s home or one’s body, whether we are dealing with far away frontiers, or the outlines of intimacy; to inhabit one’s life, one’s society/ies, one’s epoch, in what inhabiting means in terms of being present in one’s world, for and with one another, to face circumstances as they stand. In a time when, across the globe, entire populations are confined to their homes, Perspective issues an invitation to revisit the visual and imaginary plasticity of inhabiting: “to occupy a place of settled residence or habitat,” so states the dictionary, suggesting habit, repetition, regularity; but also occupying persons, inhabiting them, animating them, moving them.
Inhabiting is not only a question of space. When we speak of ‘the spirit of a place’, it opens the poetic question of being inhabited: to haunt, to be haunted, to possess a place or a being, to be possessed, as one may possess an idea, values or beliefs which, in turn, inhabit us. Thus, both time and intangibility find their way into the material world: inhabiting refers to what is built (masonry, roofs, buildings, frontiers), but it also refers to what we inherit, immaterial presences, intimate representations and mental spaces—finally, it refers to what holds us up, holds us back, or holds us together. In fine, inhabiting articulates the individual and the collective, what is shared and what is separated, what is movement and what is closure, places and non-places, and brings forth the question of the Commons: in our world, what do we share? This inevitably brings us to the question of ecology, in its original meaning; the science of the habitat (oikos, the ‘home’), to how our multiple forms of existence and coexistence interweave.
In this manner, Perspective endeavours to dedicate its coming issue to the ways in which artists, art historians, and their colleagues from various neighbouring disciplines, take on these interrogations and bring forth the multiple ways in which one can inhabit or be inhabited. This subject calls for a wide variety of approaches, both in terms of thematic and fields of study. All proposals will be studied as long as submissions remain in line with the journal’s editorial policy. Investigations into the fields of history of architecture, urbanism, landscaping, visual arts, but also museology, ethnology, anthropology, visual studies, and digital humanities, as well as decorative arts, design, fashion, performing arts and cinema shall all be welcome.
Published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) since 2006, Perspective is a biannual journal which aims to expose the diverse topicality of research in art history, while remaining constantly in movement, and explicitly aware of itself and of its own historicity and articulations. It bears witness to the historiographical debates within the field, while remaining in continuous relation with images and works of art themselves, updating their interpretations, and thus fostering global, intra- and interdisciplinary reflexions. The journal publishes scientific texts which offer novel perspectives on a given theme. These may be situated within a wide range, yet without ever losing site of the object of their focus ; to reach over and above any given case study, and interrogate the discipline, its methods, its history and limitations, while aligning these interrogations with topical issues from art history and neighbouring disciplines, which speak to each and every one of us as citizens.
Perspective invites contributors to update their historiographical material and the theoretical questionings from which they draw their work, to think from and around the starting point of a precise question, an assessment that will be considered an epistemological tool rather than a goal in itself. Thus, each article shall be written with a new approach, by creating links with the great societal and intellectual debates of our time.
Perspective is conceived as a disciplinary crossroad and aims to encourage dialogue between art history and other fields of research, human sciences in particular, and put into action the ‘law of the good neighbor’ developed by Aby Warburg. All geographical areas, periods, and mediums are welcome.
Please send your submissions (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters, a provisional title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography of a few lines) to the editorial office (revue-perspective@inha. fr) before 10 January 2021.
As Perspective will manage translations, projects will be examined by the issue’s editorial board regardless of language. The authors of selected proposals will be informed of the committee’s decision in February 2021, and articles must be submitted by 15 June 2021. Submitted articles, with a final length of 25,000 or 45,000 characters depending on the project, will be definitively accepted after the anonymous peer- review process.
Call for Papers | The Afterlife of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
From ArtHist.net:
Re-Conceiving an Ancient Wonder: The Afterlife of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, 1500–1850
RWTH Aachen University, 24–26 June 2021
Proposals due by 31 January 2021
The importance of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus for European culture is revealed by its very name, which—in many languages—has become a noun signifying any sufficiently monumental tomb. However, the Mausoleum was destroyed during the Middle-Ages, and many aspects of its appearance remain uncertain, even since the excavation of its foundations in the 1850s. During the Early Modern Period, the main sources of information on this building were thus ancient texts, which were the only references concerning the Mausoleum’s dimensions and appearance. Accurately reconstructing architecture according to brief written descriptions, however, is an impossible task. Yet, despite this difficulty or perhaps due to the liberty it offered the imagination, numerous artists, architects and antiquaries took a keen interest in the monument during the timeframe 1500–1856, mainly using Pliny’s description to suggest reconstructions, devise pictorial representations and seek inspiration for new funerary projects or monumental public architecture.
