Enfilade

Paolo Monaldi, Prince James Receiving his Son Prince Henry in front of the Palazzo del Re, ca. 1747–48, oil on canvas, 196 × 297 cm (National Galleries of Scotland). The Palazzo del Re was home to the exiled Jacobite court in Rome. Owned by the Muti family, it was rented by the Papacy for the Old Pretender, James.

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From the Call for Papers:

Performance, Royalty, and the Court, 1500–1800
Society for Court Studies Conference
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 11–12 April 2019

Proposals due by 7 December 2018

Next year is the 400th anniversary of the death of Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), a queen consort of the king of Scotland, England, and Ireland, who is well known for her patronage of art, architecture, and court entertainments, in particular masques devised by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. To mark this important anniversary, The Society for Court Studies, with the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Birkbeck College School of Arts, is organizing a two-day conference focusing on performance and the courts of the British Isles and continental Europe during the early modern period, with the opportunity to explore the networks and encounters between courts, both within and beyond Europe. The interdisciplinary nature of the topic necessarily embraces cultural, political and economic history, literature, and the visual and performing arts.

Performance was at the heart of the early modern period, with the court itself forming a stage for the construction, communication, and display of power and privilege—a world in which the social relationships that circulated around rulers, their families, and supporters took shape and found expression. Men and women played out a variety of important social, political, military, and governmental roles as well as participating in dramatic events, with court rituals and ceremonies providing occasions for demonstrations of authority, prowess, and magnificence. The architecture and decoration that surrounded the court, whether permanent or temporary, not only provided a physical setting but reinforced objectives and allegiances, as did dress, accoutrements, and entourage. The court also formed a rich source of inspiration for composers, playwrights, and actors—whether representing courts in their dramas, playing before the court, or devising masques and ballets with courtiers as performers. Equally, art and artistic patronage were of central importance, not only through the direct participation of painters, designers and craftsmen in ceremonies, dramas and other occasions, but also through portraiture and other forms of representation. Indeed, a work of art was often perceived and described as a performance.

In all its senses, performance represented opportunities for individuals and groups to find ways of expressing their ideals, their ambitions and aspirations, their frustrations and hostilities. This conference aims to bring this sense of opportunity to the study of the early-modern court, thinking in the broadest possible terms about how we can define our approaches and how, by taking the theme of performance as our guide, we can open up the study of the courtly world and its peoples to new scholarship and new audiences.

Suggested themes include, but are not restricted to:
• Political ritual and gift-giving
• Diplomacy, power play, and hospitality
• Gender and modes of performance
• Loyalties and affiliations
• Control and freedom
• Identity and values
• Court rituals and traditions
• Ceremonies, receptions, progresses and processions
• Reception, audience, and commentary
• Drama, dance, music, and speeches/addresses
• Cultural and social patronage
• Chivalric, sportive and martial performance (tournaments, barriers, manège)
• Trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship
• Visual arts as performance
• Architecture, interiors, settings and locations

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words along with a short biography to courtstudiesconference@gmail.com by Friday, 7 December 2018.

Convenors: Dr Janet Dickinson (Conference Secretary SCS and Oxford University) and Dr Jacqueline Riding (Committee Member SCS and Birkbeck College)

From H-ArtHist:

Russia: Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy
The Queen’s Gallery, London, 22 March 2019

Proposals due by 15 October 2018

A collaboration between Royal Collection Trust, Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre, and The Burlington Magazine, this one-day international academic conference takes its cue from the exhibition Russia: Royalty and the Romanovs, to be held at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, from 9 November 2018 to 28 April 2019.

The conference Russia: Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy will explore themes of courtly gift-giving and cultural diplomacy between Russia and the West, a history that sits within the broader framework of the history of British-Russian state and cultural relations [ca. 1698–1950s]. Scholarly research in these areas has flourished over the past few decades, and continues to generate debate and activity as the discipline of history itself has developed to encompass the study of material culture, sensory history and the history of emotions, domestic history, histories of power, ceremony and ritual, and internationalism and cross-cultural exchange. Increasing access to archives and the availability of new methodologies, not least the advent of the ‘digital’ humanities, have provided further opportunities for cutting-edge research. This conference accordingly embraces innovative methodologies from disciplines including history, art history, literature, area studies, and anthropology to explore ways in which Russia’s international relations have been forged, fermented, and fractured by the exchange of material objects in the social, cultural, and political spheres.

Papers are invited on the following themes:
• practices of gift-giving between the British and Russian monarchies and governments
• British-Russian cultural exchange at state and diplomatic level
• interactions between cultural diplomacy, art and politics
• cultural diplomacy and nationalism/imperialism
• gift-exchange in the formation of royal collections
• royal portraits as gifts
• the exchange of court artists, craftsmen and other cultural producers
• the role of ambassadors and cultural mediators
• royal photographs, photographs of royalty
• royal patronage in the cross-cultural context
• gift-giving and domestic court life
• family, marriage, and dynastic ties
• material culture and gift-giving
• the material accompaniments of royal travel and state visits
• transcultural ritual and ceremony
• custom, convention and protocol
• societies promoting cultural exchange between governments
• the forging of cultural links between state departments
• British artists and makers and Russian royal patronage (e.g., Godfrey Kneller, Christopher Galloway, George Dawe, Christina Robertson, Charles Cameron)
• Russian artists and makers and British royal patronage (e.g., Carl Fabergé, Savely Sorine)

Paper topics should relate to a British-Russian or British-Soviet context and, to complement the exhibition, may address any period from the late seventeenth to the mid twentieth century. Papers shall be twenty minutes long and will be organised into panels of two to four papers, with time allocated for questions on all papers at the end of each session.

Participation in the conference for both speakers and delegates will include an opportunity to visit the exhibition and an early evening drinks reception. In accordance with the event policy for conferences held at The Queen’s Gallery, the organisers will not be able to reimburse travel expenses or arrange accommodation for speakers. Some limited funding may become available as a result of grant applications that are in progress; if you wish to be considered for this, please provide an estimate of costs as part of your proposal.

Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted to Dr Louise Hardiman (Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre) at courtlygifts2019@gmail.com. Please include a paper title, your name, institution (if applicable), brief biography, and full contact information (address, phone number, and email). Any questions about the conference may also be sent to the above email address.

Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC) is an academic collaboration between the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge and The Courtauld Institute of Art. CCRAC promotes research, collaboration and scholarly debate on all aspects of the visual arts, architecture, design, and exhibitions in Russia and the Soviet Union.

Organising Committee
Caroline de Guitaut (Royal Collection Trust), Dr Louise Hardiman (CCRAC), Professor Rosalind P. Blakesley (University of Cambridge and CCRAC), Professor John Milner (The Courtauld Institute of Art and CCRAC), and Michael Hall (Editor, The Burlington Magazine).

From The Courtauld:

Eighth Early Modern Symposium: Perceiving Processions
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 24 November 2018

Proposals due by 24 September 2018

Procession of Süleyman I, from ‘Customs and Fashions of the Turks’, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, woodcut print, 30 × 39 cm, 1553 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-2304L).

In recent years, a renewed interest in early modern rituals, festivals, and performances has prompted a reconsideration of ceremonious processions with a particular focus on their impact on social, cultural, artistic, and political structures and practices. Simultaneously, scholars have increasingly acknowledged the mobility of early modern artists across geographical, religious, and cultural borders. Although processions were witnessed by natives and visitors alike and were therefore prime instances of cross-cultural encounters, their depictions by artists both local and foreign remain a lesser-studied body of visual material. This symposium proposes to explore the visual representations of processions that took place within cross-cultural encounters both within and outside of Europe.

A procession was an act of movement that was particularly charged with meaning; an ambulatory mode of celebration, it had a global resonance in the early modern period. Processionals impressed foreign dignitaries, established modes of rule, communicated traditions, and negotiated power balances and were highly sensory occasions—as such they lent themselves readily to visual representation and were enthusiastically recorded in literature. Pageantries, military processions, and Joyous Entries (Blijde Inkomsten) were recorded in a variety of media, as exemplified by the festival books celebrating the ephemeral constructions orchestrated for Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand’s arrival in Antwerp (1635) or the eighteenth-century paintings depicting Venice’s dazzling boat parades in honour of foreign dignitaries. Furthermore, ceremonial processions conceived for births, weddings, circumcision feasts, and funerals occasioned visual representations such as the colourful Mughal miniature Wedding Procession of Dara Shikoh in Presence of Shah Jahan (1740). In addition, the notion of procession can be expanded to encompass various expressions of mobility that could be understood and were often depicted as a procession. Both Jan van Scorel’s frieze-like painting of the knightly brotherhood commemorating their Holy Land pilgrimage (c. 1530) and the depiction of ambassadors travelling with their retinue to foreign courts and cities can be perceived as a form of procession. Thus, the structure of a procession was increasingly adopted in the Early Modern period to depict moments of exchange and motion propelled by the quest for knowledge, as much as diplomatic concerns and religious piety. Well-known examples include The Voyage to Calicut tapestry series (1504) as well as the highly detailed printed frieze of a merchant endeavour by Hans Burgkmair (The King of Cochin, 1508).

We welcome proposals for papers that engage with processions in the early modern period (c. 1500–1800) in the context of cross-cultural encounters, with the locations of cross-cultural interaction defined here as both inter or extra-European and beyond the ‘East meets West’ dynamic. Participants are invited to explore artistic exchanges across geopolitical, cultural and disciplinary divides, and to examine drawings, prints, alba amicorum, painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture, and the intersections between them. Contributions from other disciplines, such as the history of science and conservation, are welcome.

We invite 20-minute papers that explore, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• How is the format of the procession used to structure visual representations of early modern ceremonial occasions and cultural difference?
• How were processions perceived visually both by local and foreign artists?
• Moreover, what audiences were interested in these visual representations and what scope did such a broad and diverse range of visual material serve? It is widely acknowledged, for instance, that Festival Books were not only designed for the audience of the spectacle, but also for armchair readers who could thus experience the procession as if they had been present.
• In what way does the visual representation of a procession signify a means of negotiating between one’s own identity, heritage and outlook whilst in dialogue with another culture?
• How did diplomatic encounters encourage the production of procession scenes both during and after the diplomatic mission, such as the depiction of gift-giving ceremonies? We strongly encourage speakers to also consider less conventional modes of processions. Could, for instance, the sequential depiction of costumes in costume albums also be interpreted as a procession of some sorts?
• Through which visual strategies and spatial arrangements did the ephemeral decorations and arches erected on the occasion of glorious entries orchestrate a procession through the urban space, or thematise the idea of cross-cultural encounter?
• What are the effects (both ephemeral and lasting) of these processions that sometimes involve the construction of specific architectural constructions and temporary settings (e.g. the Field of the Cloth of Gold, 1520)?

The Early Modern Symposium offers an opportunity for research students from universities both in the UK and abroad to present, discuss and promote their research. We invite proposals from graduate students, early career researchers, conservators, and curators. Talks that draw upon technical analysis and other theoretical approaches are equally welcome. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words along with a short biography by 24th September 2018 to talitha.schepers@courtauld.ac.uk and alice.zamboni@courtauld.ac.uk.

The aim of this postgraduate symposium is to provide a platform for early career researchers and postgraduate students to their share research with peers. We may be able to provide a subsidy for travel and accommodation costs, but please be aware that this may not cover all of your expenses. We prioritise candidates from the UK and Europe. We will notify successful candidates by Monday, 1st October 2018.

From the CFP:

The Orléans Collection: Tastemaking, Networks, and Legacy
New Orleans Museum of Art, 11–13 January 2019

Proposals due by 30 September 2018

Attributed to Guy Noël Aubry, Portrait of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, 1715–23, oil on canvas, 248 × 160 cm (Orléans: Musée des Beaux Arts d’Orléans, François Lauginie).

The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Frick Center for the History of Collecting will host a
symposium in conjunction with The Orléans Collection exhibition dedicated to the collecting and collection of Philippe II duc d’Orléans (1674–1723) on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art 26 October 2018 through 27 January 2019.

Collecting over just over two decades, Philippe II d’Orléans amassed one of the most important collections of European paintings in the history of art, which he displayed in his Palais-Royal in Paris. This celebrated collection assembled over 500 masterpieces of European Art and this landmark exhibition reunites a representative group of forty works to tell the complex story of the collection’s formation and character and the impact of the sales of the collection in London during the French revolution, a watershed event in the history of collecting.

The Orléans Collection exhibition catalogue essays offer an overview of the collection, Philippe’s relationship with his court painter Antoine Coypel, the refurbishment of the Palais-Royal during the regency, his collecting of Venetian, Dutch and Flemish and Bolognese Art, contemporary artists studying the collection, and a review of the circumstances of the collection’s dispersal. The catalogue’s extensive Appendix transcribes the earliest 1727 publication of the collection tracing picture to their current locations.

The symposium seeks to expand beyond the scope of the catalogue and consider a wider range of relationships concerning Philippe d’Orléans’s taste and the impact the collection had for generations of collectors and artists, and an increasingly wider public throughout the eighteenth century. Subjects of interest might include: Philippe II’s patronage network; fellow collectors and trends in collecting in Paris; dealers and the art market in eighteenth-century Paris; connections with contemporary collections in the German principalities; the ‘Orléans Effect’ in Great Britain and later entrance in public collections.

Travel can be provided to a limited number of applicants. To propose a paper, please submit a message of interest and 300-word abstract by 30 September 2018 to: nomasymposium@noma.org.

The Indigenous Eighteenth Century
Special Issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, edited by Robbie Richardson

Manuscripts due 15 July 2019

The editor of this special issue of ECF, Robbie Richardson (University of Kent), invites manuscripts that consider the roles and representations of Indigenous peoples from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand during the long eighteenth century. In what ways did In peoples shape European literature and knowledge? How can we recover sites of agency and response, and how do we read alternative strategies of representation outside of the written word? How were European writers who encountered ‘Indians’ and ‘savages’ influenced by these exchanges? How was Indigenous material culture collected and understood by Europeans? This special issue seeks to bring the interdisciplinary approaches of Indigenous Studies to bear on the eighteenth century, and to continue the work of decolonizing the period as we know it. Publication is scheduled for Autumn 2020. Submissions should be 6000–8000 words. For more information, please write to ecf@mcmaster.ca.

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From the Call for Papers:

2018 Fairfax House Georgian Studies Symposium
Rethinking the Genius of Grinling Gibbons
Fairfax House, York, 19 October 2018

Proposals due by 31 August 2018

The sixth Fairfax House Symposium in Georgian Studies, held in conjunction with the exhibition The Genius of Grinling Gibbons at Fairfax House, and in partnership with the History of Art department at the University of York, aims to stimulate new thinking and new perspectives on the life, work, legacy, and significance of Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), master carver of Restoration England.

Gibbons is a celebrated figure, yet much about his life and work remains obscure and contentious: not least, the difficulties of attribution have meant that the exact extent, chronology, and character of his oeuvre remain unclear. Similarly, as a ‘great figure’ of the Restoration, he has tended to be considered in isolation rather than placed in his social, political, scientific, architectural, and artistic contexts, while his position within the marginalized field of decorative arts has distorted the scholarly and antiquarian perspectives through which he has been viewed. Questions of patronage, politics, artistic influence, and the collaborative and workshop cultures of creation, as well as the national identity ascribed to this ‘English genius’ who was born and trained in the Netherlands, may all require reassessment. The 370th anniversary of Gibbons’ birth (and the 350th anniversary of his arrival in York) provide an opportune moment to draw together the knowledge gained from previous generations of scholarship, to stimulate new ideas and perspectives, and to rethink the perception and reality of ‘England’s Master Carver’.

Proposals for papers dealing with ‘rethinking’ Grinling Gibbons are enthusiastically invited for potential inclusion in a one-day interdisciplinary symposium. We are keen to encourage participation from people from a wide range of disciplines and career profiles: museum professionals and volunteers, early career and distinguished scholars, curators and teachers in higher education, as well as artists, craftspeople and other practitioners.

We are seeking (1) more formal 20-minutes papers to be presented in panels organised around relevant themes, and (2) 10-minute object-based presentations and discussions which can be informal or formal in nature, focused on a particular work by or relevant to Gibbons. Please send proposals for either section 1 (formal 20-minute papers) or section 2 (10-minute object-based presentations), accompanied by a brief biography, to fairfaxhousesymposium@gmail.com by 31 August 2018. Any queries about the symposium should be sent to the same address.

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Note (added 8 November 2018) — I’m sorry to have not added the conference programme before the event took place, but for anyone who may have stumbled upon this page for information purposes after the fact, the programme is available as a Word file here. –CH

Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864), Shokunin (Artisans), 1857, woodblock, triptych, mitate
(London: The British Museum, 1907,0531,0.204)

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From the English Call for Papers (with the French version available here). . .

Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art 2019.2
Special Issue on Multiples

Proposals due by 24 September 2018; full texts due by 30 April 2019

Using the notion of multiples, the next thematic issue of Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art (2019.2) will examine the issue of mechanical reproduction. Though the phrasing inevitably refers to Walter Benjamin and his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935–36), this call for papers does not intend to limit the scope of contributions to the mass reproduction pertaining to the advent of photography and cinema, but to embrace all the means of reproduction, ranging from the most traditional, such as bronzes, terracottas, and coins, to the most contemporary related to the rise of new technologies, while not neglecting engraving, screen printing, or lithography. The aim is to analyze the ways in which reproductive techniques influence the production of works of art, while disturbing ontological presuppositions that oppose the original to its copy, the aura to inauthenticity, ritual value to exhibition value.

Starting from Walter Benjamin’s statement that “in principle the work of art has always been reproducible,” this propensity for multiplication, which may appear to be a work of art’s vital principle, does not signify the same reality in different geo-cultural periods and areas. Furthermore, is the distinction between the original and its copy a fact of modern Western culture which, since the eighteenth century and the rise of the art market, has celebrated the gure of the author and invented the notion of genius? A series of questions emerges and among them, to list just a few at random: To what needs—aesthetic, historical, anthropological, political, economic, etc.—does this propensity for multiplication that is a characteristic of artworks respond? What are the different modalities of the dialectical relationship between the original and its reproduction? Can we distinguish different phases within the history of reproduction? In what way does the advent of mass reproduction techniques constitute a turning point in the production and dissemination of artworks? Does the successive appearance of different techniques that rely on an increasingly complex apparatus which downgrades the hand in favor of the eye necessarily lead to the disappearance of the craft? Can we imagine the very existence of the aura outside of techniques of mass reproduction?

Furthermore, this issue will focus on all possible forms of multiples produced by means of mechanical reproduction processes, from the most rudimentary to the most elaborate, within a broader theoretical and geographical perspective that will give full weight to the periods preceding our own, as well as non-Western production. Though the journal is dedicated to artworks, heritage, history of architecture and urbanism, archeology, or museography, it also welcomes articles on photography, cinema, performance, dance, design, music, theater, and all forms of hybridization that the encounters of these different media can produce, provided that they are considered through the lens of visual history. Regardless of the subject proposed, contributions should follow the editorial guidelines of Perspective which publishes articles (25,000 or 45,000 characters) offering historiographical surveys of fundamental questions and/or which embody current trends in the discipline within the proposed topic.

Please submit your proposals (2,000–3,000 character summary and a 2–3 line biography) to the editorial address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) by Monday, 24 September 2018. The journal will take responsibility for translations if necessary. Proposals will be examined by the editorial committee of the issue, regardless of the language of submission. Authors of selected articles will be informed of the committee’s decision in October 2018 while full texts of accepted contributions will be due by the end of April 2019.

From the Call for Papers:

Architecture and Light
Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Symposium
St George’s Bloomsbury, London, 22 June 2019

Proposals due by 7 January 2019

From the glittering windows of Hardwick Hall and the severe shadows of the Trellick Tower, to the poetry of Chandigarh and the brash neon of Las Vegas, light is a defining factor in any form of architectural design. This symposium will coincide with two exhibitions at Sir John Soane’s Museum: one on Soane and Light and another—as yet untitled—with a leading contemporary light artist working in sympathy with the spaces of the Museum (the symposium will conclude with a visit to the Museum). As such the theme of this symposium is ‘architecture and light’ and thereby focuses on the presence, use and meaning of light in architectural design across all periods and styles.

One important starting point will be the notion that, just as light is understood scientifically as a wave-particle duality, in architecture light exists and functions as both a natural and cultural phenomenon. While on the one hand, the way (sun)light falls over a building is arguably architecture at its most elemental, how we view those light effects is always culturally conditioned. The symposium will reflect, develop, and challenge this dualism.

We welcome speakers—both established and emerging—considering this subject in all aspects of architectural production. Some of the topics that papers might consider are:
• Light as a functional element in architecture and its interactions with different materials and construction methodologies.
• The meaning of light and how this is shaped by different forms, styles and contexts.
• The ways light is mediated in architecture, physically, such as with glazing and mirrors.
• The ways in which light is expressed in architectural drawings and other forms of representation.
• The relationship between natural and artificial light in/on architecture.
• The impact of developing glazing and lighting technologies upon architecture.
• The relationship between light and shadow in/on architecture.
• The politics of light, particularly in an urban setting.
• The methodological problems of analyzing light—by nature immaterial—in architectural history.
• What scientific studies of light can bring to our understanding of its effects in architecture.

If you are interested in contributing to the symposium, please submit an abstract of maximum 300 words and a biography of maximum 150 words to fsands@soane.org.uk by 10am on Monday, 7 January 2019. The SAHGB is not able to reimburse speakers for their travel/accommodation expenses, but the symposium registration fee will be waived and speakers will be invited to attend the symposium dinner on Friday, 21 June 2019.

There are, of course, lots of RSA sessions that include an end date of 1700 (a larger list of sessions is available here); Sarah Grandin, however, notes that she and her co-chair Victoria Addona would particularly welcome late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century proposals addressing artistic collaboration.

Beyond the Singular Artist: A Critical Assessment of Collaboration, ca. 1400–1700
The Renaissance Society of America
Sheraton Centre, Toronto, 17–19 March 2019

Proposals due by 5 August 2018

Sponsored by the American Academy in Rome — Society of Fellows

This panel takes collaboration as a widespread condition of artistic practice and as a necessary strategy in the face of large, complex, and ambitious projects that exceeded the physical and technical capacities of a single individual. Early modern art history has often cast contemporary artists as antagonists, recounting the friendly competition that stimulated artistic virtuosity, invention, and ‘progress’, alongside anecdotes about more violent and secretive enmities on shared work sites. In a break from this discourse, we seek to challenge notions of the autonomous artist by shifting our focus away from a discussion of independent genius and towards the reality of interdependent and collective practices. Understanding the exigencies of works that employed multiple hands also allows us to be critical of and sensitive to the limits of looking for unilateral artistic identity in the resultant work, when authorship is so often a plural affair. This is not to suggest that collaboration did not bring about its own challenges: issues of translation and coordination could lead all too easily to stalls in process or even visible fissures in the resultant work.

