Enfilade

From The Paul Mellon Centre:

Transforming Topography
The British Library, London, 6 May 2016

Proposals due by 30 September 2015

From H-ArtHist:

Fabrications: Designing for Silk in the 18th Century
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 5 March 2016

Proposals due by 4 September 2015

Organised by Katie Scott and Lesley Miller

Joubert de la Hiberderie’s Le Dessinateur d’étoffes d’or, d’argent, et de soie (1765) was the first book to be published on textile design in Europe. In preparation for the publication of an English translation and critical edition of the text this one day conference calls for papers that will analyse, critique, contextualise, review or otherwise engage with the Le Dessinateur in the light of its themes: production, design, technology, education, botany and art. Joubert’s manual argues for both a liberal and a technological education for the ideal designer. Such a person must, he argues, have detailed knowledge of the materials, technologies and traditions of patterned silk in order successfully to propose new designs; he or she must also have taste and an eye for beauty, which call, he says, for travel in order to see both the beauties of nature and those of art gathered in the gardens and galleries of Paris and the île de France.

We invite contributions from historians—of the book, of art and design, of science, of technology, and of matters social, industrial and economic. General questions we hope the conference will consider are: Who did Joubert hope to address through his book and to what end? What was the international reach of the book?  And what other texts were its competitors? What does Le Dessinateur tell us about the status, role and skills of the designer? How did attitudes to gender inform Joubert’s notion of design and manufacture? How did his ideal designer compare to what we know about the careers and livelihoods of designers at Lyons and elsewhere? What relationship did Joubert envisage between design and technology, drawing and weaving? We welcome proposals that address silk in its uniqueness and also those attentive to its relations of difference and similarity to other textile technologies. Finally, we welcome submissions from writers and critics on contemporary textiles interested in thinking about issues of fabric threaded through concerns and examples from the past.

Whatever the historical perspective, we call for submissions that engage with the priorities and explicit arguments of Joubert’s text and also those that look at it awry: for example, with a view to the phenomenology as well as the technology of production, or with respect to the cut, tuck and fold as well than the plane in design, with regard also to the iterations of pattern in use as well as the invention of singular design motifs, or to give one last example, in relation to tradition and memory as well as novelty and fashion.

Please send your proposed title, a brief 150 word abstract and a short CV to Katie Scott (katie.scott@courtauld.ac.uk) and Lesley Miller (le.miller@vam.ac.uk) by Friday, 4th September. Some financial support for travel expenses may be available.

Inaugural Symposium of the Association of Print Scholars
Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), New York, 7 November 2015

Proposals due by 15 August 2015

Organized by Maeve Coudrelle (Tyler School of Art, Temple University), Allison Rudnick (The Graduate Center, CUNY and The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Britany Salsbury (RISD Museum), and Christina Weyl (Independent Scholar)

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) is pleased to announce a symposium to support new critical ideas and research about printmaking. The event will occur during Print Week in New York, which includes major events such as the IFPDA Print Fair, the E/AB Fair and more. We invite two types of proposals:
• 20-minute papers for a scholarly panel entitled ‘Method, Material and Meaning: Technical Art History and the Study of Prints’ (details below)
• 5-minute presentations for the Graduate Student Lightning Round; proposed papers should come from
current graduate students at the dissertation stage

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 500 words along with a CV or brief biographical statement by August 15 to symposium@printscholars.org. Please indicate in the subject line which type of paper (scholarly session or lightning round) you are proposing and apply to only one session type. Non-members may submit abstracts, but presenters must be APS members by the time of the symposium.

Method, Material, and Meaning: Technical Art History and the Study of Prints

Technical art history, an interdisciplinary methodology with growing popularity among scholars, curators, and conservators, draws connections between an object’s making and its interpretation. The application of technical art history to the study of prints is particularly fruitful as printmakers often draw upon diverse and complex techniques in order to generate imagery. From the sixteenth-century engravings of Hendrik Goltzius, who skillfully imitated other media, to the prints of contemporary artist Kiki Smith, who produces fleshy bodies on thin, skin-like Gampi paper, printmakers throughout history have engaged a variety of processes and materials  in order to elicit particular ideas, emotions, or interactions. The selection of technique, matrix, ink, varnish or support may have a profound effect on the final product and its meaning.

