Enfilade

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»

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British Art Studies, Issue 2 (April 2016)
Papers are due by 1 September 2015

We are currently soliciting submissions of articles for our second issue, which is due for publication in April 2016.

British Art Studies is an online journal published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Launching in the autumn of 2015, the journal will provide an innovative space for new research and scholarship of the highest quality on all aspects of British art. The digital format of the journal offers new opportunities for displaying images alongside text and multimedia content. The editors are open to proposals and ideas from authors to develop innovative and visually stimulating ways to publish art-historical scholarship online.

British Art Studies, which is peer reviewed, encourages submissions on British art, architecture, and visual culture from all periods in their most diverse and international contexts. The journal will reflect the dynamic and broad ranging research cultures of the Paul Mellon Centre and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as the wider field of studies in British art and architecture today.

How to submit an article: Texts of between 5000 and 8000 words in length (although the editors are willing to discuss shorter and longer formats) should be submitted via email in a Word document, together with a document containing low resolution accompanying images (where possible), and a list of proposed images and sources, as outlined in our style guide, available online. The final number of figures and the process of sourcing and commissioning media for articles accepted for publication will be discussed with authors on an individual basis, but we recommend between 5 and 10. British Art Studies will endeavour to meet all reasonable costs and deal with copyright issues for illustrative materials essential to the argument of published text.

How to submit proposals for other formats: proposals are also welcomed for content which presents art-historical scholarship in innovative and dynamic ways using the online format of British Art Studies. Proposals outlining your ideas, use of images and/or multi-media content are encouraged by the Editorial Group.

Deadline for the submission of articles and proposal to be considered for the second issue: 1st September 2015. Contact Hana Leaper (journal@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk) with any questions or to discuss a potential submission to the journal.

From SAH:

Society of Architectural Historians 69th Annual Conference
Pasadena/Los Angeles, 6–10 April 2016

Proposals due by 9 June 2015

The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 69th Annual International Conference in Pasadena/Los Angeles, April 6–10, 2016. Please submit abstracts no later than June 9, 2015, for one of the 38 thematic sessions, Graduate Student Lightning Talks or for open sessions. The thematic sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations.

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A selection of sessions that might be relevant to the eighteenth century:

Women in the Global Eighteenth Century
The 2015 Biennial Conference of The Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts, 1660–1830
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, 5–6 November 2015

Proposals due by 15 May 2015

In The Global Eighteenth Century, Felicity Nussbaum and her contributors urged scholars to see the eighteenth century as “wide”: a period with a geographical as well as temporal sweep. Such a perspective, Nussbaum contended, would require different, more complex narratives of the people, events, systems, and discourses of the age. In the spirit of our namesake Aphra Behn, whose poetry, drama, plays, and translations reflect a complex awareness of a widening world, The Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts, 1660–1830 takes up the challenge posed by The Global Eighteenth Century to invite papers exploring any aspect of women and the arts in this “global eighteenth century.” How does a wider, potentially global, lens change the view of people, places, and things both familiar and strange, domestic and imperial, Us and Other? How does gender affect those views?

The Aphra Behn Society for Women and the Arts invites papers addressing the intersection of gender and the global eighteenth century from a wide variety of disciplines, including but not limited to Literature, History, Art History, Music History, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. We welcome papers on this topic from all sub-fields of these disciplines.

Papers might address the following topics:

• Investigations or representations of ‘difference’ in literature and the sister arts
• Representations of social and political authority
• The arts, women, and empire
• Women and the construction of literary, artistic, domestic, public, national, imperial, and colonial spaces
• Women and travel writing
• Women and diaspora
• Women and the metropole
• Women and indigenous knowledge
• Women, genre (textual, visual, musical, etc.), and space/place
• Notions of performance and gender
• Notions of gender and race, class, religion, or other markers, perhaps under pressure in a widening context
• Gender and encountering the Other
• Women, modernity, and post-colonial situations
• Women and the colonial or post-colonial Enlightenment

As always, we also welcome abstracts for papers not related to the conference theme. Please upload 1–2 page abstracts or panels by May 15, 2015. In addition, the Society and its journal, ABO are sponsoring a pre-conference Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on Wednesday, November 4th, from 12:00 to 5:00 pm at the Grand Summit Hotel. Participation is free and open to everyone, although participants must supply their own laptops. Registration for this event is on the conference registration form.

The registration fee includes all conference events, including the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, the luncheon, the concluding banquet, a performance by Seton Hall students, and a reception with the rare books librarians and university archivists to view highlights of the university’s collection. The Society also sponsors a graduate student travel award ($150) and a graduate student essay prize ($150 and the possibility of publication in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830). For more information, see the conference website or contact the conference organizers, Dr. Kirsten Schultz at Kirsten.schultz@shu.edu or Dr. Karen Gevirtz at Karen.gevirtz@shu.edu.

Plenary lecture by Dr. Lynn Festa, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University.

Sponsored by The Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts, 1660–1830, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Seton Hall University.

Here’s a reminder that proposals for 2016 CAA panels are due this Friday, May 8. Details on selected sessions relevant to the eighteenth century are available here.

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104th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Washington, D.C., 3–6 February 2016

Proposals due by 8 May 2015

The 2016 Call for Participation for the 104th Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6 in Washington, D.C., describes many of next year’s sessions. CAA and the session chairs invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals.

From H-ArtHist:

The Role of Sculpture in the Design, Production, Collecting,
and Display of Parisian Decorative Arts in Europe, 1715–1815
Mons, Belgium, 29 August 2015

Proposals due by 14 May 2015

An international conference on the occasion of Mons European Capital of Culture 2015 and Waterloo 1815–2015 on Saturday, 29 August 2015

Potential speakers are invited to submit proposals for conference papers. These should be limited to a maximum of 300 words, should be accompanied by a brief CV (no more than a few lines), and should be sent to the Low Countries Sculpture Society (info@lcsculpture.org), arriving no later than Thursday, 14 May 2015. A scientific committee drawn from the Society and invited scholars will make a decision on selected speakers shortly after that date. Proposals must be in English or French, which will be the conference languages. For foreign participants, one hotel night in Mons and modest travel expenses can be covered.

Between 1715 and 1830 Paris gradually became the capital of Europe, “a city of power and pleasure, a magnet for people of all nationalities that exerted an influence far beyond the reaches of France,” as Philip Mansel wrote, or as Prince Metternich phrased it, “When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold.” Within this historical framework and in a time of profound societal change, the consumption and appreciation of luxury goods reached a peak in Paris. The focus of this one-day international conference will be the role of the sculptor in the design and production processes of Parisian decorative arts—from large-scale furniture and interior decoration projects to porcelain, silver, gilt bronzes, and clocks.

In the last few years a number of studies were carried out under the auspices of decorative arts museums and societies such as the Furniture History Society and the French Porcelain Society. It now seems appropriate to bring some of these together to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches on a European level and discussion between all those interested in the materiality and the three-dimensionality of their objects of study. The relationships between, on the one hand, architects, ornemanistes and other designers, and on the other sculptors, menuisiers, ébénistes, goldsmiths, porcelain manufacturers, bronze casters, and other producers, as well as the marchands merciers, will be at the heart of the studies about the design processes.

A second layer of understanding of the importance of sculpture in the decorative arts will be shown in the collecting and display in European capitals in subsequent generations, particularly those immediately after the French Revolution, as epitomised by King George IV. Overall, the intention of this conference is to shed light on the sculptural aspect of decorative arts produced in Paris in the long 18th century and collected and displayed in the capitals of Europe. Without pretending to be exhaustive, this study day—and its publication—hopes to bring together discussions about the histories and methodologies that could lead to furthering the study of hitherto all too often neglected aspects of the decorative arts.

Research questions may include (non-exhaustive list):
• What are the specificities of the Parisian approach to three-dimensional sculptural design that made it collectable, or was it only collectable in Europe due to its availability at vastly reduced prices when the art market was flooded by the revolutionary auctions?
• What relationships can be established between the ‘Frenchness’ of sculptural designs produced in Paris and the large number of ‘foreign’ designers and craftspeople there (coming in particular from the Low Countries and Germany)?
• What was the impact of public authorities (e.g. guilds and schools), intermediaries (marchands merciers, agents, etc.), private salons, societies, and other networks on the three-dimensional design aspect decorative arts produced in Paris?
• Taste leaders: the role of the monarch, the court, Paris vs. Versailles, and their interest in ‘sculptural’ decorative arts
• Taste disseminators: the role of prints and treatises regarding ‘sculptural’ decorative arts
• The collaborative efforts between architects, designers, sculptors, cabinet makers, ‘porcelainiers’, bronze casters, goldsmiths, engravers, etc.—were they specific to luxury items produced in Paris? Were certain disciplines more appropriate for ‘sculptural design’?
• How do case studies inform us about the role of sculptors in the design and production processes for decorative arts?
• How is sculptural illusionism in painted decorative panels, such as those by Tournai-born Piat-Joseph Sauvage (1744–1818) or in the Casa del Labrador at the royal palace of Aranjuez, related to the design and perception of Parisian decorative arts?
• What was the impact of collectors of old/existing Parisian decorative arts on the design of spaces to display these in European capitals?
• Are centre-periphery theories applicable to the interpretation of decorative arts produced in Paris and its hinterland? Is the work of Abraham Roentgen and his bronze casters an appropriate case study for this?

A dossier exhibition will be especially organised on the occasion of our international conference: Drawn to Be Sculpted: Unknown Designs for 18th-century Decorative Arts / Dessiné pour être sculpté: dessins inconnus du XVIIIe siècle pour les arts décoratifs.