Enfilade

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Now accepting proposals for this panel for next year’s ISECS Congress in Rotterdam:

For the Greater Glory of Portugal: Cultural Policy and Artistic Trade in the Age of João V
ISECS Congress, Rotterdam, 26–31 July 2015

Proposals due by 12 January 2015 (though earlier submissions are very much encouraged)

Organiser: Dr. Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira, Art History Institute, New University of Lisbon: pilarddcc@gmail.com; pcorral@fcsh.unl.pt

João V (1689–1750) propelled Portugal into the arena of international politics and raised the country’s prestige to new and unprecedented levels. His imperial policies affected vast swathes of territory in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. With his huge spending on art, music, and luxury items—intended to strengthen his position within European—he can be seen as a second Sun King. It is surprising, therefore, that relatively little interest has been shown in his kingship by non-Portuguese historians.

This panel will be devoted to analyzing Joao’s V artistic policy in Europe after the Treaty of Utrecht. One example of this was his massive print collection, intended to cover all areas of knowledge in a kind of Encyclopédie avant la lettre. The king used diplomatic channels to gather this, putting some of his best ambassadors and diplomats in Rome, Paris, London, and The Hague in charge. He was also extremely interested in developing strong ties with the Church in Rome. He supported lavish ambassadorial entrées, made substantial donations to the Pope and became (in absentia) one of the most generous patrons of art in Rome. He commissioned hundreds of masterpieces, namely the magnificent sculptures for his palace in Mafra and the sumptuous chapel of San Rocco in Lisbon, and he and his courtiers became some of the most influential collectors in the new Grand Tour.

Topics might include (but are not restricted to):

• The cultural milieu and artistic trade involving the embassies
• The print collection and the Mariettes
• The Boendermaker Atlas
• The art markets in Rome, Paris, and The Hague
• Collectors and diplomats as trading agents for the king

From the Call for Papers (avec l’Appel à communication en français). . .

Think ‘Small’: Textual Approaches and Practices
of Artistic Miniaturization from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century
Université de Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, Maison de la recherche, 1–2 October 2015

Proposals due by 15 January 2015

D’après Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Fillette au capucin
(Montauban: Musée Ingres). Commentaire de Diderot sur le tableau original de Greuze, Salon de 1765: “Approchez, voyez-vous cette enfant ? C’est de la chair ; ce capucin, c’est du plâtre. Pour la vérité et la vigueur de coloris, petit Rubens.”

From the Tanagra statuettes to the scientific automata of the industrial age, there are many material manifestations of the ancient fascination with shapes, images, and tiny objects. The examples abound: carved micro-architectures of Gothic buildings, small engravings by Stefano della Bella or Sébastien Leclerc, the objects of vertu of the eighteenth-century upper classes, and the Lilliputian creatures of children’s literature.

Rare, however, are the historical sources that allow us to understand their cultural foundations. While the written sources usually consider the ‘small’ only in its hierarchical relationship to the ‘big’, the analysis of the consumption of these objects reveals a set of practical, symbolic, and artistic skills such as manoeuvrability, mobility, economy, poverty, preciousness, thoroughness, prettiness, and strangeness. Too often, the dominant sources focus on the size of the objects, which diminishes the presence of other considerations. At times miniaturization reduces the scale of a given object, while at other times it may be an independent creation governed by specific criteria. Whatever the case, miniaturization is based on a set of justifications, usages, and judgments that this conference aims to clarify.

This area of research is nourished by recent scientific trends and interest which have benefited the European production of miniatures, notably through the recent conferences: The Gods of Small Things (Reading, 21–22 September 2009); La miniature en Europe, XVII^e–XIX^e siècles (Paris, 11–12 October 2012); L’automate: Enjeux historiques, techniques et culturels (Neuchâtel, 6–7 September 2012); and Micro-architecture et figures du bâti: l’échelle à l’épreuve de la matière (Paris, 8–10 December 2014). Our conference will consider the multiple reasons that explain the taste and interest in miniaturization over time, without favouring any particular medium. We will therefore discuss architecture, painting, sculpture, decorative arts, folk art, as well as poems and epigrams. Crossing disciplinary approaches (art history, history, anthropology, philosophy, literature, philology), this conference will focus in the first place on the theoretical reflections underlying the examination of a body of works. Secondly, we will examine those texts that, even if they comment on the ‘small’ in marginal and critical terms, are nonetheless important in the context of an anthology project in which the presenters will participate.

In order to define the ‘small’ in art and question its varied reception through the ages, each presentation, lasting 20 minutes, will explore three registers of perception, by no means reductive:

Consumption and contexts of use
Economic, marketing and circulation (reproducible series or unique work, mobility, swarming); conservation and presentation (curio cabinets, boxes, editing); functionality, usability, destinations and meanings (private / public; domestic / fun / political; secular / sacred / memorial).

