Enfilade

From the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art:

Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 7 October 2016

Proposals due by 8 July 2016

The Paul Mellon Centre’s research project Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display investigates the collection and display of works of art in the country house in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day. Focusing on specific case studies, the project addresses two closely related issues:
• The formation, character and function of country-house art collections
• The conventions, development and dynamics of pictorial and sculptural display within the country house

The crucial importance of the country house to understanding the history of art-collection and display in Britain is indisputable and of long-standing interest to historians of British art. This project, in turning a fresh eye on the collections of art associated with the country house, builds on exciting new developments within this area of scholarship, which shed new light on the wide range of motivations and circumstances that have shaped such collections. The project extends to the country house a growing scholarly interest in modes of pictorial display, which has hitherto tended to focus on the display of paintings, sculpture, and prints within more urban and public environments, and on the exhibition space in particular.

The project will concentrate attention on the ways in which country house art collections were formed and on the reasons why they took the form they did. It will address the impact upon collecting practices of such factors as the growth of continental travel, the development of a sophisticated art market, fluctuations in taste, and dynastic ambitions and familial alliances. It will also address the conditions, facilities, and habits of display in the country house, investigating such issues as the shifting modes of the picture hang, the introduction of dedicated gallery spaces within the country house, the relationship between the country house and the town house as sites of collection and display, the development of cataloguing, and the growth of professional curatorship.

As an integral part of this project, the Centre is organizing the first of a series of conferences designed to showcase new research in this area. We invite proposals for 30-minute papers which discuss some aspect of the collecting and/ or display of art in a single country house from any point over the past five hundred years. We welcome proposals from academics, museum curators, independent scholars, those working in the heritage sector, and those actively involved in postgraduate studies. While the Call for Papers has a purposefully broad and open brief, it is essential that submissions offer fresh, methodologically ambitious perspectives on the topic.

Possible themes for exploration might include, but are not limited to:
• The impact of commerce and travel on collecting
• The creation and presentation of spaces for display
• The commissioning and display of portraiture in the country house
• The collecting and display of historic and/or contemporary art
• The relationship between country- and town-house modes of collection and display
• The interaction of works of art within the country-house interior
• The relationship between the fine and decorative arts in country-house display
• Patterns of display across the different rooms of a single country house

Proposals, of no more than 250 words, together with a short CV, for 30-minute papers, should be submitted to Ella Fleming at efleming@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by 8th July 2016.

From the conference website:

Romanticism and the Peripheries
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 5–7 December 2016

Proposals due by 30 July 2016

“The Romantic phenomenon seems to defy analysis, not only because its exuberant diversity resists any attempt to reduce it to a common denominator but also and especially because of its fabulously contradictory character” (Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. by Catherine Porter, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). In an attempt to accommodate both its diversity and contradictory character, Löwy and Sayre defined Romanticism as “a worldview constituted as a specific form of criticism of ‘modernity’” and expanded the term beyond artistic and literary phenomena to encompass a wide range of fields such as religion, political theory, philosophy, etc. Even though Löwy and Sayre may offer a guiding principle outside the interpretative confusion often generated by the term, their analysis is still mostly, if not exclusively, concerned with the definition of the phenomenon as it manifested in the principal centers of Europe (namely England, France, and Germany).

This three-day conference, organized on the occasion of the bicentenary of Fernando II’s birth, the Portuguese king responsible for the edification of what is widely considered the hallmark of Romantic Portuguese architecture, seeks to focus on Romanticism in the peripheries, both European and non-European, and explore the validity of the concept for the analysis of artistic and cultural forms that, for the most part, originated outside the centers of bourgeois industrial civilization. Taking as its starting point the definition proposed by Lowy and Sayre, the conference invites participation on a number of issues including, but not limited to:
1  When Was Romanticism? Attempts at Periodization and Definition
2  Sublime matters: Romanticism and Material Culture
3  Transfers and Cross-Sections: Literature, Theater and the Visual Arts
4  The Romantic Traveler: Drawings, Prints and Souvenirs
5  Artistic Education. Academy versus Nature?
6  Romantic Landscape, Gardens and Architecture
7  Romantic Nationalism – Romantic Imperialism? The Politics of Style

Abstracts (of no more than 300 words), accompanied by a short bio (approximately two paragraphs) should be sent to the members of the organizing committee, at iha.romanticism2016@gmail.com by July 30, 2016. Participants will be notified by the end of August, and the conference program will be published in mid-September. The languages of the conference are English and Portuguese.

