Enfilade

From H-ArtHist:

Romantic Art in the Context of Natural Philosophy and Natural Science
Die Kunst der Romantik im Kontext von Naturphilosophie und Naturwissenschaft
Goethe Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 14–16 September 2017

Proposals due by 3 December 2016

“All art should become science and all science art,” declared Friedrich Schlegel in one of his many aphoristic fragments. As Schlegel envisioned, strengthened ties among art, philosophy, and natural science characterized the Romantic epoch. Literary salons in European artistic and intellectual centers, such as Dresden, facilitated the exchange of ideas and nurtured collaborations among intellectuals and artists that transgressed disciplinary boundaries.

In recent years, there has been substantial scholarly interest in how Romantic literature engaged with the scientific activities of its day. For example, the writings of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Novalis, Jane Austen, William Blake, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, and Mary Shelley have all been linked to developments and concepts in the natural sciences. This attention to science and literature around 1800 is just beginning to prompt re-evaluations of related projects in the visual arts. In the 1990s, studies by Rebecca Bedell, Werner Busch, Charlotte Klonk, James Hamilton, Timothy Mitchell, and John Thornes brought the practice of Romantic landscape painting in proximity to natural science. These scholars proposed that new theories in optics, geology, botany, and meteorology to varying degrees inflected depictions of primordial mountain ranges, glaciers, vegetation, skies, and cyclical facets of nature by artists such as Carl Blechen, Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, Joseph Anton Koch, Johan Christian Dahl, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and John Martin. However, in the German context especially, links between science and the visual arts remain contested. Caspar David Friedrich is an especially polarizing figure. With a few notable exceptions, most scholars continue to focus on the aesthetic, political, and, above all, religious dimensions of his practice, and locate his work outside of larger, European-wide trends in the visual arts.

This conference—a cooperation between the German Society for the Study of the Nineteenth Century and the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, where the German Museum of the Romantics will be established—considers anew the intersection between the visual arts  (including, but not limited to landscape painting) and the natural sciences, as well as nature philosophy in the Romantic context across Europe. Papers are especially encouraged that explore how the nature philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling or his contemporaries, such as Carl Gustav Carus, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Lorenz Oken, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, and Frederik Christian Sibbern, influenced artists, informed their practices, and shaped art theory in the early nineteenth century. Please send abstracts (ca. 300 words) for 30-minute presentations, along with a curriculum vitae, to the conference chairs by December 3, 2016. Travel expenses and accommodations will be covered.

Gregor Wedekind
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Institut für Kunstgeschichte und Musikwissenschaft
Jakob-Welder-Weg 12
55128 Mainz
gregor.wedekind@uni-mainz.de

and

Nina Amstutz
Assistant Professor
History of Art and Architecture
Lawrence Hall 212
5229 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-5229 USA
namstutz@uoregon.edu

From the CFP:

European Court Culture and Greenwich Palace, 1500–1750
National Maritime Museum and the Queen’s House, Greenwich, 20–22 April 2017

Proposals due by 1 December 2016

Royal Museums Greenwich and the Society for Court Studies are pleased to announce this call for papers, for a major international conference to mark the 400th anniversary year of the Queen’s House, Greenwich. Designed by Inigo Jones in 1616 and completed in 1639, this royal villa is an acknowledged masterpiece of British architecture and the only remaining building of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century palace complex. Today the Queen’s House lies at the centre of the World Heritage Site of Maritime Greenwich, which also includes the Royal Observatory and the Old Royal Naval College (previously Greenwich Hospital). The site as a whole is often celebrated as quintessentially ‘British’—historically, culturally and artistically. Yet the sequence of queens associated with the Queen’s House and Greenwich more generally reflect a wider orientation towards Europe—from Anne of Denmark, who commissioned the House, to Henrietta Maria of France, Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena—in addition to Greenwich’s transformation under the patronage of Tudor and Stuart monarchs. Located on the River Thames at the gateway to London and to England, royal residences at Greenwich served an important function in the early modern period as a cultural link with the continent, and in particular, with England’s nearest neighbours in the Low Countries and France. After major refurbishment, the Queen’s House reopens in October 2016 with new displays that focus on a number of important themes to historians of art, architecture and culture, and strong links to politics, diplomacy, war and royal and maritime culture.