This workshop aims to examine the afterlife of the Mausoleum during this period. Being an invisible reference, the monument left far more leeway to the imagination than other, existing ancient buildings that also attracted scholarly and artistic attention, such as the Pantheon. The Mausoleum’s invisibility entails that it is not the monument itself that will be investigated here, but rather the ensemble of texts, images and architectural projects referring to this central but unknowable model. Drawing upon recent developments in the methodologies of intermediality and temporality, the project aims to add a new dimension to this discussion by focusing on a precise case study examining the evolution of several key themes over a long period.
The following questions offer a common intellectual framework for the workshop. Further research themes suggested by participants, however, will naturally be welcomed.
• How did reconstructions engage with the Mausoleum’s invisibility and the intermedial relations that it entailed between architecture, text and image?
• What differences emerge between various groups (e.g. antiquarians, architects, painters) in their interpretations of the Mausoleum and in the motivation of their interest for this structure?
• How did the Mausoleum inspire actual buildings and serious architectural projects?
• Or, inversely, imaginary pictorial vistas and stage sets?
• How did the Early Modern reception of the Mausoleum engage with the different means of architectural quotation (shape, dimensions, ornaments)?
• Why did the Mausoleum generate particular interest within specific cultural contexts?
• How, when and to what extent was the funerary function of the Mausoleum emphasised?
• What did the Early Modern Period make of the Mausoleum’s insertion into an urban context and of its relation to the surrounding landscape?
• How is the Mausoleum discussed in general histories of architecture written during the period under consideration?
While we are interested in all proposals concerning the period 1500–1850, topics from the seventeenth and nineteenth century will be especially welcome, since they remain underrepresented amongst the several key speakers already selected.
We invite scholars to submit proposals (max. 1 page) for 20-minute talks that can later be developed into full-length book chapters. Abstracts should be sent to halicarnassus@ages.rwth-aachen.de until 31 January 2021.
The workshop will be held at RWTH Aachen University on 24–26 June 2021. Funding will be available for a partial reimbursement of participants’ expenses, thanks to a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The workshop will result in a collective publication—a coherent book, rather than a loose set of articles—retracing key issues regarding the afterlife of the Mausoleum throughout the timeframe under consideration. For this purpose, we strive for an open workshop format that fosters debate and concrete ideas for a collective publishing project. We sincerely hope that we will be able to meet in person, however, if the pandemic lasts until summer 2021 we will prepare an appropriate digital format for the workshop.
Organisational Committee
Prof. Dr. Anke Naujokat (RWTH Aachen University)
Dr. Desmond Bryan Kraege (AHO Oslo School of Architecture and Design)
Felix Martin M.Sc. (RWTH Aachen University)
Call for Papers | Food—Media—Senses
From ArtHist.net:
Food — Media — Senses
Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1–2 July 2021
Proposals due by 21 December 2020
The notion that eating is linked to sensuality is a commonplace. But once we take into consideration that during a meal all five senses can be involved, the relationship between eating and the senses becomes much more interesting. By eating we understand a cultural practice which includes the consumption of food as much as its preparation and presentation. Not only in the culinary art and fine dining of the last decades—for example, molecular cuisine—but also in the industrial processing of convenience food, trends of putting all five senses into relation to each other can be observed.
But this very aspect of sensuality is often ignored in the debates of the humanities or cultural science about eating and food, although aesthetics in the sense of aisthesis is one of its core subjects. Strangely enough, up until now there has been only little research on how eating relies on the interplay of the senses. This might generally be due to the fact that sensual experience has been held in high cultural regard only when initiating the creation of sense. The incorporation of the object of perception in no way seemed to be in a position to transcend the bodily, in the manner of the distanced sensory perceptions of seeing and hearing (Zechner 2013). We find here an implicit hierarchization which might be the reason for a lack of differentiated linguistic tools and of useful distinctions when it comes to tasting and smelling, the senses central to eating. While tools for capturing the visual and auditory already have been developed by scholars of musicology, art history, media studies or theater studies. A cultural science which is adequate to the cultural technique of designing food—as haute cuisine or as convenience food—is still lacking. Even the most recently booming food studies are only peripherally are concerned with the sensorially experienced aisthesis of dishes and, when concentrating on the socio-cultural functions of eating, fall back onto a wider perspective of cultural studies.