A selection of papers from the conference will be published as a special number of the Revista de História da Arte, an annual peer-reviewed journal, and a second publication, in the form of a book, is also being contemplated by the organizers. For all questions regarding administration and practical matters, as well as the payment of the conference inscription, please contact Mariana Gonçalves and Inês Cristóvão (iha.romanticism2016@gmail.com). Conference inscription rates: speakers 50€, participants 40€, students 20€.

From H-ArtHist:

Collecting and Display Seminar Group
Institute of Historical Research, London, 3 October 2016 — 22 June 2017

Proposals due by 6 July 2016

Our monthly seminars cover a wide range of topics from the study of individual collectors and the art market to the many different types of collections acquired over the centuries. Although the main emphasis is on art and artefacts, collections of memorabilia, scientific or ethnographic collections have also been covered. Papers have considered every type of collection, from royal and aristocratic collections to those of private citizens.

Papers are invited for the next academic year October 2016–July 2017. We encourage research that opens the field of collecting to new debates on motives of collectors, methods and networks of collecting, the market for works of art and the roles of dealers and auction houses, different types of collections and display. We are able to offer some limited support for travel from abroad where necessary.

Please submit your proposal of 300 words with a short biography to schbracken@btopenworld.com by 6 July. Our proposed dates are 3 October, 14 November, 12 December, 9 January, 6 February, 6 March, 15 May and 20 June. Please indicate if you have a preference for one of these dates.

From the conference website:

Objects and Possessions: Material Goods in a Changing World, 1200–1800
Southampton, 3–6 April 2017

Proposals due by 12 September 2016

This interdisciplinary conference looks at material culture across a long timeframe in order to explore the worlds of goods and objects across Europe and its overseas colonies, the connections and relationships facilitated by the exchange of goods, the importance and interpretation of the inheritance of goods and objects, and the ways in which goods brokered relationships between Europe and the wider world in the period.

The aim is to deepen our understanding of how goods ‘worked’ in a variety of social, economic and cultural contexts. We know a great deal about real property and the possession of land, but comparatively little about goods and chattels and their connections, and how these developed across a long timeframe. Over the period 1200‒1800 there were great changes in the type, range and availability of goods, from the finest items of the elite, the work of craftsmen on an individual basis, to the manufacture and widespread availability of cheap and utilitarian goods and equipment.

Customs of ‘possession’ need to be exposed, to show what ownership might mean, what property might be held by women or children, and what might be considered inalienable within families. The conference will look to identify the cultural connections—and how goods and attitudes to them change culture. It will also consider how goods were transferred, exchanged and collected, as well as the ways in which objects could be used to mediate connections and broker relationships between different people and places.

Proposals are invited for single papers and for whole sessions (three papers). Papers should not exceed 30 minutes. Themes might include:
• The ownership of goods; the law and objects
• Patterns of inheritance for different categories
• The connections of different groups in society to goods, for example, domestic equipment, jewellery, textiles
• The introduction of new goods, fashions and colours
• The increasing quantities and diversity of goods
• Furnishings for household interiors
• Consumer revolutions (e.g. sugar, colour, fur)
• Vocabularies for describing goods
• Trades and markets for goods
• Processes of collecting and accumulation
• The politics of possession and display

Please send short abstracts (no more than 200 words per paper) by 12 September 2016 to Chris Woolgar (C.M.Woolgar@southampton.ac.uk).

