Call for Papers | ASECS 2016, Pittsburgh
2016 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Pittsburgh, 31 March — 3 April 2016
Proposals due by 15 September 2015
The 2016 ASECS conference takes place in Pittsburgh, March 31 – April 3, at the Omni William Penn. Along with our annual luncheon and business meeting, HECAA will be represented by the Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session, chaired by Janet White. In addition, a selection of sessions that might be relevant for HECAA members are included below. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here»
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Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)
Janet R. White, UNLV School of Architecture, 4505 Maryland Pkwy, Box 454018, Las Vegas, NV 89154- 4018; janet.white@unlv.edu.
This session will feature outstanding new research by emerging scholars of art and architecture in the long eighteenth century.
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Felines and Philosophers in the Eighteenth Century
Michael Yonan, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Missouri, 365 McReynolds Hall, Columbia, MO 65211; yonanm@missouri.edu.
The Comte de Buffon was not a cat person. “Unfaithful domestics,” he dubbed them, possessing “only the appearance of attachment or friendship” with their human keepers. Behind those enticing purrs and rubs lay malicious, distrustful natures, leading Buffon to question whether cats could ever be socialized completely. Even worse, unlike their wild cousins, house cats were dissimulators, “easily assuming the habits of society, but never acquiring its manners.” Buffon’s comments prophesize sentiments voiced today by those wondering how creatures with strong independent and predatory instincts ended up sleeping on our couches. They likewise reveal that something about felines remained difficult to describe within schema of animal behavior formulated in the Enlightenment. Following in the footsteps of recent ASECS panels devoted to birds, otters, and monkeys, this panel seeks papers discussing perceptions of domesticated felines in the eighteenth century. How did philosophers understand cats? How did natural historians explain their role in nature and subsequent migration into human domains? How did artists and writers formulate images and narratives that engaged with these perceptions? Papers from all disciplines are welcomed and interdisciplinary inquiries strongly encouraged.
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In the 1720s. . .
Regina Janes, Dept of English, Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866; rjanes@skidmore.edu.
Papers are invited on any aspect of the culture (sermons to opera), economics, or politics of the 1720s. The decade beginning with the South Sea Bubble, saw Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera, two versions of The Dunciad, Defoe’s novels, Mandeville’s enflaming additions to the Fable of the Bees, Watteau’s death, Hogarth’s early work, Handel’s operas, Swift’s Irish tracts, Voltaire’s English visit and commentary, the beginning of Haywood’s career and the end of Centlivre’s, the death of George I and the coronation of George II, not to mention the controversy over who translated Pope’s Odyssey. Much has been omitted. Submissions are invited, but not required, to consider whether the work or problem under consideration, the tea kettle or the map, the garden or the statistical analysis, the book or the silver tray, constitutes a beginning at this period, or an ending, or merely a fecund middle muddle.
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Mapping the Eighteenth-Century City
Hannah Williams, St John’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3JP, United Kingdom; hannah.williams@sjc.ox.ac.uk.
This session seeks to explore eighteenth-century approaches to mapping cities and current approaches to mapping eighteenth-century cities. Academically these two pursuits are often distinct, with inquires into historical maps as visual images or textual documents, and inquiries using modern mapping techniques to communicate aspects of urban life in the past. This session draws connections between these practices inviting scholars from a range of fields, including art historians, historians, historical geographers, and digital humanists, among others, to bridge the discursive gaps. Papers might consider the functions of eighteenth-century city maps—then and now; eighteenth-century cartographic aesthetics and technologies; the kinds of information eighteenth-century map- makers were trying to record or reveal; and the role these material objects can play in our own attempts, as historians, to explore eighteenth-century cities, to visualise historical data in flexible and discoverable ways, and to probe the social lives and urban experiences of eighteenth-century city inhabitants. In particular, proposals relating to recent or on-going research projects engaging with digital mapping techniques and methods are especially welcomed.
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Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication, 1662–1842
Greg Clingham, Bucknell University Press, Bucknell University, Taylor Hall 6, Lewisburg, PA 17837; clingham@bucknell.edu.
Recent recognition of the global scope of the enlightenment has emphasized international networks informing travel, scientific exploration, trade, and politics, not to mention the fascination with exotic geographies and peoples that surfaces in poetry, fiction, drama, landscape design, art, material culture, and aesthetics. This panel seeks papers that explore any aspects of the cultural and commercial transactions and networks linking the Orient – understood as China, Japan, South East Asia, the Near East (and perhaps even the Cape Colony, as a pivotal geographical link between East and West)—with Europe and America from the time of the Kangxi emperor (1662–1722) to the first Opium War (1839–42). Contributors might explore either oriental or occidental perspectives. All critical and theoretical approaches are welcome, as are papers (of no longer than 20 minutes in length) in any discipline or combination of disciplines. If circumstances are right, abstracts (or full papers) will be circulated to interested parties before the conference, and contributors will be invited to submit their papers for publication in a volume of essays by Bucknell UP. Send 1–2 page abstract plus 1-page cv to Greg Clingham (clingham@bucknell.edu).
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Inside the Artist’s Studio
Heather McPherson, Department of Art and Art History, AEIVA 211, 1221 10th Avenue South, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294; mcphers@uab.edu.
This session will examine the artist’s studio as a multi-faceted site of artistic experimentation, creation, and display; social interchange and artistic camaraderie; and financial exchange with collectors and dealers that frequently blurred the lines between public and private and art and commerce. I am interested in papers exploring the artist’s studio in the long eighteenth century from diverse national and global perspectives ranging from painting techniques and chemical experiments; to apprenticeship and the role of assistants in producing art and replicas; to the studio’s role as an exhibition venue; to its growing significance as an artistic and literary theme that was closely tied to artistic identity and professional status, sometimes functioning as a figurative self-portrait of the artist. The expanding coverage of the arts in the press and the advent of public exhibitions contributed to the public’s growing interest in the visual arts and the image and personality of the artist.
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The Competitive Edge: Ambitious Relations Among Women
Julia Douthwaite, Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556; jdouthwa@nd.edu.
At the 2015 ASECS in Los Angeles, several panels were devoted to women’s tributes to women. Such panels showed how women writers either before or during the eighteenth century provided inspiring models or much-needed mentorship for other women writers. This 2016 seminar proposes to look at potentially more problematic relations among women. Under what conditions and why did eighteenth-century women compete with other women, whether precursors or contemporaries? How might we assess such competition? Presumably driven by ambition, whether conscious or not, was competition between or among women necessarily destructive, dividing women from each other, or could competition be productive, and if so how? In what genres—novels, painting, journals, philosophical or scientific texts, for instance—did women represent competition with other women, and does the genre affect what might be at stake for women competing with women? This seminar invites contributions from a variety of disciplines and cultural traditions to examine different forms of competition among women and interpret the reasons for that competition and the effects of it.
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Empires of Print
Douglas Fordham, McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia, Fayerweather Hall, P.O. Box 400130, Charlottesville, VA 22904; fordham@virginia.edu.
A quarter century after Mary Louise Pratt published Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, this session reconsiders travel narratives in the long eighteenth century, and it places a particular emphasis on books and reproductive prints as physical objects with their own imperial histories and narratives. With books, prints, and printed ephemera more accessible to scholars than ever before, this session reconsiders ‘imperial print culture’ not just from the perspective of subject matter and thematics, but also as commodities and agents within the flows and networks of Western imperialism. Paper submissions are encouraged from a variety of disciplines and the travel narratives and images may pertain to any region or nation in the long eighteenth century.
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Rubens in the Eighteenth Century
Kaylin Haverstock Weber and Leslie M. Scattone, (Weber) 4120 Oberlin Street, Houston, Texas 77005; (Scattone) 6236 Overbrook Lane, Houston, Texas 77057; kaylinhweber@yahoo.com and leslie.scattone@gmail.com.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) cast a long shadow on art and culture not just in the seventeenth century, but throughout the eighteenth century to the present day. Through hundreds of paintings as well as thousands of reproductive prints, the work of Rubens had a major impact on artists, patrons, collectors and writers. In the eighteenth century, the dynamic art market brought even greater access to his work both in Europe and her colonies. While many artists looked to Rubens for artistic inspiration, some also saw him as a model of an artist who attained the status of a gentleman, collector, diplomat, and court painter. His legacy, which has been the subject of a recent major exhibition, is a vast topic that deserves greater investigation. Through this seminar we hope to expand the scope of the current discourse to include not only European art, but also colonial art, as well as Rubens’s influence in terms of art criticism, literature, and fashion.
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Satirical Images: Between Sociability, Animosity, and Entertainment
Kathryn Desplanque and Jessica Fripp, (Desplanque) AAHVS, Duke University, PO Box 90766, Duham, NC 27708; (Fripp) TCU School of Art, PO Box 298000, Ft Worth, TX, 76129; kathryn.desplanque@duke.edu and j.fripp@tcu.edu.
The use of graphic satire proliferated in the eighteenth century, from the caricature and portrait charges of the Grand Tour (Pier Leoni Ghezzi, Thomas Patch, François-André Vincent), to political caricature on the continent and in England, to the verbal-visual puns of broadside imagery and street cries series, to the complex allegories that criticized and supported the French Revolution. These different genres of graphic satire are difficult to reconcile because they vary widely in tone: some are oppositional, others are sociable, and others still seemed destined primarily for entertainment. Scholarship on eighteenth-century graphic satire has privileged oppositional and political imagery, neglecting the prolific sociable, amusing, and cultural caricatures whose imagery and tone are often more challenging to decode. Recent scholarship, such as The Efflorescence of Caricature (2010), The Saint-Aubin ‘Livre de caricatures’ (2012), L’Art de la caricature (2014), and Ann Bermingham’s 2015 Clifford Lecture, “Coffee-House Characters and British Visual Humor at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” has begun to bridge persistent gaps in the study of graphic satire, putting into conversation formerly disparate genres of satirical imagery. This panel seeks papers that nuance, overturn, or refine the categories applied to graphic satire—oppositional versus entertaining; political versus cultural; sociable versus slanderous. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: satire (especially political satire) in the light of sociability; how the circulation of these images through commercial or social exchange relates to their format, including tone or medium; and how satire informs our understanding of relationships between individuals and groups, such as friendship, enmity, rivalry, or comradery.
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Home Entertainment: Artistic Production and Domestic Life
Linda Zionkowski and Miriam Hart, Department of English, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701; zionkows@ohio.edu and hartmim@aol.com.
Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Anna Lefroy recalled the home of her aunt, Jane Austen, as a haven for “the flow of native homebred wit,” where “all the fun & nonsense of a clever family” found expression in the art they produced. This session will examine the prevalence of homebred amusements in the long eighteenth century, particularly those involving music, drama, and literature. Journals, diaries, and literary texts from this period repeatedly describe the importance of home as a place for artistic creation, experimentation, and enjoyment, particularly for women like Austen but also for men like Alexander Pope; they also portray home entertainment as the occasion for dissipation and transgressive conduct—behavior that is all the more disruptive when it occurs in the midst of family life. Panelists might consider the way in which playing, singing, acting, or writing at home challenges concepts of gender roles and domesticity; enables individuals to fashion an identity as actors, writers, and musicians; and confuses the categorization of private and public venues for artistic production.
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Picturing the News
Leslie Ritchie, Department of English Language and Literature, John Watson Hall 4th Floor, 49 Bader Lane, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L3N6; ritchiel@queensu.ca.
Unlike their image-laden modern counterparts, eighteenth-century newspapers present their readers with a wall of words. Within their tight columns of text, however, eighteenth-century newspapers allude to, advertise, or represent the pictorial in myriad ways. This panel will consider the role played by the pictorial in news media. Topics may include: advertisements for particular artists or prints; allusions to visual arts topoi or particular art works within the news; reviews that rely upon the visual; broadsides, pamphlets and prints that comment on news items using visual means; the typography and formatting of news.
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Worrying about Money in France: The Art and Literature of Financial Crisis Kate Jensen, Dept. of French, Studies 416 Hodges Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-5309; kjensen@lsu.edu.
The 2015 ASECS Annual Meeting included at least six ‘economic’ panels that covered topics including the triangular trade, double-entry bookkeeping, and works of political economy by Smith and Montesquieu. Some scholars connected political economy to novels by authors such as Burney and Austen, or sought to understand the norms dictating the literary market and how it was gendered. A round-table focused on the surprise best-seller of 2014, Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. But the question of method remains somewhat elusive. Can media such as art and literature predict, prejudice or otherwise affect the course of financial history? Or do they play a more passive role, as a mirror of mentalities? Whereas Piketty studies the realism of Balzac to enable readers to identify the wealth needed to frequent the elite of the 1820s, and to understand the fears of bankruptcy felt by the have-nots, this panel would like to explore other methods of analyzing literature’s role in moments of economic turbulence. Before declaring on fiction’s use-value to realistically portray money worries, we need to explore where those worries came from, who generated them, and what forms they later took. This session seeks to prompt scholars to make interdisciplinary connections between art, literature and economic history, to see if and to what extent these media may be seen as active participants in fanning the flames of financial worry in eighteenth-century France, especially in reaction to the financial crisis of 1719–21 (the Law System) and the build- up to the French Revolution.
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Realism and ‘Real Life’: New Approaches to Material Culture and Literature
Karen Lipsedge and Julie Park, (Lipsedge) English Literature Department, Kingston University, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England; (Park) English Department, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604-0744; K. Lipsedge@Kingston.ac.uk and jupark@vassar.edu.
One of the major innovations attributed to the eighteenth-century novel was its development of realism as a literary mode and representational system. So realistic was the narrative art of fiction during this period, the worlds depicted in it were recognizable as the readers’ own. Scholars from Ian Watt and Naomi Schor to Cynthia Wall have explored the critical role physical details play in producing narrative realism. What might happen if we were to focus not only on eighteenth-century material culture as it appears in literature as description or plot device, but on the referents themselves? How might research—including embodied research in physical environments—in the material worlds of eighteenth-century life complicate our understandings of realism’s realism? How might information about the way carriages, pockets, toothpick cases, personal letters, bowling greens, scissors, etc., were designed and used in their eighteenth-century contexts transform our understanding of their significance when they emerge in literature as setting, prop or detail? We invite papers exploring eighteenth-century literature of all genres and material culture research of all fields, from theater design, costume history, landscape and garden design to print and manuscript studies.
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Tableaux Vivants: Life and/as Art in the Eighteenth Century
Noémie Etienne, Getty Research Institute; and Meredith Martin, New York University, Department of Art History, New York University, 303 Silver Center, 100 Washington Square E, New York, NY, 10003; msm240@nyu.edu.
During the eighteenth century, a whole series of artistic productions aimed to simulate motion and life, at the same time that individuals became ever more preoccupied with performing or embodying static works of art. This session aims to explore such hybrid creations and the boundaries they challenged between animate and inanimate form, art and technology, the living and the dead. Papers may focus on specific objects, such as the automata created by the clockmaker Pierre-Jacques Droz that imitated human acts of writing or harpsichord playing; hyperrealistic wax figures, sometimes displayed in groups or dioramas, that were used for entertainment as well as pedagogical and medical purposes; and ‘tableaux mécaniques’, mixed-media paintings with motors on the back that enabled the figures represented to move across their surfaces. Other possible topics include the staging of collaborative tableaux vivants in eighteenth-century theaters, gardens, and salons; and related attempts to resurrect or animate ancient artifacts, as in Emma Hamilton’s ‘living statue’ performances. Papers that consider the eighteenth-century specificity of such artistic productions, introduce new methodological perspectives, or discuss relevant examples from outside of Europe are especially encouraged.
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Eighteenth-Century Freemasonry and the Arts
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, Music History, College of Music, Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle, Denton, TX 76203-5017; rebeccageoffroy@gmail.com.
Freemasonry represented a new social and cultural institution during the eighteenth century. The ideologies of Freemasonry opened new frontiers to the application of Enlightenment philosophy to lived experience, to the creation of new spaces of socialization, and to the integration of new forms of spirituality with Newtonianism and sensationism. The practices and ideologies of Freemasonry called for humans to rethink their relationships: with themselves and their peers, with authority figures, and toward the natural and supernatural realms. Artists across the visual, performing, and literary arts came to occupy a crucial role in the development, expansion, and sociality of Masonic lodges. This panel seeks to explore the significance of the relationship that Freemasonry, from its rituals to its social structure to its values, shared with the arts. Recent scholarship has begun to reveal the rapport between Freemasonry and the visual, performing, and literary arts. This panel aims to bring scholars of the arts into conversation to pursue a holistic theoretical and methodological framework through which to understand the mutual influence of Freemasonry and the arts during the eighteenth century.
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‘The Delight of the Eye’: Eighteenth-Century Painting and/as Decoration
Yuriko Jackall, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and Katherine Brion, Kalamazoo College, Jackall: Department of French Paintings, National Gallery of Art, 2000B South Club Drive, Landover, MD 20785; Y-jackall@nga.gov and kbrion@kzoo.edu.
In 1747, the critic Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne lamented that painting of the French school had been divested of its rightful purpose: bringing great deeds of the past to splendid visual life. For his contemporaries, La Font argued, painting had become nothing more than another form of vanity or ornamentation, a “delight of the eye” equated with surface treatments such as mirrors, gilding, paneling, and plasterwork. In the context of this lament, he drew a sharp distinction between history painting (broadly defined as narrative representation with moral and didactic intent) and painting as decoration (associated with pleasure and flattery). Apart from some temporary upsets, this distinction held sway over painting and its reception through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The goal of this session is to explore the relationship between painting and decoration in the practice and reception of eighteenth-century art—a relationship that begs to be reexamined, particularly in the light of increasing scholarly interest in later ‘decorative’ impulses. In what contexts was the category of decoration meaningful, and how was it defined? To what extent were site-specificity, the constitution of ensembles, the formal qualities of paintings themselves, and/or other concerns determining factors in the role of painting as decoration? Was ‘decorative’ painting aligned with, or distinguished from, other ‘decorative’ practices and media? Finally, do the answers to these questions dispute, nuance or confirm La Font’s opposition of decoration and edifying representation? Case studies in a variety of fields ranging from architecture to the decorative arts are welcome, as are papers examining the subsequent historical impact of eighteenth-century models of painting and/as decoration.
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Istanbul: Beyond Tulips and Turqueries
Jonathan Haddad; jhaddad@berkeley.edu.
How should we situate Istanbul in Eighteenth Century Studies? Traditionally, scholarship has pivoted on the Tulip period (1703–30) as a moment of unprecedented adoption by the Ottoman state and society of European influences in the arts and technology, extending to advances in military tactics and the advent of print. However, recent revisions of studies in Orientalism have brought to bear evidence of more complex cultural flows that blur the frontiers between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. In a similar vein, situating Istanbul within the field of Mediterranean Studies has been fruitful in revealing the work done in facilitating these cultural flows by transcultural intermediaries, such as dragomans, renegades, and Armenian merchants. However, narratives of mobility reconstitute a European relationship with the Islamicate Orient at the risk of deemphasizing the internal dynamics of the Ottoman state and society as factors of artistic production.
This panel, then, seeks to reconcile these disparate approaches to the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century through contributions that explore how Ottoman and other identities (Persianate, European, Islamic, provincial, urban, transcultural, etc.) were articulated through poetry, performance, court ceremonials, the visual arts, ekphrasis, and/or artistic patronage in eighteenth-century Istanbul. Please send abstracts of 200–350 words.
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Violence and Death in Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture
Amy Freund, Department of Art History, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750356 Dallas, Texas 75275- 0356; afreund@smu.edu.
Chardin’s eviscerated ray, William Blake’s tortured slaves, Copley’s Watson eternally escaping his shark, Goya’s terrifying Disasters of War, David’s deaths of everyone from Hector to Marat: violence and death haunt eighteenth-century visual culture. This panel will explore the depiction of violence and death in eighteenth-century art, with the aim of mapping an alternative history of the visual arts and revising our understanding of aesthetic categories such as the Rococo and Neoclassicism. Topics might include: representations of sick, injured, aging or dying bodies, both human and animal; violent practices (hunting, executions, warfare); the impact of eighteenth- century colonial violence and global war on artistic production; memorialization of the dead (including saints and ancient or contemporary heroes); examinations of objects of violence (arms, armor, the guillotine), domestic or sexual violence; and violence against inanimate things (iconoclasm, the demolition of buildings, attacks on the state or religion).
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Portraiture Before 1750
Jennifer Germann, Department of Art History, Ithaca College, 953 Danby Road, Ithaca, NY 14850; jgermann@ithaca.edu.
Over the last decades, the topic of portraiture has generated significant scholarly interest. Much of this attention has been focused on painted portraits in the second half of the eighteenth century. This panel proposes to turn attention to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. What are the major trends or themes emerging in the practice of portraiture at this time? What about sculpted portraits or those incorporated into the decorative arts (such as in tapestries)? How are artists working internationally, within and beyond Europe? What cross-cultural exchanges are emerging with the expansion of colonial networks? Papers are welcomed from diverse cultural traditions around the globe engaging both the analysis of cross-cultural exchange in terms of the approaches to and forms of portraiture as well as facilitating the cross-cultural comparison of portrait traditions.
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Illustration, Visual Interpretation, and the Eighteenth-Century Book Market
Kwinten Van De Walle, Department of Literary Studies (English Studies), Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium; kwinten.vandewalle@ugent.be.
In the last two decades, scholars such as Peter Wagner and W.B. Gerard have abandoned the notion that illustrations are secondary to the typographic text proper in favour of a more balanced, and often interdisciplinary, approach which considers book illustration as an important and integral facet of print culture and the book market. Illustrations not only allowed publishers to generate appeal and to distinguish their products from their competitors’, it also had an impact on a reader’s approach to and interpretation of the text. A major intervention in the field is Sandro Jung’s recent book, James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–1842, which is a compelling study of the ways in which book illustration can significantly affect the cultural reception and reputation of texts. This panel wishes to acknowledge the value of book illustration studies and its potential to contribute to and even revise existing scholarly accounts of eighteenth-century literature. Open to presentations on a broad range of illustrations, from up-market productions (such as furniture prints) intended for an elite audience to cheaply manufactured ornaments in widely disseminated print forms (such as ballad-sheets and chapbooks), this panel invites 300-word paper proposals, aiming to consider the visual (re)interpretation of texts as well as the role of illustrations within the broader context of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book market in general.
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Fashion, Beauty, and Social Mores in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Catherine Sama, University of Rhode Island, Department of Modern and Classical Literatures, 60 Upper College Rd., Kingston, RI 02881; csama@uri.edu.
This panel invites papers from a variety of disciplines addressing the intersections among fashion, beauty, and social mores in eighteenth-century Europe. Papers might address (but are not limited to) the following topics:
• Fashion periodicals as proscriptive and/or descriptive texts of gendered norms
• Fashion, beauty, and the construction of literary, domestic, social, and national spaces
• Translations and adaptations of fashion periodicals across Europe
• Women, genre (textual, visual) and space/place in fashion periodicals and trends
• Notions of performance, gender, class in fashion periodicals and trends
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Artists’ Artists in the Long Eighteenth Century
Ryan Whyte, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences, OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5T 1W1; rwhyte@faculty.ocadu.ca.
In the long eighteenth century, artists commissioned, collected, and published criticism of the work of fellow living artists. Superficially, artists’ patronage and criticism of other artists appears consistent with the activities of the larger world of art, yet in fact it represents a parallel world of artistic engagement that was, and remains, at least partially inaccessible and incompletely understood beyond professional artistic circles. This session aims to shed light on artists’ taste for one another’s work in a period when the emergence of art criticism and periodic public exhibitions of contemporary art created tensions between the increasingly public nature of artists’ careers, and the exclusive, technical nature of studio practice and language.
What did it mean when an artist—rather than a critic or a patron—favored the work of a fellow living artist? Who were considered ‘artists’ artists’, as reflected, for example, in artists’ collections of one another’s work, and why? To what extent was the notion of an ‘artist’s artist’ even understood beyond the confines of the studio? When artists commissioned, collected, and published criticism of the work of fellow living artists, how and why did their patronage and criticism depart from state and private initiatives? How did homages and rivalries manifest in artists’ portraits of fellow living artists, so prevalent and sophisticated in this period? This session welcomes new approaches to these problems, including interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative papers.
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Re-Framing the Picturesque
William C Snyder, Department of English, Saint Vincent College Latrobe PA 15650; william.snyder@email.stvincent.edu.
My intent is to pick the brain of ASECS members to uncover the latest scholarship addressing the Picturesque, the late eighteenth century movement that involved landscape, prospects, natural process and the relation of these to multiple arts, especially painting, poetry, and gardening. Digital Humanities and other recovery tools have provided new texts and evidence of material culture that suggest that the Picturesque in its time was (1) not bounded on one end by the touring of the 1770s and on the other by Romanticism in the 1790s; (2) subject to competing aesthetic criteria as articulated by various theorists and practitioners; (3) part of, and not simply precedent to, theory and creative work of several Romantic writers and painters well into the 1800s. I have drafted this CFP: The ‘mode’ or ‘school’ of the Picturesque is generally fixed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but recent research questions the period boundaries of the Picturesque as well as its theoretical underpinnings. Papers are invited to re-assess the phenomenon of the Picturesque, focusing on the connections between its visual art and verbal art, its theory, its tools and practices, its implications involving class and gender, or its influence on some Romantic writers and painters. Send 300-word proposals.
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Framing the Eighteenth Century: Borders and Peripheries in Visual Culture
Daniella Berman and Blythe C. Sobol, Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10128, daniella.berman@nyu.edu and bcs265@nyu.edu.
In its entry on bordure, the 1792 Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, scupture, et gravure considers the dynamic between painting and frame, between border and center: “Cependant, d’après les loix d’un gout éloigné de trop de sévérité, la bordure d’un tableau, ainsi que la parure d’une femme, ne doit point fixer les yeux, en les détournant trop de l’objet qu’elle embellit; mais l’une & l’autre doivent faire valoir les beautés dont elles sont l’ornement.”
Watelet and Levesque underscore the distinct remit of the central work of art and its border, in terms of iconographic program and decorative function. How do framing devices augment our understanding of the artworks they surround? How do borders and margins function in visual culture? How intentional is the association between picture plane and the embellishments on the fringe? How vital is the periphery to the center—artistically, and spatially? This panel will explore the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between the artwork and its frame, between the ornament and the ornamented, between the periphery and the center in visual culture of the long eighteenth century. We welcome a variety of interpretations of the subject of borders and peripheries in the visual arts. Topics might include, but are not limited to, the role of borders in landscape architecture or manuscript illumination; relationships between (literal) framing, display, and status; re-woven tapestry borders; considerations of luxury and superfluity in artistic discourses; and examinations of the role of Paris versus the provinces in artistic production.
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Representing the Fragment in the Eighteenth Century
Olaf Recktenwald, McGill University, School of Architecture, 815 Sherbrooke St. W., Montréal, QC H3A 0C2, Canada; olaf.recktenwald@mail.mcgill.ca.
Whether it be in discussions of architecture, art, music, philosophy, literature, or theatre, the fragment rose to a new level of significance in the eighteenth century. An obsession with torsos, ruins, fragments themselves, and unfinished conditions could be linked to an understanding of nature that found its fulfilment in future growth. In the case of the built artificial ruin, the confidence that architecture could provide humans with true places of dwelling was lost, thus necessitating a desire to return to nature’s garden. Pittsburgh collections such as the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Sculpture and Hall of Architecture attest to this cultural preoccupation. This panel readily welcomes interdisciplinary readings of the fragment and ones that address either international or local topics.
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Rethinking the Academic Conference (Women’s Caucus Professional Panel)
Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University, 9030 Haley Center, Auburn, AL 36849, ecfriedman@auburn.edu.
Even as travel budgets shrink (when they exist at all), conferences still play an important part in the life of the profession, and maximizing one’s time at a conference seems all the more vital. It is possible to spend 21+ hours (almost 8 hours a day) seated in a chair listening to papers. In response, “innovative formats” such as roundtables, lunches, pre-conference events, and other session forms (in addition to ‘playing hooky’ altogether) have begun to proliferate as alternatives to the traditional 15-minute-paper format.
In light of this, this session asks: what kinds of knowledge-production and collaboration do our current formats support? How can we (and should we) alter formatting, programming, and scheduling to better foster our organizational, individual, and scholarly goals? Can we steal good ideas from sister organizations or learn from their mistakes?
The 2016 Women’s Caucus Professional Session will thus take the form of Pecha-Kucha style presentations (http://www.pechakucha.org) with an extended workshop period. We seek presenters who can bring examples of productive alternative format sessions from other academic organizations, their own institutions, or dream formats that have not yet been attempted, to inspire a lively and productive discussion among all session attendees. The session will end with a working document of potential session formats, with the advantages and challenges of each form as they apply to ASECS.
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Intersections of Digital and Public Humanities: New Media and New Audiences for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Roundtable)
Jessica Richard, Wake Forest University, 1834 Wake Forest Road Winston-Salem, NC 27109; richarja@wfu.edu.
This roundtable will explore the challenges and benefits of studying the eighteenth century in public, using the digital environment and reaching new audiences. Participants with public-oriented digital humanities projects (small- or large-scale, nascent or established) will address some of the following questions: What does it mean to take our scholarly work online? What is gained and/or lost when addressing a public or blended public/student/scholarly audience? How do you elicit scholarly contributors? How do you engage readers in the online environment? What opportunities does the digital environment offer? Roundtable participants might be bloggers, editors, designers, contributors, or users of online journals or other digital projects, or scholars of the digital humanities.
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Note (added 14 August 2015) — The original posting failed to included the roundtable session on Intersections of Digital and Public Humanities.
Call for Papers | Rowlandson and After: Rethinking Graphic Satire
Thomas Rowlandson, A York address to the whale. Caught lately off Gravesend. 5 Apr 1809. Hand-coloured etching 26 x 39 cm (Royal Collection Trust, #810766)
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Rowlandson and After: Rethinking Graphic Satire
The Paul Mellon Centre and The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 22 January 2016
Proposals due by 25 September 2015
A collaborative study-day organised by Royal Collection Trust and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
The prints, drawings and watercolours of Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), which are to be showcased in the forthcoming exhibition High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, have long been recognised as offering a remarkable combination of satirical invention and artistic brilliance. This study-day, which has been co-organised by Royal Collection Trust and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, uses Rowlandson’s work as the starting-point for a broader art-historical examination of British graphic satire—whether drawn, engraved or painted on paper—between the later years of the 18th century and today.
Rowlandson and After is inspired by the recent upsurge in ambitious scholarship on the pictorial satires of the Georgian and Victorian periods, and by a desire to explore graphic satire’s long-standing identity as a fluid, hybrid form that seems always to straddle different worlds—art, journalism, literature and politics—rather than belonging fully to any one particular cultural sphere. Accordingly, submissions are invited that engage with examples of graphic satire dating from any point across the last 250 years and that address the following questions, among others:
• What can Rowlandson’s work tell us about the broader workings of graphic satire in his period, and how has it helped shape the practice of his successors?
• What have been the distinctive formal, iconographic, technical and textual characteristics of this particular strand of artistic practice at different historical moments, and how and why have they changed?
• What is the relationship between graphic satire and other forms of visual art?
• What kind of artistic persona is associated with this form of practice—how has the figure of the satirist been defined and imagined?
• How has the history of graphic satire been shaped by developments in print technology?
• What is the relationship between graphic satire and journalism; or graphic satire and literature; or graphic satire and political discourse?
• How might histories of graphic satire be related to histories of British humour?
• How does graphic satire operate today—and how might contemporary examples of the genre be compared to the work of artists such as Rowlandson?
The day will be split between The Paul Mellon Centre and The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Please send proposals (of no more than 250 words) for 20-minute papers to Ella Fleming, Events Manager, events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by 5.00pm on 25 September 2015.
Call for Papers | Transforming Topography
From The Paul Mellon Centre:
Transforming Topography
The British Library, London, 6 May 2016
Proposals due by 30 September 2015
The British Library and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art are delighted to announce a call for papers for an international conference on transforming topography. The conference will be interdisciplinary in nature, and we invite contributions from art historians, architectural historians, map scholars, historians, cultural geographers, independent researchers, and museum professionals (including early-career) which contribute to current re-definitions of topography. We welcome contributions that engage with specific items from the British Library’s topographical collections and highlight the copious nuances that can be explored within topography, including, but not limited to:
- Topography versus landscape: topography’s position within registers of pictorial representation
- Topography’s boundaries with other forms of knowledge, such as antiquarianism
- The role and identity of the artists and writers employed in producing topographical images and texts
- Topographic techniques and conventions, repetitions in text and image
- Patrons and collectors of topographical material: topography as a social and cultural practice, the circulation, use and display of these objects
- Topography and the library, museum or gallery
Topography is an emerging and dynamic field in historical scholarship. The Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain exhibition of 2009/2010 (Nottingham, Edinburgh, London) and subsequent research has sought a redefinition of topography. Rather than seeing topographical art as marginal compared to the landscapes in oils or watercolours by the canon of ‘great artists’ or more imaginative and Sublime images, a growing number of scholars are embracing the historical study of images of specific places in their original contexts, sparking a lively debate around nationhood, identity, and cultural value, or what John Barrell describes as “the conflict and coexistence of the various…’stakeholders’ in the landscape and in its representation” (Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 2013).
The British Library holds the world’s most extensive and important collection of British topographic materials, including George III’s King’s Topographical Collection, currently being re-catalogued. There are hundreds of thousands of images and texts, including unique compilations of prints and drawings, rare first editions, maps, extra-illustrated books, and handwritten notes across the collections: all of which exhibit the broad range of forms and subject matter which topographical material can take. Using the BL’s main online catalogue and typing in ‘George III, views’ will give you a taste of what is available, as will the entry for the British Library in M.W. Barley’s A Guide to British Topographical Collections (1974). The majority of topographic materials are not listed individually, so if you need help finding specific items please contact Alice Rylance-Watson, Research Curator, at Alice.Rylance-Watson@bl.uk.
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words accompanied by a brief biography to: Ella Fleming, Events Manager, events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by 5.00pm on Wednesday 30 September 2015.
Call for Papers | Fabrications: Designing for Silk in the 18th Century
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.
Call for Papers | Symposium of the Association of Print Scholars
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.
Call for Papers | Early Modern Artistic Lexicography, 1600–1750
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
Call for Papers | Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art
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.
Call for Papers | Difficult Women in the Long Eighteenth Century
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.
Call for Papers | AAH at the University of Edinburgh, 2016
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.
Call for Papers | The Alhambra in a Global Context
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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