In order to acknowledge the material and media-related aspects of eating as a cultural praxis, the conference proposes to understand the various aspects of eating as a purposefully designed sensory experience. Thereby it aims to introduce, produce and discuss research tools commensurate with the sensuality of eating. First, we intend to develop ways of describing how the individual senses are addressed by food and to conceptualize their modes of interaction. As they design sensual experience the dishes prepared are to be considered as media themselves. They offer perceptive opportunities which are strongly formed by culture and in special ways address the sensory as much as sense. In addition, haute cuisine even works with textures, smells and taste nuances in an attempt to create meaning. Focusing the senses in combination with the concept of media and its heuristics is meant to permit a new perspective on dishes and eating.
The involvement of media in eating can be further differentiated. By an open concept of media—which could for instance be obtained from the ethnographic orientation of the actor-network theory—the constitutive roles of menu, cutlery, tableware and dining room can be taken into account without relegating them to the secondary role of ‘context’. In this sense, we have to describe the preparation and combination of food together with the specific choice of tableware, table decoration, furniture, interior design, music and, last but not least, the service to the table and additional media components. Also, the fine arts always have reflected on food, for example in the genre of the still life or, since Modernity, in interactive settings which take eating as a starting point for creating a Gesamtkunstwerk and reflect on the aesthetic and socio-cultural dimensions of food.
Finally, media come into play when representing and communicating eating in advance or afterwards. Under this aspect we may ask by which forms of linguistic expression, structure and imagery for example a cooking recipe is characterized, how film and television evoke the sensual experience of eating or how the oeuvre of a certain chef is represented in photo books. Complementary it has to be asked in which ways a whole media ensemble is grouped around food and its preparation, how such a media ensemble organizes perception and consequently directly feeds back onto the senses. The intrinsic logic of particular media and how it affects the presentation of food has to be taken into consideration, too.
The conference is conceived as an interdisciplinary exploration in which experts from media studies, art history, literature, sociology, ethnology, cultural studies and design studies come together for productive exchanges and share their special approaches such as gastrosophy, culinary studies and food studies. The following three thematic blocks can be defined:
1 Food as Medium
The first section focusses on the media-related qualities of eating, which is understood as a designed sensual experience. Food as a multisensory and multimodal object of perception as well as all related practices of preparation, presentation and consumption come into view. In contrast to the traditional approaches in the study of meals, we suggest an understanding of the preparation, presentation and consumption of food not as a cultural framing, but as a communicative practice which includes the meal’s design and its whole field of experience: which role is played by sensual experience when buying and preparing food? Which options are there to control the parameters of sensory experience during cooking? How is a meal arranged to let the eater have a certain experience? How is food semantically charged? Of course, specific associations are induced in food; but can we imagine other strategies as well? The analysis of happenings in the fine arts which perform and simultaneously reflect on the preparation of food as much as on its communal consumption can yield great insights. Art works not only use food and its staging as a vehicle for messages but can also convey its sociocultural implications and even reveal how the construction of culture works.
2 Food in Media
The representation of eating and the sensual experience connected to it has a long history: the interest in food’s colors and tactile surfaces is one of the major causes for the emancipation of the still life as a genre of its own. Cookbooks seek to demonstrate the preparation of meals as much as the expected pleasures by a variety of linguistic devices, specific layouts and images. Food photography in advertising and in cookbooks claims to visualize sensual experience. On product packaging, food photography can work like a serving suggestion inasmuch as it can trigger, in combination with color design etc., sensual associations. In addition, attention must be paid to the parameters of media-specific presentation and how they feed back on the cultural practice of eating. Photogenics and, recently, instagrammability highlight colorful and structured dishes. In what ways does a photogenic appearance indirectly impact on sensual experience? Visual communication as an applied science, at the service of the food industry, which deals with the relationship between packaging design and buying decisions, has to be taken into consideration.
3 Sociology and Culturality of Food
We want to explore how the sensuality of eating is treated in specific cultural contexts. It is not only about preferences—for example, for the bitter or the sour—but also about the involvement of the different senses in eating: in which cultural contexts is the sense of sight particularly emphasized? In which cultural contexts is the sense of touch addressed through texture? In addition to the findings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, not only the relation between the raw and cooked but also between the liquid, soft and solid plays a role. At this point, we would like to reflect on the sensuality of cultural and national identities. Following the discussion on a sociology of taste, as has been prominently guided by Pierre Bourdieu, we aim to identify how the relationship between sensual experience and social biography contributes to the formation of social identity. Sensual experience becomes understandable as basically socially formed; concurrently, the socio-cultural formation is recognized as a naturalized one when, for example, preferences of taste are regarded as being gender-based.
The conference is to be held July 1–2 at the Philipps-Universität Marburg in person or as a hybrid event. In view of the COVID pandemic, it is not yet possible to make definitive statements about the form of the event that can ultimately be realized. Accommodation will be financed by the organizers. Travel expenses will be covered or subsidized, depending on the cost. There are no conference fees. Proposals (of approx. 400 words) for a 25-minute presentation accompanied by a brief CV should be sent by 21 December 2020 to foodmediasenses@uni-marburg.de.
Organising committee: Christina Bartz (Paderborn), Jens Ruchatz (Marburg), Eva Wattolik (Erlangen)
Call for Papers | ECRS Series, 2021
From ECRS:
The Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar Series
(Online) Fortnightly on Wednesdays, from 27 January to 7 April 2021
Proposals due by 15 December 2020
The Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar (ECRS) series invites proposals for twenty-minute papers from postgraduate and early career researchers addressing any aspect of eighteenth-century history, culture, literature, art, music, geography, religion, science, and philosophy. The seminar series seeks to provide a regular interdisciplinary forum for postgraduate and early career researchers working on the eighteenth century to meet and discuss their research.
ECRS will be hosted online by the University of Edinburgh. Seminars will take place on Wednesdays between 4:30 and 6:00pm on a fortnightly basis from 27 January to 7 April 2021. Each seminar will consist of two papers.
Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a brief biography and institutional affiliation should be submitted in a Word document to: edinburgh18thcentury@gmail.com. In your email, please also indicate any scheduling restrictions you may have. The closing date for submissions is Tuesday, 15 December 2020.
The Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar is kindly sponsored by the University of Edinburgh’s Eighteenth-Century and Enlightenment Studies Network.
Call for Papers | The [After]Lives of Objects
From ArtHist.net:
The [After]Lives of Objects: Transposition in the Material World
(Online) University of Virginia Art & Architectural History Graduate Symposium, 18–19 March 2021
Proposals due by 15 December 2020
Transposition involves the movement of people, objects, and ideas from one context to another. The reverberating impacts of such regional and transregional exchanges have shaped artistic expressions, systems of knowledge, and relationships among polities. Recently, scholarship has turned to the object as a material manifestation of cross-cultural, transregional, and imperial encounters. [After]Lives is an interdisciplinary symposium that explores how transposition has materialized throughout history. How are objects changed when they are activated as mediums of encounter? In what ways do makers and users negotiate their positionality between and within societies through objects? How have artists and other creators problematized binary ideas of encounter and exchange in their works? When should adaptations be considered cultural appropriation instead of cross-cultural connectors? Can they be both? What is at stake when materials, artistic techniques, and/or technologies originating from one region are duplicated outside of that region?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Mediation of transcultural encounters through visual and material objects
• Processes of adaptation and assimilation in visual and material culture
• History of looting, collecting, and the art market
• Role of institutions in the (re)contextualization of objects
• Studies that problematize notions of influence, exchange, and reception across social, cultural, and artistic hierarchies
• Imperial and colonial networks of collection, trade, and exchange
We welcome submissions from graduate students at all stages and areas of study. Papers should be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a Q&A plenary session. Papers must be original and previously unpublished. Graduate students are invited to submit a CV and an abstract (250 words) in a single PDF file by 15 December 2020 to the symposium committee at uvaartandarch@gmail.com. Applicants will be notified of decisions by 15 January 2021. Limited funds will be available to cover expenses associated with presenting at the symposium.
Keynote Speaker: Kristel Smentek, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Architecture, MIT | Author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014) and Objects of Encounter: China in Eighteenth-Century France (forthcoming).
Call for Papers | New Directions in 18th- and 19th-Century Art, Season 3
From NDENCA:
New Directions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century, Art Season 3
Digital Seminar Series
Abstracts due by 30 November 2020
This digital seminar series seeks to showcase new and innovative research being undertaken on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and its histories. We invite contributions for papers investigating any aspect of the artistic, visual, and material cultures of this period, and produced across the globe. Sessions will be hosted via video conferencing software and will take the form of a 40-minute seminar, with time following for questions.
We welcome proposals from PhD researchers, early career academics and museum professionals, particularly those from underrepresented groups. Please send your abstracts to ndencaseminar@gmail.com.
Call for Essays | Academic Research and the Contemporary Museum
From the Call for Articles:
Academic Research and the Contemporary Museum (working title)
Collection of essays edited by Dr Nicola Pickering, to be published by Routledge
Proposals due by 30 November 2020
This publication intends to re-establish the importance of focused and supported academic object-based research in museum practice and encourage a more robust debate within the museums sector surrounding the requirement and benefits of this work. It aims to reveal how new and creative academic research can be of value to audience-focused outcomes and public engagement work in museums, something that has not received the attention it should have up to now.
In this publication ‘academic research’ will be considered as activity of a scholarly nature, involving in- depth study of museum objects, drawing heavily on the examination of primary and secondary sources, and undertaken by subject-specialists using methodologies drawn from academic disciplines. This book will offer a unique opportunity for readers to see how new academic research can successfully inform visitor-centred practices in museums, and public outcomes for non-specialists, rather than remain the preserve of elitist curators and be produced for limited and privileged audiences.
This book will contain case studies that highlight the value of skilfully and appropriately transferring and translating academic research into public-facing projects and outcomes in the museums sector. Sympathetically integrated into public interpretation and education projects, and astutely linked to contemporary issues, new object-focused and audience-focused academic research can assist in widening access and participation and contribute to museum work in areas such as wellbeing, accessibility, social justice and sustainable funding. Thus, it can complement and bolster visitor-centred approaches, rather than work in opposition to them. It is hoped that the case studies collected in this volume will show that primary research and object-based scholarship in curatorial practice, which focuses on the needs of audiences, as well as collaborations with academics and academic organisations, can enhance the public impact and wider appeal of museums.
Case studies that feature examples of object-focussed research drawing on alternative theories (for example post-colonial, feminist, critical race, post-human and environmental theories) will highlight how museums can reinterpret objects from multiple and new perspectives. This might then show how new, or a wider range of, audiences may then be engaged in the work of the museum through the curatorial, learning, engagement and community projects that draw on this fresh research. Such activity can assist in widening access and participation and contribute to museum work in areas such as wellbeing, accessibility, social justice and sustainable funding.
Case Studies Sought
Case studies—each approximately 5,000-6,000 words—of successful and innovative methodologies, practices and projects in which new and creative academic object-based research has been employed to enhance public-facing outcomes are sought for this publication.
This book aims to discuss the controversies and extend the current debate regarding curatorial approaches. Thus, case studies should discuss new ways of thinking about the role of content specialists or expertise and academic research in museums, and highlight new and creative uses of academic research in collections-based projects. Case studies might be examples of innovative and imaginative undertakings, methodologies and practices, those highlighting the value of transferring and translating academic research into public-facing projects and outcomes in the museums and heritage sector. The case studies will come together to show why this is so important, how to approach such activities, and the benefits of pursuing such projects.
The case studies should help to show how new, or a wider range of, audiences may then be engaged in the work of the museum through the curatorial, learning, engagement and community projects that draw on this fresh research. If possible, the benefits of primary research and content-focussed scholarship to successful measurable outcomes (increased visitor numbers, greater visitor engagement, raised income through commercial activities, sponsorship or grant awards, changes in diversity of audiences) should be highlighted in the case studies.
Case studies that contribute to the current debate surrounding curatorial practice, museum management and public engagement will be positively received.
The necessity of strong partnerships and interdisciplinary working might be highlighted: successful case studies in which academic staff have worked alongside museum staff to achieve innovative outcomes are sought. In doing so it is hoped this publication will assist in showing how scholarly research can be made accessible to the general public in an effective way, and help museum professionals, academics and students to see how this might be done well. Potential ways that external partnerships and internal expertise within museum and heritage organisations might be developed and maintained could be discussed in the case studies.
We are seeking case studies from any country, from a variety of types of museum (national, trust/charity, independent, local authority, university), and it is hoped they will feature a range of collection objects, subject matters, spaces, locations and budgets. Examples from museums outside of the UK and those that have an international dimension or show engagement with source communities from around the world are actively sought.
Your case study must fall into one of the following five categories:
o University museums and academic partnerships with museums.
o Public–privatepartnerships.
o Untold stories (e.g. gender and sexuality / under-represented, disenfranchised and marginalised groups / post-colonial interpretation).
o Retold stores and contemporary issues (e.g. community stories, lost and forgotten stories, audience interest reinvigorated).
o Difficult spaces and projects undertaken on small and restricted budgets (e.g. at local authority museums, independent museums).
The case study chapters will be presented thematically, examining specific research themes as outlined above. The case studies will combine to show the variety of primary, object-focused and academic research that is being undertaken in museums in projects that have visitor-focused outcomes.
Required
• Summary of your proposed contribution (no more than one side of A4).
• A list of any suggested illustrations, tables etc.
• Author CV (and list of previous published material if applicable).
MuseumResearchContributions@gmail.com
Deadline
Midday on Monday, 30th November 2020.
More information is available here.
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