This conference seeks to investigate the relationship between specific technical choices made by printmakers, printers, or publishers in order to rethink more broadly the relationship between process, material and meaning in the graphic arts. We seek papers that focus on a wide range of chronological periods and geographic locations in order to highlight overarching methodological issues. Questions to consider:
• How can technical analysis aid in understanding artists’ strategic decisions, including their use of printmaking within a larger multimedia practice?
• What can conservation science tell us about the life and contemporary importance of a print?
• How has print scholarship grown beyond connoisseurship, towards a more holistic account of engagement with the viewer?
• How does the transfer of information from the matrix to the receiving surface affect the resulting imagery and its significance?

APS is a nonprofit members’ group for enthusiasts of printmaking that brings together the diverse print community: curators, collectors, academics, graduate students, artists, conservators, critics, independent scholars, and art dealers. APS’s goals are to encourage innovative and interdisciplinary study of printmaking and to facilitate dialogue among its members.

From H-ArtHist:

Early Modern Artistic Lexicography: Words for Theory, Words for Practice
Forms, Uses, and Issues in Early Modern Artistic Lexicography, 1600–1750
Montpellier, 15–17 June 2016

Proposals due by 15 October 2015

In the prospect of the circulation of concepts and practices and the permeability of artistic boundaries, the project LexArt—Words of Art: The Rise of a Terminology (1600–1750) which began in April 2013, studies the development of artistic vocabulary in the seventeenth-century, beginning with the Italian vocabulary of the great foundational texts, and how it transforms in the first part of the eighteenth-century among North European theorists in relation with artistic practices in France, Germany, England and the Netherlands. Words are agents in the circulation of concepts, and turn out to be a significant site of experimentation, dissemination, transfers and networks across artistic communities in early modern Europe. Though the chronological and geographical boundaries, as well as the scope of the LexArt project itself are defined precisely, the purpose of this symposium is the necessary confrontation with other patterns from a methodological and conceptual perspective, and the extending of precise themes in order to provide a theoretical as well as concrete framework for the tools being developed by the LexArt project, namely the database (web application with interface under development), and the Encyclopedic Dictionary of artistic Terminology (in preparation) which are both based on publication of specific and targeted sources. This symposium proposes various directions and fields of research through interdisciplinary and related approaches, to better grasp and define the forms, uses and issues of early modern artistic theory.

1. Books on art
This interdisciplinary session examines the book as object in the broadest possible sense: from the publication of a book to its dissemination and its audiences, but also its composition (index, glossaries, table of contents). It may also consider the place and role of illustrations in texts on art, the complementarity or discrepancy between illustrations and text, the use and revival of models, as well as the confrontation between literary and visual descriptions of the work of art.

2. Languages: the book as lexical laboratory
To provide a more comprehensive account of the issues at stake, this session considers topics that lie beyond the geographical and chronological scope of the LexArt Project. Different approaches may be imagined from examples found in historical lexicography from Baldinucci to the Encyclopédie méthodique: the mutation of lexical models from classical antiquity or from foundational Italian texts in early modern Europe; the vocabulary of theoretical texts versus that of artistic biographies; poetical language in the theory of art: words and the idiom of an artistic theory.

3. Words and practices: from the studio to the Academy
This session addresses the rapport between theory and practice, and more specifically the transfer of knowledge through the words used in texts on art. It will explore the connections and differences between the appearance of a word and its practice as well as more generally the question of jargon or the relation between words and artistic professions.

4. Translating words
The session approaches artistic lexicography by looking at strategies and process of transfers in textual translations from the early modern era. As well as focusing on networks, it may examine the use of multilingualism in historical lexicography, the notion of transfer as an element of conciliation or differentiation, or even leading to loss of meaning, and more generally on the life of European transfer networks between vivification, transformation, forgotten or abandonment, or the role of the translator as creator of words.

5. Workshop (or round table discussion): Questions, themes and perspectives
This session welcomes contributions that focus on methods of research or more general issues of methodology related to the construction of databases or other web-based instruments.
• The publication of illustrations: selection and indexation of images in databases.
• Cartography, the atlas of words, and the dictionary:  the genealogy and typology of words and their topography, the transfer of words from a text to a figured word in an atlas.
• Paradigms of research and interactivity in databases: computerization, digitalization, navigation.
• Questions and perspectives: using concrete examples to think about the use of computer systems for the study of artistic lexicography according to different objects (whether monographic or transversal) but also to raise questions about use and misuse of these new tools.

Submission Modalities
• abstracts for papers should be no longer than 400 or 500 words and be headed by a title
• they can be in either French or English
• they should be complemented by a CV
• each proposal will be examined by the Scientific Committee of LexArt

Proposals should be sent to these two addresses: michele-caroline.heck@univ-montp3.fr and marianne.freyssinet@univ-montp3.fr

Scientific Committee
• Michèle-Caroline Heck, porteur du projet LexArt, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
• Jan Blanc, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Université de Genève
• Olivier Bonfait, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Université de Bourgogne
• Ralph Dekoninck, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Université catholique de Louvain
• Emmanuelle Henin, Professeur de littérature française – Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
• Cecilia Hurley, Enseignant-chercheur (HDR) – Ecole du Louvre et Université de Neuchâtel
• Thomas Kirchner, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Directeur du Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte – Max Weber Stifung
• Christian Michel, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Université de Lausanne
• Alessandro Nova, Professeur d’histoire de l’art – Directeur du Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
• Caroline Van Eck, Professeur d’histoire de l’art moderne – Universiteit Leiden

From the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici:

Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art
Università degli Studi di Firenze and the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, 31 March — 1 April 2016

Proposals due by 15 October 2015

Conference organized by Maia Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano

As has often been noted, monographic or retrospective exhibitions that illustrate the career of a single individual are largely a product of the late 19th-century desire to commemorate the deaths or centenaries of artists (e.g. Michelangelo, Firenze 1875; Donatello, Firenze 1886/87 to cite two Italian examples) or to serve patriotic ends using famous artists of the past to raise the status of an emerging nation state (e.g. Holbein, Dresden, 1871, discussed by Francis Haskell). While there are some earlier examples such as the Reynolds retrospective of 1813 at the Royal Academy, it is only in the second half of the century that the practice becomes common. By the early 20th century, some of these exhibitions had become truly art-historical in focus in that their curators approached their subjects with the express purpose of visually chronicling the development of an artist during his career and providing a venue for connoisseurship, and in this way providing opportunities for new approaches to scholarship.

Even those exhibitions of commemorative natures influenced art historical scholarship which, not surprisingly, emerged in the same decades that such exhibitions became popular, as attested to by the Holbein example. The nascent scientific discipline of art history owes much to the developing scientific rigor with which such monographic exhibitions were increasingly equipped—another theme we seek to elaborate through the individual studies. While much work has been done on the development of art historical literature, including the development of the art historical monograph (Gabriele Guercio), and to a lesser extent on the history of exhibitions (Francis Haskell, Enrico Castelnuovo, Roberto Longhi), the important relationship between the two has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves.

In an effort to better understand how the relationship between monographic exhibitions and artistic monographs has changed over time and with respect to the typology of artist subject (old master, contemporary or recently deceased), we invite papers on any aspect of how monographic or retrospective exhibitions have interacted with art history in different time periods and geographical contexts, including but not limited to the changing role of copies vs. originals, the development of connoisseurship, the role of historical documentation, the evolution of the scholarly catalogue, and considerations upon how artists were viewed by their contemporaries. It is one of our objectives to create an opportunity for scholars of various chronological frames from the Middle Ages to contemporary to exchange ideas regarding the fundamental role played by monographic exhibitions in the fields of art history and criticism. Since retrospectives were not confined to painters and sculptors—composers for example regularly received them from the 1930s—papers which address the role of like events in relation to different fields are most welcome, particularly if parallels may be drawn with the visual arts.

The conference will be held at the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Università degli Studi di Firenze, 31 March – 1 April 2016. Lodging and meals will be provided for those whose papers have been accepted. The proceedings will be published. Please send your 200–300 word abstract in Italian or English and CV by 15 October 2015 to the conference secretary, Myra Stals: myra.stals@lorenzodemedici.it.

Thomas Rowlandson, Breaking up of the Blue Stocking Club. Published: [London] : By Thos. Tegg, No. 111 Cheapside, [March 1, 1815?]. Lewis Walpole Library, #11823.

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From the conference website:

Difficult Women in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680–1830
University of York, 28 November 2015

Proposals due by 1 July 2015

The long eighteenth century witnessed an age of social and political revolution which profoundly affected the way in which women occupied and contributed to the public sphere. This interdisciplinary conference looks at representations and conceptions of ‘difficult women’ from 1680 to 1830. The term ‘difficult women’ encapsulates many different female experiences and lifestyles. From religiously non-conformist women to women bearing arms, a plethora of ‘difficult women’ find representation within the British Empire. This conference welcomes abstracts and/or proposals for panels on any topic relating to ‘Difficult Women’ throughout the long eighteenth century.

Topics can include, but are not limited to
• Dissenting Women – Preaching and teaching women, women writing theological texts, Methodist, Quaker, or Moravian women
• The Politically Engaged – Women involved in revolution (Glorious, American, French), female campaigners, authors of political pamphlets, female protestors, women assisting politicians
• Sexually Non-Conformist Women – Lesbianism, cross-dressers, spinsters, prostitutes, promiscuous women
• Women of the Pen – Female philosophers, published authors, bluestockings and similar intellectual circles
• Armed, Dangerous, and Criminal – Murderesses, warriors, thieves, female prisoners, representations of armed women
• Women in Art – Representations of women in satirical prints, portraiture, depictions of the female body, female artists
• Theatrical Women – Travesty roles, gender-bending roles, breeches parts and various forms of theatrical dress, women working in theatre
• Sporting Women – Female cricketers, hunters, horse riders, boxers
• Women of the Larger British Empire – Black women, women of ethnic minorities, women of conquered territories as a form of ‘other’
• Women and Medicine – Hysteria, Melancholia and Femininity, Depictions of Childbirth, Love’s Madness, the female body, female medical practitioners, midwives

Please send abstracts/panel proposals of no more than 500 words to difficultwomenconference@gmail.com by July 1st 2015. Panel proposal submissions should include the full name, affiliation, and email addresses of all participants.

By my quick count, 9 of the 34 sessions proposed for the Association of Art Historians 2016 conference could include eighteenth-century papers. Be sure to consult the conference website for things I’ve overlooked. –CH

42nd Annual AAH Conference and Bookfair
University of Edinburgh, 7–9 April 2016

Proposals due by 9 November 2015

AAH2016 will highlight the diversity, scope and importance of art-historical research and its application today. AAH2016 will engage with current art historical scholarship in exciting and innovative ways, across a range of periods, locations, and media. Academic Sessions will cross disciplinary boundaries. They will, for instance, explore relationships between the visual and the textual, between fashion and art history, between art and architecture, between art and economics, or between art and science. Other sessions will highlight issues of time and periodisation, exploring revivalism, re-enactment, and extinction. Or highlight advancing technologies and media, including video games and cybernetics. AAH 2016 also presents an opportunity to reflect on nationalism and its conflicts and contradictions in the past and present, as well as opening the discipline of art history up to broader audiences.

If you would like to offer a paper, please email the session convenor(s) direct, providing an abstract of a proposed paper of 30 minutes. Abstracts to be no more than 250 words, and to include your name and institution affiliation (if any). Download a Paper Proposal Guidelines here.

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Session 1 | Air and the Visual
Convenor: Amanda Sciampacone, Birkbeck, University of London, asciampacone@gmail.com

‘The air is unique among the elements in having this affinity with nothingness, in signifying the being of non-being, the matter of the immaterial’ (Steven Connor, The Matter of Air, 31).

The materiality of the air has long been at the forefront of our cultural and visual imaginary. Air has variously been associated with life and death, purity and pollution, circulation and stagnation. It is a thing that moves and flows across space and time. It is also a site of transmission, a force that conveys both the tangible and intangible. From vapours, microbes, and particulates to signals, sounds, and images, the air is heavy with matter and meaning. Air is an element that can produce, elude, and be captured by the visual.

Following Connor, this session seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. How has air, or its vacuum, been visualised in art? How do images of the air, and their very dissemination, highlight particular meanings and connections? How do new optical technologies, modes of visual reproduction, and methods of investigation allow people to study and depict the air? This session invites papers from across historical periods and media that engage with the visual, material, and metaphorical forms of air. Papers that explore the theme through a cross-disciplinary approach—for instance, linking art history to environmental studies, the history of science and medicine, or art theory and practice—are especially welcome.

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Session 4 | Art History Matters: Research and Writing as Material Practice
Convenors: Jennifer Walden, University of Portsmouth, jenny.walden@port.ac.uk; Veronica Davies, The Open University and Chair of Freelance & Independents’ Special Interest Group

Following the critique of art history as an ideological project, with the political urgency of the Marxist, feminist and postcolonial interventions in the latter 1970s and 1980s and later philosophical discursive turns, there comes a reawakening of the discipline’s work as itself material, to be understood in terms of its own affective force.

This is evidenced by a desire to foreground, often alongside practitioners, ‘creative’ art history practice, stretching the weave of its texts, expressing and performing encounters with its objects (see Art History Special Issue 34/2/April 2011 Creative Writing and Art History and Courtauld Art History Research Students’ Group: Performing Art History events 2010/11) or to reveal the tension between a discourse of ‘images’ and stubborn/elusive material objects (see Art History Special Issue 36/3/June 2013 The Clever Object) and by a (re) casting of art historical work in the wake of a turn to a new materialism, twisting from an emphasis on (de)constructivist characteristics towards the material emergence of its knowledge and affect. This is also provoked by the insistence coming from the practices of making art that there is an embodied material practice at stake as a form of knowledge which a hitherto preoccupation with signification and representation may not fully grasp.

This session will explore how art historical research and writing has worked and presently works as material practice. Papers are welcome which critically examine examples pushing the discipline’s methodological boundaries with materialist and creative urgencies, as contributions to these understandings of art historical mattering.

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Session 12 | From Antique Craft to Modern Ideology: Mosaics as Public Art
Convenor: Antonio David Fiore, The Open University, antodavidfiore@gmail.com

Mosaic, because of its close relationship with architecture, has always been an ideal vehicle for the symbolically and ideologically charged art to be found on the walls of public and religious buildings. Nevertheless, after the celebrated achievements of Antique masters, neglect seems to follow. Yet, the calling of Giovanni Belloni (1772–1863) to set up a national Mosaic School in post-revolutionary France in 1798, the decoration of Westminster Palace in London (1922; 1926) and Foro Mussolini in Rome (1931–38), Ben Shahn’s Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1967, Syracuse, USA) are but a few, deliberately disparate, examples of a modern renaissance.

More than other techniques of architectural decoration, such as fresco and sculpture, mosaic reflected ambiguities and uncertainties of a practice constantly suspended between experimentation and revival. Challenges included: the separation between designer and craftsman, the impact of new materials and semi-industrial practices such as the indirect method, and the relationship with the Antique traditions. For example, late Roman and Byzantine mosaics, with their anti-perspective and anti-naturalistic approach, were often referenced by modern artists when asked to justify their position theoretically. However, the varieties of motives and forms used in practice were often unorthodox.

This panel aims to highlight questions of relationship between artists and artisans, iconography, technique and materials, relationship with the architectural space, patronage, and reception. How do we inscribe mosaics into a socially engaged art history? Papers are invited that situate mosaic of any period as works of art that conjure up dialogue between tradition, revival, and renewal.

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Session 16 |  Iteration
Convenor: Robin Schuldenfrei, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Robin.Schuldenfrei@courtauld.ac.uk

This session will consider the ways in which multiple stages, phases, or periods in an artistic or design process have served to arrive at the final artefact, with a focus on the meaning and use of the iteration, over the end result. In examining iteration this session seeks to explore ways of theorising ideas surrounding series of objects, whether the original, the interim object, the design proposal, or the copy, vis-à-vis antecedents and successive exemplars. This session asks how a closer look at iterations of a single object-type—whether art, architecture, book or media-object—might reveal new insight into the production of objects and the production of thought alike.

The palimpsestic qualities of the artistic or architectural sketchbook, as well as practices of urban renewal and urban design, represent one kind of iteration. New, often more numerous editions of earlier works, such as the plaster casts of Louise Bourgeois re-released in bronze, or the multiples of Joseph Beuys, are another example of this phenomenon. The relationship of works in a series to an inaccessible ‘original’ is also germane to discussions of iteration—especially when not executed by the artist’s own hand, such as copies of Renaissance studio painting, or in the use of reproductive media such as Andy Warhol’s silk screens executed by assistants, as well as the copy in its many forms. Iteration can have political implications, especially in the built environment, when a predecessor’s physical manifestations are over-written by that of the successor or a victorious nation. There is the potential to highlight the latent instability of art and architectural objects in instances of a lack of a single, identifiable original artefact or trajectory. Yet, in the case of lost or mysterious objects, what is not known might be as useful as what is known, as it allows successive cultures to ascribe new significance—or speculation—to these works, offering further cultural understanding. And how might a Derridian rethinking of iteration be helpful in contemplating a shift in emphasis from the subject to the object’s own agency in an iterability that is both a repetition and a differing?

From a range of perspectives, this session seeks to look broadly at meaning and insight offered by the iteration, the multiple, and the design process, for historical research and its methods. Particularly desired are papers considering theoretical formulations of iteration, in addition to historical case studies, from any period in art, architecture, and urban planning.

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Session 24 | Sculpture and the Decorative
Convenors: Claire Jones, Independent, jones.claire@gmail.com; and Imogen Hart, University of California, Berkeley, imogenhart@berkeley.edu

The history of sculpture has largely been written with an emphasis on free-standing, monumental, figurative, single-authored works created by named sculptors, primarily in bronze, marble and plaster. Decorative arts scholarship has been predominantly concerned with works created by named manufacturers, and with the impact of industrialisation on craft and related issues around mass production, taste, labour and commerce. Yet cross-fertilisations between sculpture and the decorative have played a vital role in the formal practices and aesthetics of art production, bringing sculptors into contact with diverse makers, materials, techniques, forms, colours, ornament, scales, styles, patrons, audiences and subject matter, to produce composite, multi-material, quasi-functional and multi-authored objects.

This session will explore the decorative as a historically fertile, parallel and contested field of sculptural production. We invite proposals that address affinities between sculpture and the decorative in any culture or period from the Middle Ages to the present day, and which explore the cross-disciplinary connections between the institutional, biographical, conceptual, visual, material and professional histories of the two fields. Topics might include artistic autonomy and creativity; the fragment and the composite work; figuration and relief; the hierarchy of the arts; copyright and authorship; originality and reproduction; and the languages and histories of making and materials. We also welcome papers that examine sculpture and the decorative in relation to the racialization, nationalisation and gendering of the practices of art, craft and manufacturing.

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Session 26 | Style as History: Self-reflective Moments in Drawing
Convenors: Amy Concannon, Tate Britain, amy.concannon@tate.org.uk; and Iris Wien, Institut für Kunstwissenschaften und Historische Urbanistik, Technical University Berlin, iris.wien@tu-berlin.de

Since the Renaissance drawings have been inextricably linked with their authors. Drawings were thought to embody in a seemingly direct and unmediated way the artist’s pictorial thinking. They were understood as both traces of the process of artistic creation and highly idiosyncratic demonstrations of the manipulation of line, form and texture. More recently, increased attention has been paid to drawing as a discipline replete with its own tacit conventions and handed-down formulae that not only guides the learner in the acquisition of a certain facility and skill but also reveals the collective aspect of the art as a system of rule-bound notations. Concurrent with the efforts of academies to promote drawing as a universal visual language, the drawing collections of the 16th and 17th centuries and more particularly the great 18th-century cabinets, along with the ensuing publications by renowned collectors and connoisseurs, fostered an historical understanding of this art.

This session explores how artists across Europe have dealt with these developments. How have they reacted to different conceptions of stylistic formation when developing their own manner of drawing or engaging with drawing styles of the past? What kind of role has the recourse to—or rejection of—past traditions of drawing played in the construction of artists’ identities and their self-positioning within the competitive arena of contemporary draughtsmanship? This session invites papers that examine how the historicity of form is reflected in drawings from the early modern period to the present day.

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Session 27 | The (After) Lives of Things: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Material Culture
Convenors: Sarah Laurenson, University of Edinburgh, sarah.laurenson@ed.ac.uk; and Freya Gowrley, University of Edinburgh, f.l.gowrley@gmail.com

Material things have been used to fashion identities and form social relationships throughout history. This panel seeks to shed light on the intersecting histories of materiality and process in the production and consumption of material culture. It invites papers that examine how physical and intellectual practices such as collecting, repurposing and remaking conveyed materially embedded messages about the subjective experience of their owner-makers, as well as the period in which they were undertaken more broadly. Such practices performed not only physical but semantic changes upon these objects which, due to their revised contexts, reciprocally enacted changes upon their possessors. Examining how these processes allowed individuals to construct identities, spaces, and social bonds, this panel will address issues central to the ‘material turn’ that has characterised recent scholarship within the humanities and, in particular, that of art history.

Papers concerning all geographical areas and time periods—from the beginning of human history to the present day—are welcome. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to
• object biographies
• construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction
• adaptation and alteration
• quotation and pastiche, bricollage and photomontage
• movement: mobility, translation, and geographical transformation
• composite forms of artistic production: quilting, shell/feather/paper-work, collaging
• affective, familial, and emotional objects
• modes of acquisition: collection, found objects, inheritance, and gift exchange
• the relationship between mass production and personal identity

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Session 28 | The Artist as Historian
Convenors: James J Bloom, Centre College, james.bloom@centre.edu; and Amy Reed Frederick, Centre College, amy.frederick@centre.edu

This session seeks to examine the scope and range of artistic activities that can be construed as historical enterprise. Although history is conventionally understood as the product of scholarly discourse, we invite papers that recognise in the historical engagements of artists the possibility of an alternative model of history making. To cite just a few examples, Jan van Scorel, Keeper of the Vatican Antiquities and celebrated 16th-century painter in his own right, was perhaps the first of many artists to have restored the Ghent Altarpiece (though his historicising efforts in both capacities have been broadly ignored); William Morris reportedly pursued extensive research into the production of medieval manuscripts (an historical exercise that has been dismissed as medievalist fantasy); and while it is well known that Pablo Picasso reproduced techniques and motifs won from the study of Rembrandt’s etchings, Picasso’s attentions have not been assessed for their historicist implications. While obviously different from traditional scholarly understandings of historical representation, can we yet discern or distinguish a discrete critical value in such explorations?

We welcome studies that identify instances from any historical moment or cultural geography in which artists and architects explicitly set themselves the task of excavating the past. These might include—but are not limited to—architectural reconstructions, pictorial or sculptural restorations, and explorations of facture (copying, forgery, appropriation) that are self-consciously historicising. Ultimately, we hope to collectively consider how an examination of artists’ conceptions of historical representation might affect our understanding of history itself.

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Session 33 | The Place of Fashion Studies in Academia
Convenors: Alessandro Bucci, The University of Edinburgh, a.g.bucci@sms.ed.ac.uk; and Chiara Faggella, Stockholm University, chiara.faggella@ims.su.se

Fashion Studies is a field of knowledge with deep historical roots within History of Art. However, as apparently disparate approaches flank the traditional historiographies of dress, its placement in scholarly settings is, today more than ever, up for discussion. Still innovating, even if Fashion Studies has been an academic topic for more than 30 years now, academics often feel the need to deconstruct disciplinary boundaries within this wide research area. While understanding fashion as a meaningful system within which the production of the cultural and aesthetic representations of the body is made possible, research in Fashion Studies all over the world is undertaken from different perspectives in diverse university departments, including History of Art, Media Studies, Design, Literature, and Cultural Studies. Thus, university programmes in Fashion Studies enrich their unique profiles alongside academic traditions connected to their own institutions, yet the global amount of graduates in this field undoubtedly shares a mutual ground. We believe that the interdisciplinarity of Fashion Studies is an advantage to all individuals and institutions involved. This panel aims to be an occasion to discuss what we have in common as scholars, our independent goals as researchers and our outlook on the future as educators. Therefore, we welcome contributions that highlight the copious nuances that can be explored within Fashion Studies, including, but not limited to
• collaborations between educational institutions and the fashion industry
• higher-education programs combining Fashion Design and Fashion Studies
• academic journals specialising in Fashion; the predominance of English-speaking contributions within Fashion academia
• pedagogical field research conducted within Fashion Studies programs
• the role of Fashion Studies in museums or heritage institutions
• historical trends in researching Fashion Studies among and across disciplines.

From H-ArtHist (which includes the call in German and Spanish). . .

The Power of Symbols: The Alhambra in a Global Context
Zürich, 16–17 September 2016

Proposals due by 1 September 2015

Keynote Speakers: Fernando Valdés Fernández (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Pedro A. Galera Andreu (Universidad de Jaén)

In view of the current international globalisation debate, this two-day conference intends to foster a re-interpretation of the Alhambra. Topics like the positioning of the Nasrid architecture in a global Islamic context, the phenomenon of cultural exchange on the Iberian Peninsula, the controversial debate of Orientalism after Said’s Orientalism (1978) or the political instrumentalisation of architecture will be the centre of attention.

Does the Alhambra—with its decorative motives and building techniques taken from the Islamic East, North Africa and the Christian Castile—not invite us to adopt a global point of view? Did the Alhambra of the 19th and early 20th century, famous through its neo-Nasrid buildings and interiors, not stand at the beginning of a global building tradition, which spread out to the New World? At the same time, the reception of the Alhambra raises conceptual questions. Has the significance of the Nasrid palace-town for the national identity of Christian Spain been perceived outside the Iberian Peninsula? Why did other nations, such as Brazil for instance, choose to represent themselves with neo-Nasrid pavilions at the International World Exhibitions?

The world-wide fame of the Alhambra, that mostly relies upon British and French travellers of the 18th and 19th century, has however also its negative sides. How can the Nasrid palaces be conserved for future generations? Can the increasing pressure of the tourism industry be faced, and how? Which are the actual challenges that Granada, the Patronato and the international research community have to face?

The following four sections are planned:
• The Alhambra in Islamic Times
• The Alhambra and National Identity
• The Alhambra in the World
• The Alhambra in the 21st Century—New Challenges

Conferences will have a duration of 20 minutes. Conference languages will be German, English and French. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a short CV, should be sent to:
conference@transculturalstudies.ch.

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From the call for papers:

2015 Fairfax House Georgian Studies Symposium
Retail Realms: Shops, Shoppers and Shopping in Eighteenth-Century Britain, c.1680–1830
York Hilton Hotel and Fairfax House, York, 22–23 October 2015

Proposals due by 31 July 2015

The eighteenth century was a transformative age for shops and shopping in Britain. Between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries far-reaching changes took place in the ways people shopped, the things they bought, the shops themselves and the ways in which they were run, and the systems of distribution and marketing which made possible the shopping experience.

For an increasing portion of Georgian ‘polite society’, shopping, from being primarily a matter of obtaining the necessities of life, became a pleasurable leisure activity in its own right, associated with sociability, sensory experience, the fashioning of selfhood and the expression of individual and collective identities. Many historians who have explored the social and cultural dynamics of shopping in the eighteenth century have argued that this period saw a ‘consumer revolution’.

Theorisations of eighteenth-century consumerism, however, tend to overlook or disregard the materiality and spatiality of the shopping experience: the Georgian retail realm was not just a social or economic process but a place, located in shops, showrooms, markets and high streets, and extending into the assembly rooms and drawing rooms, and indeed the bedrooms and dressing rooms, of polite society. From the packaging of goods and the display of signs and labels, print advertising and the design of shops, to the increasing prominence of shops in towns and cities and the refashioning of the urban environment around the shopping experience, the retail realm was an increasingly important factor in the physical reshaping of eighteenth-century British life.

This symposium, the third Fairfax House Symposium in Georgian Studies, aims to bring together interested parties from curatorial, conservation, academic and other backgrounds with an interest in the history of shops and shopping to explore the nature and significance of the retail realm in the long eighteenth century. The symposium, which is taking place over two days, will be organised around five broad themes:
•  A consumer revolution? — the development and transformation of the retail realm in the long eighteenth century
•  Shopping outside the shop — publicity, marketing, the retail realm interacting with the urban, rural and domestic realms
•  Shopping inside the shop — the design, layout and furnishing of shops, the display of goods, the management of the shopping experience
•  The shopper’s realm — shopping as a fashionable/leisure pursuit and a social activity, the sensory/haptic dimensions of shopping
•  The retailer’s realm — how retailers perceived shopping and shoppers, new retail arenas and models, the materiality of the retail business

Proposals are invited for symposium contributions not exceeding 20 minutes in length addressing one or more of the themes identified above. Please send outlines of around 200 words, accompanied by a brief one-paragraph biography, to fairfaxhousesymposium@gmail.com by Friday 31 July 2015. Any queries about the symposium should be sent to the same email address.

From H-ArtHist:

Understanding British Portraits Annual Seminar
National Portrait Gallery, London, 25 November 2015

Proposals due by 12 June 2015

Nathan Cooper Branwhite, Portrait of Reverend John Eagles, ca.1820–25 (Bristol Museum & Art Gallery)

‘Understanding British Portraits’ is an active network with free membership for professionals working with British portraits including curators, museum learning professionals, researchers, academics and conservators. It aims to enhance the knowledge and understanding of portraits in all media in British collections, for the benefit of future research, exhibitions, interpretation, display and learning programmes.

This year’s Annual Seminar will take place on Wednesday 25 November at the National Portrait Gallery, London. It aims to highlight current scholarly research, museum-based learning programmes, conservation discoveries and curatorial practice relating to British portraits of all media and time periods.

We are now inviting proposals for 20-minute papers from museum professionals, scholars, conservators, and independent researchers which focus on these areas and seek to share innovation, challenges, or best practice case studies. Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) with a short biographical note (max. 100 words) in Word format to mail@britishportraits.org.uk before Friday 12 June.

More information is available here»