Artistic and aesthetic aspects
Ideological tensions between ‘small’ and ‘high’ art; the issue of miniature reproduction of the human figure (dwarf, pygmy, monsters); characters of courtesy, refinement, oddity, impoverishment, etc., specific to the ‘small’; intercultural relations (exchanges and influences between East, the Americas and the West, exotic).

Human and emotional dimensions
Individuals, human categories and social structures involved in the ‘small’ (women, children, ‘ignorant’, princes, peasants, etc.); an attempt at classification; challenges of physical manipulation and microscopic observation; moral criticism (worship and fetishism); imaginary fables and tales and history of mentalities.

Proposals for papers up to one page and a brief bio-bibliographical record in English or French should be sent to Colloque.Petit.Toulouse.2015@gmail.com before January 15, 2015. The proceedings of the symposium will be published along with an anthology of textual sources dealing with the ‘small’; the papers and the list of references and possible sources for the anthology should be sent by December 15, 2015. Languages used in the symposium: French and English.

Organizers
Sophie Duhem (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA UMR 5136); Estelle Galbois (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, PLH-CRATA); Anne Perrin Khelissa (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA UMR 5136)

Scientific Committee
Jean-Pierre Albert (EHESS, LISST, Toulouse); Lorine Bost (Centre de recherches en Littérature et Poétique comparées, EA 3931); Quitterie Cazes (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA); Pierre-Olivier Dittmar (EHESS, GAHOM); Jean-Marie Guillouët (université de Nantes); Pascal Julien (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA); Jean-Marc Luce (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, PLH-CRATA); Christian Michel (université de Lausanne); Jean Nayrolles (université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA); Odile Nouvel (Les Arts décoratifs, Paris); Nathalie Rizzoni (CELLF 17^e-18^e UMR 8599 CNRS et université Paris – Sorbonne)

Penser le « petit » de l’Antiquité au XIXe siècle.
Approches textuelles et pratiques de la miniaturisation artistique

The Call for Papers in French is available here»

From the Call for Papers:

Collection of Essays | Irish Fine Art in the Early Modern Period
Proposals due by 12 January 2015

Papers are invited for a forthcoming book which will showcase new scholarship focused on the history of fine art in Ireland in the early modern period (c.1600–c.1815). Publication by Irish Academic Press is due in 2016. Dedicated research in the past decade into Irish fine art of this period has produced some excellent—though isolated—examples in the form of displays, publications, and articles. In notable contrast are coeval fine art studies in Britain which currently enjoy a revival in research funding, museum partnerships, publishing opportunities, exhibitions, and active expertise networks, all of which provide vital scholarly momentum to the field.

While a more sustained format for focused scholarly output in this area remains a desideratum, this project provides an opportunity to draw together and highlight substantial new work on the production and reception of fine art in Ireland in this period and its contemporary discourse. Contributions are warmly welcomed from academics and graduate students working in art history and associated humanities disciplines, curators, and independent scholars actively engaged in related research. Papers should engage with fine art media—painting, drawing, miniatures, sculpture, and print culture—and demonstrate original and previously unpublished research.

Possible topics for papers include, but are not confined to, the following themes as considered in an Irish context:
• Artistic patrons, patronage, and collecting
• Modes of acquisition and display
• The impact of contemporary politics and ethnographic change on artistic production and consumption
• Artistic networks
• Artistic genres
• Artist biographies
• Artistic training and education
• Foreign travel for formal or informal artistic education
• Amateur artists and artistic production
• Fashioning an artistic career: artists’ means of self-promotion and engagement with patrons and the art market
• Art writing, published or otherwise
• Art historiography of the early modern period

Please send an abstract of your proposed paper (approximately 400 words) and a brief biographical note (maximum 200 words) to IrishArtCFP@outlook.com by Monday 12 January 2015. If you have any queries, please address them to the same email. Final papers will be in the region of 9,000 words, but abstracts for shorter papers are also welcome (please indicate if possible when submitting your abstract). Authors are welcome to submit more than one abstract for consideration by the editorial committee, which comprises Dr Jane Fenlon, Dr Ruth Kenny, Caroline Pegum, and Dr Brendan Rooney. Final papers will be peer-reviewed.

Information about the chimneypiece is available here       

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From the Call for Papers:

Robert Adam and His Brothers: New Light on Britain’s Leading Architectural Family
London, September 2015

Proposals due by 25 December 2014

The Adam style revolution transformed British architecture in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The brothers’ unique and inventive approach to design, based on a modern reinterpretation of the art of antiquity, found widespread popularity and was to have a lasting impact on European and American architecture. The movement and surface variety inherent in their buildings, combined with the lightness and informality of their interiors, set new standards of elegance and were widely imitated.

This two-day symposium aims to highlight important new research and findings on Robert Adam and his brothers across all aspects of their life and work, including architecture, interior decoration, the use of colour, the influence of classical sources, drawing office procedure, the art market, town-planning and building speculation. The conference will present papers from established scholars as well as new research by a younger generation of historians and doctoral students, and is intended to stimulate further study into this most important of British architectural families.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations on any aspect of the Adams’ oeuvre. Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words and a copy of your CV by 25 December 2014 to Colin Thom (Senior Historian, Survey of London) or Geoffrey Tyack (Director, Stanford University Programme, Oxford, and Editor, Georgian Group Journal) at c.thom@ucl.ac.uk and geoffrey.tyack@kellogg.ox.ac.uk. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 12 January 2015. The symposium is being hosted by the Georgian Group with the support of the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and will be held in London in September 2015. Further details of the symposium dates, venue and programme will follow by 2 February 2015. It is intended that selected papers will be published in an edited volume in 2016.

As noted at H-ArtHist:

Anthology: On the Politics of Ugliness
Chapter proposals due by 15 January 2015

Ugliness is a pejorative marker for bodies, things, and feelings that fall beyond or outside the limits of acceptability. Ugliness has long been indirectly deployed in order to mark, collect, and exclude that which is determined to be aesthetically intolerable (Garland-Thomson; Grealy; Schweik), disgusting (Meagher), dirty (Douglas), abject (Kristeva), monstrous (Braidotti; Haraway; Rai & Puar; Schildrick; Sharpe), revolting (Lebesco), grotesque (Russo), or even simply plain and unaltered (Bartky; Bordo; Morgan; Wolf). While aesthetically ugliness has been positioned both against beauty and as a distinct category for art and art-making (Adorno; Ranciere), there has been little sustained engagement with the ways that ugliness operates alongside identities, bodies, intimacies, practices, and spaces (exceptions include Danticat; Kincaid; Athanassoglou-Kallmyer). Part of the reason for this absence might be that ugliness is at once too broad and too diffuse, serving, as art historian Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer has pointed out, as “an all-purpose repository for everything that [does] not quite fit,” a marker of “mundane reality, the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance, irregularity, excess, deformity, the marginal” (281).

A repository for many socio-cultural feelings and attitudes, ugliness operates in ways that have dangerous and deadly consequences for bodies and those who inhabit them. When a body is labeled or understood as ‘ugly’, it is subsequently positioned as up for expunging, destruction, and affectively motivated terror (Fanon). For example, the ‘ugly laws’ of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America demonstrate the visceral discomfort that ‘ugly’ bodies evoke, justifying their exclusion from public spaces on account of their ‘polluting’ effects (Schweik). This demarcation of ugliness is inextricably bound with taken-for-granted ethical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions about the value of bodies. Further, ugliness is infused with dominant discourses of ability, race, heterosexuality, gender, body size, health, and age. At the level of ideas, relations and institutions, deployments of ugliness can have lethal effects on a body’s horizons and the possibilities for visibility, intimacy, and thick life.

On the Politics of Ugliness seeks to provide the first anthology that centralizes ugliness as a political category. It explores the various ways in which ugliness is deployed against those whose bodies, habits, gestures, feelings, expressions, or ways of being deviate from social norms. It argues that ugliness is politicalin at least two ways: (1) it denotes inequalities and hierarchies, often serving as a repository for all that is ‘other’; and (2) it is contingent and relational, taking shape through the comparison and evaluation of bodies. This collection asserts that it is only in facing ugliness as a political category that we can agitate routinely harmful ways of seeing, understanding and relating.

We are seeking an array of contributions that will center the politics of ugliness as it relates to bodies, feelings, gestures, habits, things, spaces, sounds, intimacies and their operations alongside ability, race, gender, class, sexuality, body size, age, health, or animality. Specifically, we invite submissions of academic papers; however, we will also consider art-based work, memoirs, cultural scholars, writers, and artists. We welcome approaches informed by (but not limited to) critical disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, feminist theory, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, queer and sexuality studies, science and technology studies, critical psychology, environmental studies, musicology, and performance studies.

Submissions should engage with the politics of ugliness. Topics of inquiry may include
• interrogations of ugliness as violence against bodies
• the ethics of engaging with ugliness
• feminist explorations of ugliness, ‘ugly’ engagements with feminism
• ugly methodologies, reading practices, and modes of inquiry
• representations of ugliness, ‘ugly’ bodies, body parts, and ‘ugly’ behaviors
• phenomenological encounters with ugliness: feeling ugly, being ‘ugly’, embodying ugliness
• ugly intimacies, feelings, and dispositions (e.g., Ngai; Sharpe)
• genealogies, archives, temporalities, and histories of ugliness
• the fashionizing of ugliness, ugly fashion
• ugly development practices, environmental ugliness
• visual, sensorial, and tactile pollution in relation to spaces and geographies
• theoretical considerations of ugliness as a political category
• reclamations and tactical repositionings of ugliness (e.g., Eileraas)

The deadline for chapter proposals (maximum of 500 words) is 15 January 2015. Please forward proposals or questions to Ela Przybylo (przybylo@yorku.ca) and Sara Rodrigues (sararod@yorku.ca) with the subject heading “On the Politics of Ugliness.”

Now accepting proposals for this panel for next year’s ISECS Congress in Rotterdam:

Alternative Markets and Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century France
ISECS Congress, Rotterdam, 26–31 July 2015

Proposals due by 12 January 2015 (though earlier submissions encouraged)

Organiser: Dr. Esther Bell (Curator in Charge, European Paintings, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Dr. Jessica Fripp (Post-doctoral Fellow in Visual and Material Culture, Parsons The New School for Design)

Academic artistic practice in the eighteenth century was at odds with the growing commercial culture of the period. From its foundation, the Royal Academy prohibited its members from dealing in art, an offense that was deemed cause for expulsion by 1777. Critics similarly looked down on painting for profit. In 1747, La Font de Saint Yenne had harsh words for artists who chose the more financially lucrative practice of portraiture over the more noble art of history painting. Diderot suggested that Fragonard’s turn away from history painting was caused by “l’appas du gain.”

Of course, even artists who appeared to resist the lure of monetary wealth were embedded in complex systems of exchange based on other forms of capital. This panel seeks to explore alternative markets of exchange that developed around the production of eighteenth-century visual culture and the forms of symbolic capital artists could accumulate. Papers might address topic such as: the role of collecting works by one’s contemporaries, friendship networks between artists and artists and patrons, celebrity as currency, gift exchange and favors, artistic dynasties and family allegiances. We especially encourage papers that demonstrate exchange across France’s borders, including its colonies or other European entities.

Information on how to submit abstracts can be found here»

Making A Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Domestic Interior
University of Sussex, Brighton, 7–8 May 2015

Proposals due by 30 November 2014

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Flora Dennis, Senior Lecturer, Art History, University of Sussex

I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
—Maya Angelou

The late Maya Angelou once wrote, “The ache for home lives in all of us.” This nostalgia for home—be it a physical space or geographical place, a moment in time, a person / people, or a state of mind—continues to be of central interest to artists, writers, and thinkers. Crossing lines between the private and public spheres, and extending
into important explorations of nationhood and belonging, different areas of research into the home seek to expand our understanding of how physical space has been used, transformed, and conceptualised throughout history. Some aspects of this pursuit include less-tangible features: Interactions between people, objects and spaces; the complex process of memory-making; the role of sentiment; and creating a sense of belonging can transform a dwelling into a home. In turn, these interactions have the power to transform the individual and the home, and to shape a sense of identity, whether as an individual, family, or nation.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference invites proposals from doctoral students and early career researchers for 20-minute papers that explore the question of what makes a home, and how homes make us. Papers may consider homes both past and present and from a variety of perspectives such as material culture studies, art history, gender
studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and geography. Topics may include, though are not limited to:
• Historical constructions of home
• Public versus private spaces/spheres
• Domestic production and consumption
• Notions of domesticity, gender and identity
• Representations of home in art, music and literature
• Religion, ritual and belief in the home
• Institutional or non-familial homes
• Historic homes and heritage sites
• Architecture and interior design
• Sociability and sociality
• Ideas of nation / nationhood
• Diaspora and belonging
• Colonial and postcolonial histories

Please email an abstract of no more than 250 words to Michele Robinson and Emma Doubt at MakingAHome2015@gmail.com by 30 November 2014. Along with your abstract please include your name, institution, paper title and brief biography. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 February 2015. All speakers will be invited to attend a complimentary dinner in Brighton the evening of 7 May 2015.

Now accepting proposals for this panel for next year’s ISECS Congress in Rotterdam:

Pictures in Motion: Portraiture around the World during the Long Eighteenth Century
ISECS Congress, Rotterdam, 26–31 July 2015

Proposals due by 12 January 2015 (though earlier submissions encouraged)

Organiser: Jennifer Germann, jgermann@ithaca.edu

Portraits and portraitists moved between courts, capitals, nations, and colonies in an ebb and flow that followed the tides of imperialism, markets, and diplomacy. Indeed, while portraits were understood as emphasizing the unique individual who could be regarded as a ‘defined location’ at the heart of the image, these representations frequently gesture to the world beyond the sitter to situate and elevate him or her. Portraiture was a dynamic artistic practice throughout the long eighteenth century due, in part, to the various exchanges that portraits occasioned and pictured. This panel turns its attention to the practice of portraiture and to portraits produced during this period with an emphasis on their global circulation. What motivations, rewards, and disincentives existed for artists who traveled for their work? What artistic and cultural exchanges were occasioned by this movement? How were portraits used to facilitate other transactions, whether mercantile or diplomatic? In what sense can we understand portrait production as a global phenomenon, as opposed to an international or cosmopolitan one and distinct from national schools? How does portraiture help us understand what it meant to be global in the eighteenth century? Topics might include the exchange between distinct traditions of portraiture in terms of approaches and conventions, the use of portraits in diplomacy (as, for example, in marriage arrangements), and artists who traveled for and in search of clients. Interdisciplinary papers are welcome with an emphasis on cultural exchange through portraits and global portrait practices. Submissions concentrating on the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century are particularly encouraged.

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Portraiture as Interaction: The Spaces and Interfaces of the British Portrait
The Huntington, San Marino, California, 11–12 December 2015

Proposals due by 7 November 2014

A symposium jointly organized by the Yale Center for British Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Huntington

This symposium has been inspired by the important collections of British portraits at the Huntington Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, and by an upsurge of scholarly interest in the interactive nature of portraiture—both in its intrinsic character and as a curatorial construct.

Portraiture implies an interaction between the sitter and the spectator. It often rehearses an interaction between two or more protagonists and regularly focuses on the interaction between the person(s) represented and his, her, or their surroundings. Portraits—of husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, friends, and colleagues—are often depicted by artists and arranged by curators so as to interact with each other in meaningful ways. As they are created, and once they are completed, portraits (and the figures they represent) interact with their settings: with the studio, the exhibition space, the domestic interior, the public building or square; and with the objects, people, and spaces found in those settings. The same portrait, or portraits of the same sitter, can also find themselves interacting with each other across different media—paint, print, sculpture, and more.

Furthermore, curators are continually thinking about the ways in which the portraits they display—and the individuals these pictures portray—will relate with each other across and around a gallery. The Thornton Portrait Gallery at the Huntington and the galleries at the Yale Center for British Art exemplify portraiture’s continuing forms of interaction: implied and actual, pictorial and physical, and formal and figural.

This two-day international symposium will use the rich collections at the Center and the Huntington Art Gallery and the different concepts of interaction outlined above as points of departure and return, in order to open up new approaches to the history and workings of British portraiture up to the present. Participants will be encouraged to offer original and innovative readings of individual portraits, groups of portraits, portrait galleries, and portraiture as a genre. Talks that respond explicitly to works in the collections of the Huntington and the Center are particularly encouraged.

We invite proposals for thirty-five to forty-minute papers on this theme from scholars working in any discipline. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Please e-mail abstracts of no more than three hundred words, along with a short CV, to ycba.research@yale.edu. The deadline for proposals is November 7, 2014.

Travel and accommodations will be provided for speakers arriving from outside the Los Angeles area, and meals will be provided for all.

By my hasty count, 11 of the 34 sessions proposed for the Association of Art Historians 2015 conference could include eighteenth-century papers. Be sure to consult the conference website for things I’ve overlooked. –CH

41st Annual AAH Conference and Bookfair
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), University of East Anglia, Norwich, 9–11 April 2015

Proposals due by 10 November 2014

The AAH 2015 conference and bookfair will be located in the famous Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), designed by Norman Foster and a finalist for the museum of the year. It holds a fascinating collection of work and hosts a range of exhibitions. SCVA is part of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and situated on the UEA campus. The conference will start on Thursday 9 April at various venues in Norwich city centre, and then remain at SCVA for Friday and Saturday.  The SCVA building will be the main hub of the event, in which registration, refreshments and sessions take place.

Founded in 1965, the Department of Art History and World Art Studies is a member of the Sainsbury Institute for Art at the University of East Anglia. The Department has become known for its commitment to geographical and historical inclusivity, and to collaborative and cross-disciplinary scholarship.

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Session 3 | The Art History of Architectural History
Session Convenors: Mark Crinson, University of Manchester, mark.crinson@manchester.ac.uk; and Richard Williams, University of Edinburgh, r.j.williams@ed.ac.uk

Art history and architectural history are sister disciplines… or are they? How many art history departments regard architectural history as a core component of their provision? What might art history students miss if architectural history were not part of their curricula? Perhaps art objects and architectural objects are so radically different their study cannot be shared. Or perhaps there are modes of enquiry that can be developed to mutual benefit.

This session reviews the art history/architectural history relationship in several ways. One way is to excavate those moments when art and architectural history were tightly bound together: in the very formation of art history as a discipline, for example, when both art and architecture were natural objects of study.

Other ways might be: investigations of the parallel developments of formalism in art and architectural history; of architectural history’s relation to the ‘new art history’; of the ways in which architectural history might adopt recent developments in object studies, global art history, and art writing.

Academics dealing with contemporary architecture find themselves wrestling with debates that in other disciplines may be more abstract or indirect: How does money or power represent itself in visual form? How does the general public (whoever they may be) understand form? How does government use aesthetics to communicate? All of these things are, and always have been, live in architecture. Perhaps this might be part of a case for making architectural history more central to art history. If so, what implications would it have for our curricula and our pedagogy?

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Session 6 | British Art through Its Exhibition Histories, 1760 to Now
Session Convenors: Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Martina Droth, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, svturner@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk

How have histories of British art been shaped, defined and contested by and through exhibitions? Taking a broad historical perspective, and responding to an upsurge of interest in the study of exhibition histories in recent years, this session will explore the varied exhibition cultures of British art from 1760—the year that saw the first annual exhibition of contemporary British painting, sculpture and printmaking—through to today.

This session does not seek to offer a chronological history of exhibitions but rather a series of critical propositions that take exhibitions and exhibition culture as a lens through which to examine the history, presentation, marketing and reception of British art, both in the UK and internationally. How have exhibitions shaped or disputed the artistic canon, defined particular artistic groupings, or articulated distinctive histories of British art? How have they contributed to new kinds of critical and art-historical writing about British painting, sculpture, graphic and multi-media arts?

We welcome proposals that explore exhibitions of British art in a variety of contexts, at either a national or international level, including: case studies of individual exhibitions or series of displays; monographic or thematic exhibitions; the phenomenon of travelling exhibitions, both historically and today; exhibitions in public, private and commercial spaces.

Papers might examine the role of agencies, institutions and funding bodies; exhibitions as a tool for shaping a canon; exhibitions and changing notions of ‘Britishness’; the display of British art and artists in different international contexts. We seek papers that will interrogate and analyse the dynamic, transformative and sometimes challenging relationship of British art to its exhibition histories across different periods.

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Session 13 | Flow in World Art, 1500–1750
Session Convenor: Margit Thøfner, University of East Anglia, m.thofner@uea.ac.uk

This session considers the notion of flow in the early modern period in the broadest possible terms. During this time, most parts of the globe became connected by shipping lanes. The already steady trickle of people, objects and ideas across the continents and oceans became a full flow. That waterways could both conjoin and divide was evident in a manner that it had never been before. At the same time, liquids such as sap, mercury, lava, semen, milk and blood came under intense interrogation, in moral, political, theological and scientific terms.

What consequences did this fascination with fluidity have for the arts? Depicting flow is of necessity an act of fixing runniness. Liquids may work as boundaries but, at the same time, they are boundless. How did early modern artists and artisans address this paradox? How did they show fluidity, whether of persons, ideas or substances?

The aim of this session is to consider, compare and contrast how image-makers from across the world tackled such problems. Our ultimate goal is to determine whether, how and why the concept of flow changed visually under the manifold pressures of early colonialism. We welcome contributions focused anywhere in the world within the given dates and we are particularly interested in examples where two or more pictorial or artefactual traditions are brought together. We hope to publish selected papers from this session in a dedicated issue of the journal World Art.

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Session 14 | From Distaste to Mockery: The City and Its Architectures Ridiculed
Session Convenor: Michela Rosso, Politecnico di Torino, michela.rosso@polito.it

Since the origins of the contemporary age, the rise of a mass public and a reconfigured public sphere, along with the diffusion of the popular press, have deeply affected the way in which the city and its architectures are interpreted and judged. Among the genres addressing the modern city, some emerge that seem to be highly effective in disseminating the architectural culture, displaying its distortions or singling out its vulnerable features through the deployment of humour. As part of a media-saturated public culture, humour is both a practice of social communication and a plausible portrayal of society, illuminating the ambivalences of modern life and uncovering the shock provoked by processes of modernisation.

This session’s aim is to inaugurate a catalogue of the comic as applied to the spatial criticism of the city, its artefacts and its leading professionals—architects, artists and builders. Punch’s sharp satire of the first World Exhibition, William H Robinson’s caricatures of modernist housing, Tati’s parody of the Corbusian villa, and Dunn’s architecturally situated cartoons for The New Yorker are some of the renowned entries in this possible catalogue. By absorbing the disturbing effects of modernisation and turning them into laughter, they give voice to a diverse range of feelings and social reactions, from distaste to overt dissent.

This session invites case studies that explore the reception of architectural facts through the distinct codes of humour, verbal as well as visual, in any place and time, between 1750 and today, and focusing on any medium from literature to cinema, television and cartoons.

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Sesison 17 | Materialising Modern Identities: Architectural Sculpture after 1750
Session Convenors: Katie Faulkner, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, katie.r.faulkner@gmail.com; and Ayla Lepine, University of Essex, ayla.lepine@gmail.com

In recent years, sculpture studies within art and architectural history have grown exponentially, increasingly taking diverse themes into account including materiality, gender, postcolonialism and affect. In the rapid transformations of state power and imperial activity in the 18th century, through into the post-revolutionary political atmosphere of the 19th century, nations appeared to sponsor the celebration of the public citizen and actively projected imperial stability in the midst of change and resistance. Despite its association with permanence, sculpture was charged with representing change: materialising new identities and formulating representational traditions.

Architectural sculpture in particular marked sites of urban modernity, such as stations, cultural institutions, civic landmarks and sacred structures; these large and prestigious commissions often sparked public debate around identity and artistic production. As the onset and outcomes of the First World War shaped the power and politics of cultural memory, sculpture took centre stage, with new responsibilities amongst global tensions. Interwar architectural sculpture negotiated and articulated increasing anxieties regarding ornament, historicism, modernism and minimalism. With the arrival of modernism worldwide, some believed architectural sculpture was anathema. Others looked to it as the vehicle to facilitate and embody vitality in bold new architectural experimentation. Architectural sculpture was a crucible for artistic and wider cultural dialogue concerning modern life and modern subjects.

We invite proposals for papers that explore architectural sculpture and identity in a global context between 1750 and the present. Potential themes include: collaboration and networks between architects and sculptors; materiality, production and reproduction; modernism and tradition; beauty and ugliness; figuration and abstraction; style and historicism; form, function and ornament; spectacle and the everyday; memory and ritual; nationhood and transnationalism; and empire and its afterlives.

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Session 22 | Navigating the Pacific: Latin America and Asia in Conversation
Session Convenors: Kathryn Santner and Paul Merchant, St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, kathryn.santner@gmail.com and pm437@cam.ac.uk

The critical role of Asia in the history of Latin American art has often been overlooked; recent scholarship has, however, begun to reassess this longstanding cultural engagement. This session will examine the significance of Asia–Latin America exchange from its earliest days via the Manila Galleon and Portuguese trade networks through to the present day.

Iberian trade brought luxury goods—porcelain, lacquerware, folding screens, ivories, and inlaid furniture—to the Americas, where they were adapted and incorporated into local artistic practice, spawning new art forms like the biombo. The decline of the galleon trade after 1815 did not mark the end of this transpacific relationship; ensuing centuries brought successive waves of Asian immigrants to Latin America – notably the Chinese to Peru and the Japanese to Brazil.

In the wake of this diaspora, artists have recently begun to explore Asian identity in Latin America, notably in several successful documentary and fiction film productions from the region. The presence, for the first time, of a Latin American pavilion at the Beijing Art Expo 2013 also points to the increasing recognition of a centuries-old dialogue in the visual arts. So too does the ‘Latin American Artists in Asia’ network, whose members practise in fields from sculpture to photography and digital art. This session will cover a broad historical period, and adopt a variety of methodological approaches. Key issues to be considered include (post) national identity, materiality and its relationship to place, and the opportunities and complications offered by digital technologies.

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Session 23 | Petits-maîtres: ‘Minor’ Genres and Their Meanings in Post-Revolutionary France
Session Convenor: Richard Taws, University College London, r.taws@ucl.ac.uk

While studies of French art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have historically tended to privilege the work of a few prominent artists, increased attention has been paid more recently to artists working in less prestigious genres, in other media, and to those who helped disseminate their work. This session focuses on, among others, the genre painters and miniaturists, flower and animal painters, landscapists and portraitists, and printmakers of all types who were active in France from the beginning of the French Revolution through to the end of the July Monarchy.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, a diverse range of artists working in ‘minor’ genres negotiated the shifting parameters of artistic practice, documenting (some more explicitly than others) a modern world subject to rapid social and political change. Meanwhile, new venues for the display and dissemination of art, alongside technical innovations in printmaking, created novel opportunities for reproductive image-makers and publishers. Consequently, this session also welcomes papers that address the implications of the circulation, sale and display of prints by, and after, so-called petits-maîtres, the lives of images in reproduction, and the practices of replication, remediation and recontextualisation to which they were subject.

How did the new political, social and commercial circumstances of early 19th-century France enable or constrain artistic practices of this kind, and how might they be understood in terms of evolving hierarchies of class or gender? How did art made during this period relate to other techniques, institutions, spectacles, careers, audiences or social practices?

While this session encourages papers that focus closely on lesser-known artists or works, it is also hoped that speakers will take the opportunity to situate their subjects imaginatively within broader tendencies in early 19th-century visual culture.

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Session 24 | Portraiture and the Unworthy Subject in the Early Modern World
Session Convenor: Carmen Fracchia, Birkbeck, University of London, c.fracchia@bbk.ac.uk

In the early modern period, the production of portraiture was governed by restrictive conventions. According to the first European treatise on portraiture since antiquity (Francisco de Holanda’s Do tirar polo natural [On Taking Portraits from Life], 1548), the essence of the genre was the worthy sitter’s moral or intellectual prestige. Thus, the main function of the portrait image was to immortalise the worthy elite, with the implicit moral understanding that there could be no room for the portrayal of the unworthy subject. What are the political and visual implications of this belief about portraiture? What are the notions of human diversity that prevent the portrayal of undeserving subjects? How are these concepts negotiated in the production of the portrait image outside Europe?

This session aims to build on research by historians of art, literature and the colonial world, and work on slave narratives that illuminate the paradoxical nature of ‘slave portraits’ in the Atlantic World. It intends to explore a wider spectrum of what were considered ‘unworthy subjects’, and the complexity of the mutually exclusive categories of ‘portraiture’ and ‘undeserving subject’. It also seeks to tackle the oxymoronic categories of ‘self-portraiture’ and ‘unworthy subject’, and investigate how notions of human diversity might challenge the boundaries of traditional portraiture and self-portraiture.

Contributions are invited that address the portrayal of ‘undeserving people’ across different media and cultures in the early modern world, as well as the historical context of social inferiority and the ‘undeserving’ between the 15th and the 18th centuries.

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Session 28 | Surface Affects and Shiny Things: Bringing Meaning to Light
Session Convenors: Nic Maffei, Victoria Mitchell and Marcia Pointon, Norwich University of the Arts n.maffei@nua.ac.uk, v.mitchell@nua.ac.uk and m.r.pointon@manchester.ac.uk

The visual qualities of a surface that shines are such as to attract or distract the eyes, which themselves are often attributed with gleaming, shining or glinting. The silkiness of high polish invites tactile attention too, or deters for fear of spoiling. Shine may materialise through use or careful positioning of an object. It is often not inherent in a material but may be derived from working up a shine. Within art, design and architecture, materials (metal, plastic, glass, fabric, wood, paint) and processes, often labour-intensive (polishing, burnishing, glazing), can combine to reveal shine. The manifestations of shininess can imply bodies in motion and individual subjectivity, while the gloss of film or magazines points to a more socially pervasive ‘look’. Although dependent on specular-reflective properties of light and absorbency of materials, reflective patina or sheen is often intentionally sought, in order to generate affect or effect.

This session addresses the cultural, historical, critical and often paradoxical meanings of ‘shine’ as this pertains to the making, using or viewing of objects and surfaces. Depending on context, shininess might suggest religious or poetic allusion, sensory engagement, luminosity, spectacle, desire, cheapness, cleanliness, protection, health, wealth and perhaps also disgust (as in the surface of slime). Shininess was held in high regard in Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon art, as also for many designers of the mid-20th century. Spurred on by fashion, the superficial nature of shininess has been linked to postmodern theory on late-capitalism. We seek papers that engage with such issues in relation to any period, reflecting a range of practices and perspectives.

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Session 29 | Things and Their Ideas: Exchanges in the Visual and Material Cultures of Islamicate Asia
Session Convenors: Sussan Babaie, The Courtauld Institute of Art, sussan.babaie@courtauld.ac.uk; and
Elizabeth Lambourn, De Montfort University, Leicester, elambourn@dmu.ac.uk

In recent decades, the theoretical turn to cross-culturality has produced important reflections on the global in art history. A persistent feature of such trans-regional explorations remains nevertheless rooted in networks that implicate Europe in some prominent way: the Mediterranean exchanges are invariably about Europe and the Muslim cultures, the European interests in chinoiserie that skip the vast inter-Asian land and water routes of exchange, or post-colonial interests that reflect, in the end, more on the European colonist than on the Asian colonised.

This session takes the global from the vantage point of the centrality of the Asian nexus in producing its principal vectors in pre-colonial times. It invites innovative approaches that focus on the specificities of, and excavate deeply into, isolated ‘things’ or a cluster of desirable things. It asks for trans-disciplinary reflections on the mechanisms of exchange and transmission of ideas, through art and material culture, in between the local histories and global networks across regions where Islamic cultural modes were dominant or influential, throughout the Asian landmass. Collecting or commissioning of cut precious stones, of album and manuscript paintings, of embroidered textiles and inlaid objects, of garden designs and tomb edifices, and the collection and circulation of animalia; with such topics, we hope the papers in this session will bring fullness to our understanding of things as a way to access their global implications through an Islamicate Asian lens.

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Session 30 | Thinking Images
Session Convenors: Hanneke Grootenboer, Anita Paz and Lucy Whelan, University of Oxford, lucy.whelan@trinity.ox.ac.uk

This session explores the rising interest in art as a mode of thinking, apparent in academic writing as well as artistic practice. Images have long been seen as thought-provoking or as tools for contemplation. However, recent years have revealed a shift towards giving art works agency to think. Cézanne and Klee famously declared that they thought through painting, while Jean-Luc Godard claimed cinema as a mode of thinking. More recently, Jacques Rancière declared photography as thoughtful, while Ron Burnett’s How Images Think links the digital image’s thinking power to the technology from which it derives.

This session will examine how images might be capable of thinking. Questions to be pursued include: By what mechanisms do images think? What visual language do they use or create? How do they shape thought? How is a mode of thought specific to a particular medium—film (stills), installation art, sculpture—or a particular culture—Chinese Ming painting, Buddhist imagery? What are the political implications of ascribing thought processes to visual materials? This session intends to establish a genealogy of the thinking image, and encourages papers addressing these and related questions through a variety of approaches, media and ideas.