Adapting the Eighteenth Century: Pedagogies and Practices
Edited by Sharon Harrow (Professor of English, Shippensburg University) and Kirsten Saxton (Professor of English, Mills College)

Proposals due by 15 August 2016; final essays due by 15 January 2017

The eighteenth century has quite a bit of popular currency these days; we see adaptations of eighteenth-century literature and culture on tumblr, fan fiction, web series, scent lines, cult mashups, Facebook accounts, you-tube videos, fashion, graphic novels, literary fiction, theater stagings, greeting cards, and in mainstream films. Adaptation is currently a lively intellectual topic, generating both theoretical and applied research. Theories of adaptation—including Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, Julie Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation, and Dan Hassler-Forest’s and Pascal Nicklas’s The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology—undergird recent inquiries into adaptation, including interpretations of contemporary adaptations of eighteenth-century texts, such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Longbourn, The Scandal of the Season, Foe, The Cattle Killing, Inkle and Yariko, Mother Clap’s Molly House, and Zong! In addition, new work argues for the adaptive nature of the century itself; Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Samara Anne Cahill and Kevin Cope, explores adaptations—transnational and transactional—within the century.

Our collection will build on this rich scholarly foundation to focus on adaptation and pedagogy. Adaptations of material or ideas from the long eighteenth century are often seen as middlebrow simplifications, capitalist exploitations, or, in teaching, simply as gateway texts. Rather than viewing adaptations as the spoonful of sugar, we invite essays to combine current adaptations of eighteenth-century texts or concepts with texts from the eighteenth-century in ways that provocatively and thoughtfully open up and out our own reading and teaching.

Essays might focus on the literary (novels, plays, poems), or on philosophical or scientific treatises, paintings, historical records, or musical notations. We are interested in both direct adaptations as well as in appropriations, re-mixes, or traces. We are particularly interested in essays that move beyond description of a film adaptation of a book to address new forms of media convergence and participatory culture in which reading, watching, and listening are key elements in the process of adaptation.

Adapting the Eighteenth Century: Pedagogies and Practices hopes to be broadly representative in the philosophies, methodologies, and critical orientations presented; and in the types of schools, students, and courses considered. We want the book to be relevant for non-specialists as well as specialists, for graduate student teachers as well as senior professors. We welcome essays across a range of disciplines, geographies, and levels of focus. Since this volume is dedicated to teaching,  abstracts and essays should center on pedagogical issues. Whatever its topic—practical teaching or more theoretical or topical—essays should explicitly address how they will apply to the needs of teachers in preparing and teaching classes and the needs of students in learning.

Please send a 500 word proposal/abstract and a CV to ktsaxton@mills.edu and srharr@ship.edu by August 15, 2016. We will respond with decisions by September 15, 2016. Completed essays of no more than 25 pages will be due by January 15, 2017.

From The University of Chicago Press:

“More images, please.” These words—all too rare in publishing—are commonplace for editors at Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture. More than a bunch of pretty pictures, images act as essential evidence, allowing Portfolio readers to explore a wide range of topics based on substantive object-based research. Interdisciplinary material culture scholarship rests on seeing the objects, images, places, and spaces under discussion, and the editors of Winterthur Portfolio and the University of Chicago Press are committed to providing the highest level of image quality and editing for authors from any stage in their careers.

As a journal that appears both in print and digital formats, Winterthur Portfolio welcomes traditional manuscripts as well as innovative textual, graphic, and video content. We encourage authors to use a broad range of tools and media to bring new insights and spark conversations about the material world in the Americas. A generously illustrated article, a 3-D model, a digital photo essay, or an analytical model all have a place at Winterthur Portfolio, and we look forward to hearing your ideas for cutting-edge, interdisciplinary material culture research. For inquiries and questions, please contact Executive Editor Catharine Dann Roeber (croeber@winterthur.org), or Managing Editor Amy Earls (aearls@winterthur.org), or click here .