Some of the themes that might be considered (but are not limited to) include
• Royal portraiture, in particular the representation of queens regnant and consorts
• ‘Princely magnificence’ and the design of royal spaces (such as the division between a King’s and Queen’s sides)
• Dynastic links between the houses of Stuart, Orange, Bourbon, Wittelsbach (Palatinate), and Portugal
• The history of Greenwich Palace as a royal residence and centre of power and culture
• The Queen’s House and Greenwich Palace situated in a wider royal and architectural context
• Connections between court life in Greenwich and the development of the navy (as represented by Thornhill’s allegorical paintings in the Painted Hall, and James, Duke of York, as Lord High Admiral, etc.)
• Fashions and artistic influences from overseas, notably Dutch, Flemish or French artists, architects and royal spaces (Inigo Jones, Orazio Gentileschi and James Thornhill), usage of allegory and mythology in royal/naval settings
• other areas patronized by the court, such as maritime exploration, scientific advances, prints, as represented by the Royal Observatory Greenwich

The conference will be held 20–22 April 2017 in the National Maritime Museum and the Queen’s House. Keynote speakers will include Dr Simon Thurley. We invite the submission of abstracts (300 to 400 words) for twenty-minute papers. The deadline for submissions is 1 December 2016. Please direct queries, if any, to Janet Dickinson: janet.dickinson@conted.ox.ac.uk and proposals and a brief biography to research@rmg.co.uk.

Conference Organisers
Janet Dickinson (University of Oxford), Christine Riding (Royal Museums Greenwich), and Jonathan Spangler (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Hall of Mirrors (Galerie des Glaces), 1678–84
(Château de Versailles)

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From the National Gallery of Australia:

Enchanted Isles, Fatal Shores: Living Versailles
NGA, the Australian National University, and the University of Sydney, 17–18 March 2017

Proposals due by 30 October 2016

Organized by Mark Ledbury, Robert Wellington, and Lucina Ward

On the occasion of the Versailles: Treasures from the Palace exhibition at the NGA, which brings major works of art from the Palace of Versailles to Canberra, this conference showcases the latest ideas about the lives of past people and objects, as well as the living culture of Versailles today. Staged in Canberra, which like Versailles is a planned capital city, centre of government and culture, this is a unique opportunity to explore the enduring influence and resonance of Versailles, its desires and self-perceptions of modernity, from film to fashion to architecture. Gathering a generation of scholars whose work is shifting our perceptions of the art, culture and life of ancien-régime Versailles and its reception, this is the occasion for fresh and challenging research, and new perspectives on canon-defining works.

1664 is formative in the history of Versailles—the year a modest hunting lodge began to be transformed, to become a centre of art, fashion and power in Europe for more than a century. The dream of Versailles as an enchanted isle for the French aristocracy came to a grisly end with the 1789 revolution. Only two years later, the first fleet of British colonists came to settle on the east coast of Australia, on what Robert Hughes famously dubbed ‘the fatal shore’. Life at Versailles changed irreparably just as it would for those who lived in, and migrated to, Australia at the close of the eighteenth century.

Versailles was not the static creation of one man but a hugely complex cultural space, a centre of power, of life, love, anxiety and creation, as well as an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires and ruptures. The splendour of the castle, and the masterpieces of art and design it contains, masks a more sordid history. The conference’s theme, Enchanted isles, fatal shores, encourages examination of the tensions between splendour and misery, insiders and outsiders, display and privacy that framed life at Versailles.

Conference conveners seek proposals to deliver 20-minute papers addressing the subject of the conference; those that address the key themes below are especially welcome. Please send an abstract of 300 words and a short CV to the conveners at Versaillesconference@nga.gov.au by 30 October 2016.

Key Themes
• The ‘lives’ of Versailles
• Virtual Versailles
• Adaptations and destructions
• Challenging period terms
• The private and the public
• ‘Le sale et le propre’
• Versailles and Paris
•  Being there
•  Resonances of Versailles
•  Versailles on film

Conveners
Mark Ledbury, Power Professor of Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney; Robert Wellington, Lecturer, ANU School of Art Centre for Art History and Art Theory; and Lucina Ward, Senior Curator and coordinating curator for the exhibition, National Gallery of Australia

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This working group will meet at the RBS-Mellon Conference Bibliography among the Disciplines in October 2017.

Resembling Science: The Unruly Object across the Disciplines
Philadelphia, 12–15 October 2017

Proposals due by 25 October 2016

Organizers: Meghan Doherty (Berea College), Dahlia Porter (University of North Texas), and Courtney Roby (Cornell University)

The task of transforming observation and experience into representational media is a constant concern in the long history of scientific knowledge. We might even argue that the history of of consolidating and communicating scientific thought is structured by a tension between two kinds of unruly objects: the objects we seek to represent, and the objects produced by representational media. Scientific media instantiate a wide range of representational modes, from drawings, tables, and diagrams to printed text and script in various languages. In this working group, we will examine the strategies deployed by writers and artists to transform material objects—whether a body, a specimen, a machine, or an observed phenomena—into knowledge that could be shared and disseminated materially as image, text, and/or book.