We welcome papers that do not merely describe instances of artists working together but that seek to engage critically with the concepts and practices of artistic collaboration. How was labor divided or delegated in collaborative projects? Did collaboration foster the development of artistic specialization or attract generalists? How do multiple hands manage to create artistic unity? How do we understand the split between design and technical execution, and, relatedly, the translation between media (i.e. from painting to print, from cartoons to tapestries)? Is the visible coordination of accomplished artists and diverse resources ever a desirable effect, as may perhaps be the case in multimedia works such as the retablo, the grotto, and ephemeral architecture? Are conventional discourses on artistic media such as the paragone still useful as we think about collaboration and its products, or do collaborative practices challenge the limits of theory?

Topics might address:
• collaboration between a diverse array of actors, from artists to architects, artisans, apprentices, printers, laborers, furnishers of tools and materials, patrons, foremen, and site managers
• strategies of transfer and translation across surfaces and scales that facilitate intermedial and transmedial projects
• papers that result from the collaborations of practitioners and researchers across specialties (i.e. restoration, conservation, and practicing artists) and disciplines (i.e. history of art and history of science)
• the aesthetic particularities of works of art that result from collaboration
• the development of a critical vocabulary of terms to assess artistic collaboration

Please submit proposals, which should include a paper title (15-word max), abstract (150-word max), and a brief CV (300-word max) to Victoria Addona (vaddona@fas.harvard.edu) and Sarah Grandin (sgrandin@fas.harvard.edu) no later than August 5, 2018.

From J18:

Journal18, Issue #8 (Fall 2019) — Self/Portrait
Edited by Melissa Hyde and Hannah Williams

Proposals due by 21 September 2018; finished articles will be due by 7 April 2019

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, The Vexed Man, 1771–83, alabaster, 39 × 27 × 26 cm (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum).

This issue of Journal18 explores artworks, objects, spaces, performances and other visual or material productions that engaged with the self during the long eighteenth century. Rather than a study of ‘self-portraits’ per se, this issue is concerned with expanded definitions of both the ‘self’ and the ‘portrait’, seeking to deepen our sense of how self-expression, self-perception, and self-representation were understood in the long eighteenth century.

Enlightenment philosophy defined modern conceptions of the individual and the self. Not coincidentally, the eighteenth century was also a period in which representations of the self took on a new prominence in artistic practice, becoming sites of innovation and experimentation in a range of visual and material forms. Across the long eighteenth century, self-representation emerged as a crucial space for navigating the individual’s place in society, for pushing the boundaries of artistic convention, and for exploring perceptions of the corporeal self. As institutional restrictions on art were challenged, as new movements redefined who and what the artist was, and as a new emphasis on introspection and subjectivity developed, the eighteenth century witnessed a shift in the artist’s relationship with the self.

We invite proposals for articles that explore artistic engagements with the self in any media, from any cultural context, at any moment across the long eighteenth century. How was art used to explore the self? Beyond mere self-fashioning, how did eighteenth-century artists use portraits (in whatever shape or form) to interrogate, examine, relate, express and communicate? Outside of conventional self-portrayals, how did artists inscribe themselves in their works (e.g. through signatures or self-referential codings)? Of particular interest are proposals that explore unexpected modes or materials of self-portrayal (e.g. architectural self-portraits, porcelain self-portraits, or combinations of word and image) or that take up pertinent issues of methodology (e.g. questions of biography and its problematic place in art-historical writing).

Issue Editors
Melissa Hyde, University of Florida
Hannah Williams, Queen Mary University of London

Proposals for issue #8 Self/Portrait are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: September 21, 2018. To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography to editor@journal18.org and mlhyde@ymail.com. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due on April 7, 2019. For further details see Information for Authors.