From the conference website:

Nomadic Objects: Material Circulations, Appropriations, and the
Formation of Identities in the Early Modern Period, 1500–1800
Paris, 2–4 March 2017

Proposals are due by 15 September 2015

Domenico Remps, Trompe-l’oeil with an Open Cabinet (Cabinet of Curiosities), ca. 1690s (Florence: Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure)

This interdisciplinary conference, organized in partnership with two museums of the Paris region, the Musée National de la Renaissance in Écouen and the Musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris, seeks to confront the material history of early modern objects with their artistic and literary representations. It proposes to look at the various ‘traces’ left by material culture as it circulated and was appropriated. Studying the history of material culture (be it dress and personal accessories, everyday and decorative objects, art works, and technical, scientific, or musical instruments…) sheds light upon the various processes of cultural appropriation, transculturation or hybridization that accompanied such material circulations across Europe or between Europe and the rest of the world. Material objects, whether commodities, tools, devotional objects or works of art, can all be considered as bearers or vehicles of cultural identities. By travelling across space they call into question national, religious and linguistic boundaries. The early modern period (1500–1800) corresponds to a period when national identities became more firmly entrenched in Europe with the definition of clearer national territories, languages and religious traditions. The establishment of such boundaries resulted from the development of a new political philosophy, born in part in reaction to Renaissance court culture and its intrinsic nomadism (A. M. Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales, 1999). Following the trajectories of objects as they crossed these boundaries brings into focus the tension between sedentariness and nomadism that Daniel Roche identified as a key element in the advent of modernity (Humeurs vagabondes, 2003).

In addition to the tight network of material circulations within Europe linked to trade, diplomatic exchanges, aristocratic modes of life or religious exile at a time defined by intense religious and political strife, more complex trajectories yet are to be traced. In the context of proto-globalization and of the rise of international trading companies, goods often followed global paths, coming from distant locations and transiting through a number of countries or cultural spaces before reaching their destinations. Because these objects found their way into artistic and literary representations, they also generated in turn less material forms of circulation, posing the question of multi-layered processes of appropriation.

We are seeking proposals that address such processes of circulation and appropriation by looking at the reception of these objects in literature and the arts or at their production and consumption, and the craftsmanship, techniques or practices thereby implied. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to
• Legal and illegal networks for the circulation of objects and goods, whether through trade, smuggling or personal relationships
• Diplomatic gifts and exchanges
• Travelling objects in court culture
• Objects in exile and objects of the exiles
• The transmission of craftsmanship and technologies and its links to human migrations
• Decorative, artistic and literary motifs, and their circulations from one country to another
• The meaning and implications of literary and artistic appropriations of objects
• Processes of linguistic appropriation and cross-fertilization linked to the circulation of objects
• The notion of proto-globalization and its economic, social, material, cultural and artistic manifestations

We hope that this conference will bring into play a variety of methodologies and foster a fruitful dialogue between different disciplines (history, material culture, history of technologies, art history, European languages and literatures, anthropology, archaeology…). Outreach activities, such as workshops and round-tables open to the general public, will also be included in the program. We welcome proposals from established scholars, doctoral students, curators and other professionals working on or with early modern objects. We particularly encourage proposals discussing objects in the collections of the Musée de la Renaissance or the Musée Cognacq-Jay. 300-word proposals, along with a brief CV (1 page maximum), should be sent by September 15, 2016 to the conference organizers at objetsnomades2017@gmail.com.

Professor Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick) will be one of the keynote speakers.

Conference Organizers: Line Cottegnies (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris3); Anne-Valérie Dulac (Paris 13); Ariane Fennetaux (Paris Diderot – Paris 7); Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3); Nancy Oddo (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3); Sandrine Parageau (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense); Laetitia Sansonetti (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense); Jean-Paul Sermain (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3)

Scientific Committee: Muriel Barbier (Conservateur du patrimoine, Musée d’Ecouen) ; Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros (Conservateur du patrimoine, Palais Galliera) ; Isabelle Bour (Université Paris 3) ; Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (Professeur émérite, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) ; Rose-Marie Herda-Mousseaux (Conservatrice du Patrimoine, Musée Cognacq-Jay) ; Beverly Lemire (University of Alberta) ; Angela McShane (Victoria & Albert Museum) ; Lesley Miller (Victoria & Albert Museum), Alain Montandon (Université Blaise Pascal – Clermont II) ; Ladan Niayesh (Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7) ; Isabelle Paresys (Université Lille 3) ; Joad Raymond (Queen Mary University of London) ; Helen Smith (Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies University of York) ; Chantal Schütz (École Polytechnique).

From H-ArtHist:

Interiorities: Artistic, Conceptual, and Historical Reassessments of the Interior
Palgrave Communications
Guest Editor: Vlad Ionescu (Faculty of Architecture and Art, Hasselt University, Belgium)

Article proposals due by 31 October 2016; full submissions due by February 2017

Palgrave Communications is inviting article proposals for a collection dedicated to the theme of ‘Interiority and the Interior’. The collection addresses interiority as a concept debated by artists and philosophers, historians and sociologists alike. The goal of this interdisciplinary collection is to approach interiority and the interior as relational entities that interact with architectural spaces, visual arts and music, social and political ideologies, geographical and historical structures. We welcome contributions that address the interior as an opportunity to research the status of the subjectivity in modernity and beyond. Article proposals and enquires should be sent to the Managing Editor at palcomms@palgrave.com.

Palgrave Communications is an open access online-only journal dedicated to publishing high quality original research across all areas of the humanities, the social sciences, and business. Multi-disciplinary in scope, Palgrave Communications also champions interdisciplinary research, fostering interaction, creativity, and reflection within and between the rich disciplines the journal encompasses. The journal is supported by an international Editorial Board and aspires to be the definitive peer-reviewed outlet for open access academic research in and between its subjects. Palgrave Communications is open to submissions on all theoretical and methodological perspectives.

From H-ArtHist:

Synagogue and Museum: 3rd International Congress on Jewish Architecture
Technische Universität Braunschweig, 21–23 November 2016

Paper proposals due by 29 July 2016; poster proposals due by 30 September 2016

Since antiquity and especially since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70 CE, synagogues have become the central places of gathering of Jewish communities. They are complex, highly significant and polyvalent objects of for religious, social, economic, architectural, and artistic developments in Jewish culture. At the same time, they reflect the interdependencies with the surrounding cultures. Since the holocaust, historic synagogues also gained high importance as focal points of remembrance and education.

However, scholars were interested in the material culture(s) of Jews all over the world well before the holocaust and turned synagogues and their furnishings into a focus of their research. The documentation of synagogues as objects of cultural and historical significance started alongside with the establishment of Jewish ethnography (jüdische Volkskunde) as an academic discipline at the end of the 19th century. They became items of collecting, which were set up in exhibitions and museums. Objects from the religious and cultural practice got ‘musealised’, as well as entire synagogue furnishings and sometimes even architectural elements. After 1945, the interest in synagogues as objects of cultural history continued. Besides ritual objects and furnishings, the ’empty’ buildings of the annihilated communities became objects of interest. Historic synagogue buildings were regarded as museums, their material substance was and is restored and interpreted in different ways. The virtual and haptic reconstruction of destroyed synagogues generated another group of ‘immaterial’ exhibits.

The congress will examine the subject in a wide range of perspectives of theoretical and historical reflections. Historic and actual examples of documenting, collecting, and researching synagogues and their furnishing will shed light on the history, the presence, and the future of synagogues in and as museums. Thus, the organisers encourage scholars in the fields of art and architectural history, cultural sciences, Jewish studies, restoration and museology as well as experts in museums, collections, preservation authorities, and education programs to take part in the congress.

This call asks for papers for talks and for posters for a posters-section. It is open for young researchers as well as museums, collections and initiatives who want to present their institutions and their ongoing or future projects. The members of the international and interdisciplinary academic board and the organisers will decide on the acceptance of the papers and the posters. The publication of selected papers and posters in the book series of the Bet Tfila – Research Unit for Jewish Architecture is scheduled for 2017. The conference language is English. Provisions to refund travel expenses will depend on the approval of running applications.

To propose a paper, please send an abstract of up to 1500 characters for a lecture of 15 minutes and a short-CV of up to 500 characters in English by July 29th, 2016. To propose a poster, please send a poster (PDF-file, 5 MB max.) for the poster presentation in English by September 30th, 2016. The email address is u.knufinke@gmx.de.

The congress is organised by the Bet Tfila – Research Unit for Jewish Architecture (Braunschweig/ Jerusalem) and the Lehrstuhl für Kunstgeschichte at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg in cooperation with the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, Braunschweig, and the Israel Jacobson Netzwerk für jüdische Kultur und Geschichte e.V.