This working group will meet for four sessions over three days (see schedule below) to discuss the tension between the unruly material object and the equally unruly materiality of the objects used to represent it. In so doing, we seek to promote conversations about the tools, practices, and processes of scientific knowledge making across modern disciplinary divisions. What verbal and visual strategies are used to discipline objects of scientific study? How do the conventions of description and depiction render objects knowable to particular communities, or within a specific cultural context? Within any given context, is it possible to identify a ‘visual grammar’, or ‘regime of description’, on which scientific knowledge depends? How does the combination of text and image forward, or disrupt, the communication of scientific ideas? What methods of analysis or interpretive approaches might advance the study of images, texts, and objects across the history of science?

Interested scholars, librarians, curators, and members of the book trade are invited to send statements of interest describing a particular representational problem or proposing a case study that exemplifies the materiality of scientific knowledge. Statements may address any national tradition or time period from antiquity to the present; those focused on non-western representational traditions are particularly welcome.

Participants should be able to commit to attending all sessions of the working group:
Thursday, 12 October 2017, 2:00–5:00
Friday, 13 October 2017, 1:45–3:15
Saturday, 14 October 2017, 10:45–12:15

Participants should further be able to commit to meeting again within one year after the conference to work toward the final publication of the results of the working group. In their statements of interest, participants should indicate their availability to meet during the year following the conference (e.g., will you be abroad—if so, when, and do you anticipate that you will have sufficient internet connectivity to meet virtually?).

In order to be considered please submit proposals for participation by 25 October 2016 here. Proposals should include a statement of interest of no more than 250 words, outlining your relevant research, what you hope to contribute toward the group, and what you hope to take away from it.

Bibliography among the Disciplines, a four-day international conference, will bring together scholarly professionals poised to address current problems pertaining to the study of textual artifacts that cross scholarly, pedagogical, professional, and curatorial domains. The conference will explore theories and methods common to the object-oriented disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, but new to bibliography. The program aims to promote focused cross-disciplinary exchange and future scholarly collaborations. Bibliography among the Disciplines is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and organized by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present
Special Issue of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 11.2 (June 2018)
Guest Editors: Li-hsin Hsu and Andrew Taylor

Articles due by 30 June 2017

This special issue The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture seeks essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words engaged in debate around historical, cultural, and literary issues in the Atlantic World. Whilst national narratives have often sought to assert the truth of universal values, a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of the transnational Atlantic world concerns itself explicitly with ways in which diverse and competing local or national paradigms might contest the kinds of ideological assumptions that underwrite narratives of progress, civilisation and modernity. The editors are keen to receive submissions that explore what happens when the assumptions of a nationalistic model of doing literary and cultural criticism, in which geography is allegorised as the autonomous locus of all possible meaning, are challenged by forms of encounter and contagion that disrupt and expand our frames of interpretation. How might the Atlantic space map a series of textual disruptions and contagions during the period? In what ways does transatlanticism open up possibilities for thinking about literary comparison as a critical practice? How do the crossings of people, objects and ideas complicate our sense of literary and intellectual inheritance? What kinds of relationship does the Atlantic world have with other spatial paradigms—the Pacific, the Orient, Australasia? The essays in this special issue seek to explore the meshed networks of interaction—aesthetic, ideological, material—that constitute the space of Atlantic exchange. This, we hope, will result in a wide-ranging, geographically diverse collection that displays much of the best research being undertaken in this exciting and vibrant field.

Possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:
• ecology and landscape
• migration and travel
• nature and nation
• Asia/Orientalism and transatlanticism
• social reform
• class and conflict
• gender and sexuality
• art and aesthetics
• slavery and empire
• science and technology
• nationalism and cosmopolitanism

The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (www.wreview.org) is a Scopus-indexed journal of interdisciplinary nature based in the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Please follow the submission guidelines to submit articles online by 30 June 2017.

Li-hsin Hsu is Assistant Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh and specialises in transatlantic studies, ecocriticism, and Orientalism. She received the 2014 Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Scholar in Amherst Award and has published in journals such as Symbiosis: A Transatlantic Journal and The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer and Head of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in 19th- and 20th-century North American literature and intellectual history and has an interest in the intersection of historiography and contemporary American fiction. He’s the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge UP, 2002), Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Experience (U of New Hampshire P, 2010), and co-author of Thomas Pynchon (Manchester UP, 2013). He’s the co-editor of several books including Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), Stanley Cavell: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (Manchester UP, 2012), and Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (Routledge, 2013). An awardee of the Leverhulme Trust Project Grant, Dr Taylor is a series editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, published by Edinburgh UP.

From H-ArtHist (7 September 2016). . .

Art for the Powerful, Multiple Objects: Medals and Tokens
in Europe from the Renaissance to the First World War
Art du puissant, objet multiple: Médailles et jetons en
Europe, de la Renaissance à la Première Guerre mondiale
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 30 March — 1 April 2017

Proposals due by 6 November 2016

The medal was revived in the princely courts of fifteenth-century Italy as a commemorative art and quickly adopted by sovereigns across Europe. Medals, tokens, and other metallic objects devoid of fiduciary value became more and more widespread and benefitted from several peaks of popularity in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as illustrated by the metallic histories of Louis XIV or Napoleon, a format adopted by others as far afield as the Tsar of Russia. Whilst changes in taste led the medal to be seen as in or out of fashion at different moments, it has continued to maintain its essentially commemorative function and has been used to express the ideals of all manner of political regimes from monarchies to republics.

This symposium seeks to explore the specificity of a form of official art that associates image and text, producing objects whose message is also partially conveyed by the hierarchy of values intrinsic to the metals used, from the noblest gold to more modest alloys. As objects that can be reproduced, that are easily portable and largely distributed, their biographies also tend to be quite distinct from that of other types of art objects. An initial specificity is that of the role of the engraver whose function oscillates between that of an artist, an artisan, and an agent of a commissioning power. His artistic practice can be considered in some sense as paradoxical in so much as it is constrained by the conventions of the medium and by the outline of the project which his talent is called on to convey in material form. This opens up to the question of the expressive aims of this official art that seeks to capture and commemorate History as it happens, fortifying the glory of the commissioning party. Indeed, medals and tokens represent the result of the interplay of the different actors who contribute to their elaboration: from the initial idea developed by a commissioning power and affiliated scholars, to the drawing of a model, to the production and diffusion of the multiple editions of the final product. Medals also need to be considered as part of a wide range of visual productions that share a common language dedicated to reinforcing the powers in place. Finally, greater attention needs to be paid to the manner in which these objects (and their models) have circulated, in particular by considering the development of a market for modern and contemporary medals and their status in the make-up of private and public coin collections. This may also be an opportunity to consider the reciprocal influence between the evolution of the taste and interest of collectors and production styles, techniques, and themes through time.

This conference will showcase current research that can provide an alternative to a very dispersed historiography dominated by the genre of the catalogue. We hope that a comparative effort, with cases from across Europe, in a large chronological frame will help to establish an interdisciplinary approach to the production and circulation of medals and similar objects; one that reflects their complex nature and the specificity of their biographies. We welcome perspectives from a range of disciplines and research perspectives including art history, social and political history, numismatics, material culture studies, etc.

Proposal of no more than 400 words should be sent accompanied by a short CV before the 6th of November 2016 to the following address: colloquemedailles2017@gmail.com. Each presentation should aim to be no longer than 20 minutes, and the conference papers will be published. Languages are French and English. The organizing committee will give notice of acceptance by mid December 2016.

Organizing Committee
Felicity Bodenstein, docteur en Histoire de l’art, Kunsthistorisches
Institut, Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut
Thomas Cocano, doctorant en Histoire, EPHE
Ludovic Jouvet, doctorant en Histoire de l’art, Université de Bourgogne/ INHA
Katia Schaal, doctorante en Histoire de l’art, École du Louvre / Université de Poitiers / INHA
Sabrina Valin, doctorante en Histoire de l’art, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense

Scientific Committee
Marc Bompaire, directeur d’études, EPHE
Béatrice Coullaré, chargée de conservation, Monnaie de Paris
Frédérique Duyrat, directrice du département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, BnF
Victor Hundsbuckler, conservateur du patrimoine, responsable de la Conservation, Monnaie de Paris
Thierry Sarmant, conservateur en chef, Service historique de la Défense à Vincennes
Philippe Thiébaut, conservateur général du patrimoine, conseiller scientifique, INHA
Inès Villela-Petit, conservatrice du patrimoine, département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, BnF

Institutional Partners
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (École doctorale 395, Milieux, cultures et sociétés du passé et du présent – Laboratoire du HAR, Histoire des Arts et des Représentations)
École pratique des hautes études (EPHE)
Monnaie de Paris
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA)