Enfilade

From H-ArtHist (which includes the CFP in German). . .

Representing the Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty in Musical,
Visual Media, and Architecture, c. 1618–1918
Vienna, 8–10 June 2015

Proposals due by by 31 October 2014

This international conference will take place in Vienna from the 8th to the 10th of June 2015. It will be devoted to the new interdisciplinary research program ‘Representing Habsburg’—one of the main current research fields of the Institute for History of Art and Musicology (IKM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences focusing on the history of fine arts and music in Austria and Central Europe in their general European context. We invite submissions of papers from all art-related disciplines (history of art, musicology, history, theatre history, cultural studies etc.) to the five panels described below.

Representing the Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty
The IKM intends to build its new research priority by subjecting the visual and musical culture of the Central European Habsburgs to completely new and extensive scrutiny. In particular, it plans to cast new light on the paradigm of a specifically ‘Habsburg’ representation that research has all but disregarded until now. Hence it is important to judge, on a case by case basis, how representation functioned in the complex relationship between the addresser and the addressee, the sender and the receiver, and which decision-makers favoured which kinds of communication networks. The investigations should also include the estates and social groups (the nobility, the clergy, the guilds and the municipalities) which functioned as the principal addressees of Habsburg activities. Consequently, the new research priority will need to ask how social groups reacted to dynastic activities (e.g. entries into the city, the idolisation of rulers, monuments, imperial and municipal halls containing portraits of regents and sculptural decorations), and how specific forms of representation were expressed in this process.

I. Topics and Media of Representation
On the premise that Habsburg representation was a successful mode of balancing (outward) self-presentation and (inward-looking) self-interpretation, it can be asked whether visual arts and music (as well as theatre) shared similar topics (topoi) and narratives. Is a Habsburg ‘code of virtues’ bound to be considered a compulsory basis for all participating court arts, or are there other social practices or political interests responsible for establishing a canon of subjects (e.g. Christian iconography or Classical mythology)? Are disruptions discernible in the process of actualizing panegyrics through musical and artistic production? How do innovations interact with the traditional representation of potentates? In the light of the courtly arts’ preeminent aim of representing the dynasty or the state, may we perceive any media-specific differences?

II. Ceremonial Spaces and the ‘Public’
Since the early modern period, music, visual arts, architecture and panegyric literature have been used for the plurimedial definition and design of the ceremonial space. The strategies used will be examined in more detail in this section: Are there differences in defining ceremonial space for different kind of publics (public space, sacred space, court space)? The question of how the architectural site related to plurimedially generated ceremonial space is of particular importance. Does immovable architecture only set the boundaries of the ceremonial space, or does it—together with music—constitute this area? This refers to court architecture as well as to sacred and urban architecture. The latter could be examined particularly in the context of the ruler’s ‘adventus’.

III. Dynasty, State and Nation
What was the relationship between the ruling Habsburg dynasty and the concepts of state and/or nation from the 18th century until the collapse of the monarchy? Was a primarily dynastic representation superseded by a state representation and—in the course of time—even pushed aside by concepts of national representations? Taking into consideration a wide range of artistic, architectural and musical genres (including for example, in the case of architecture infrastructural buildings and urbanism, and in the case of music ‘popular’ genres like operettas) we are interested in the structural/institutional characteristics of this kind of political representation, in their impact and intricacies and their intended signifying functions. We also welcome contributions that focus on oppositional representations or exemplify ‘regional’ and/or ‘peripheral’ forms within the empire as well as on a global level (e. g. in relation to associated courts overseas).

IV. Church and Representation
The Counter-Reformation led to a ‘propaganda campaign’, also carried out in the fields of the arts, in which the struggle for the ‘true faith’ and the ‘Pietas Austriaca’ were declared to be the causa prima of the dynasty, also by means of the arts. A crucial issue is the importance of representing religion in general and the Pietas Austriaca in particular at the intersection of court, city and church. How did the Habsburgs utilize the cult for their personal representation? And in contrast, how did religious communities use the dynasty (and even their close relationship with the dynasty) for their own purposes? To what extent was the ‘Pietas Austriaca’ politically deployed as a mode of symbolic communication, and which topoi were used by the (court) arts? Did music and art occupy a specific position in religious rituals such as pilgrimages, processions or services at Stations of the Cross (Stationsgottesdienste), which served to represent the ruler?

V. Decision Makers
If we understand dynastic representation not as a centrally determined top-down strategy but rather as the result of a complex intertwining of particular action and reaction processes, the following questions have to be posed (concerning the monarch’s advisors and decision makers from the institutions involved): What groups (imperial/royal family, court institutions, antiquarians and so on) participated in decisions and why? Is it possible to read their intentions out of historic sources? Are there similarities or differences with strategies of other dynasties?  Beyond that, case studies of non-courtly Habsburg representation can be of interest. Analyses of such works should illuminate the circumstances of dynastic representation in the Habsburg monarchy.

Conference language: German and English
Lectures: 20 minutes
Abstracts: max. 2000 characters, CV (max. 500 characters)

Contact:
Univ.-Doz. Dr. Werner Telesko
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften / Austrian Academy of Sciences
Institut für kunst- und musikhistorische Forschungen (IKM), Direktor /
Institute for History of Art and Musicology (IKM), Director
Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2
A-1010 Wien
werner.telesko@oeaw.ac.at

From H-ArtHist (with the full call for papers available as a PDF file here). . .

River Cities: Historical and Contemporary
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., 8-9 May 2015

Proposals due by 14 September 2014

The dynamic relationships between cities and their rivers, a landscape of potentially critical adaptability and resilience, is the focus of the 2015 Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks. Building on the emergence of urban humanities and urban landscape history, we propose to consider the urban river as a city-making landscape deserving of careful reading and analysis: past, present, and future.

The subject of this symposium builds on a new multi-year initiative in urban landscape studies, which Dumbarton Oaks is launching in 2015 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its principal goal is to create a dialogue between designers and scholars to address the landscape consequences of advancing urbanization. With this task in mind, the 2015 symposium aims to bring together the work of contemporary designers with the historical perspectives of scholars, encouraging practitioners and historians to bridge the gaps between their modes of thinking. We consider historians to include those in art history, urban history, and architectural history among others. We would particularly welcome proposals for collaborative or paired presentations by designers and historians working on similar topics or the same city.

Please submit a 300-word abstract to Thaisa Way (tway@uw.edu) by September 14, 2014 to be considered for the 2015 Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies symposium: River Cities: Historical and Contemporary. If accepted, full papers will be due on March 1, 2015 for presentation in May 2015 (most likely May 8–9, 2015). For more information, contact Thaisa Way, University of Washington, tway@uw.edu.

From the College Art Association:

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

Proposals due by 12 September 2014

The CAA 104th Annual Conference will take place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC. The Annual Conference Committee invites session proposals that cover the breadth of current thought and research in art, art and architectural history, theory and criticism, pedagogical issues, museum and curatorial practice, conservation, and developments in technology. Deadline: Friday, September 12, 2014. In order to submit a proposal, you must be a current CAA member. For full details on the submission process for the conference, please review the information available here.

As noted at H-ArtHist:

LUCAS International Graduate Conference 2015
Breaking the Rules! Cultural Reflections on Political, Religious, and Aesthetic Transgressions
Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society, 29–30 January 2015

Proposals due by 15 October 2014

Society, religion and art have always been defined and governed by certain (un-)written rules. Yet there have always been those who willingly transgressed communal norms. Throughout history, from Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, up to the present day, these transgressors have met with either praise or disapproval. Some have been heralded as heroes, great thinkers or revolutionary artists, while others have been branded as exiles, sinners or outcasts. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was punished for defying the Gods and gifting humanity with fire; Christianity, Judaism and Islam condemn Adam and Eve’s transgression of divine command. The legacy of prominent rule-breakers, such as Socrates, Jeanne d’Arc, Pablo Picasso and Martin Luther King, can still be felt today.

This multi-disciplinary conference focuses on the wide range of cultural reflections on the violation of laws, traditions and conventions in the political, religious and aesthetic domains. Central questions, applicable to all three domains, include: Who breaks the rules? What are the aims of the offender: identification, protest or innovation? How can the authority of rules be undermined? How has transgression been perceived through the ages? Is the rule breaker punished or praised? To what extent is an act of rule breaking a confirmation of the existence of certain rules? What role does gender play in rule breaking? How do various cultures define transgression?

Papers in the political domain may focus on artistic perspectives on social taboos, the ethics of rule breaking, revolt, emancipation, disobedience, identity through rule breaking, the absence of rules (anarchy, freedom), protest through art or any other topic related to this domain. Papers in the religious domain may deal with cultural perspectives on the various aspects of religious rule breaking, such as sin, confession, penance, damnation, redemption, heresy and inquisition, as well as iconoclasm and idolatry. Other topics include, but are not limited to, sin as a political instrument, religious taboos and forbidden pleasures. Papers in the aesthetic domain may focus on boundaries of what is considered to be art, changing perceptions of beauty/ugliness in art, deviations from stylistic conventions and artistic traditions, plagiarism, the tension between resisting convention and embracing innovation or any other topic related to this domain. Creative and engaging ideas which fall outside the three domains described above will also be considered.

The LUCAS Graduate Conference aims to reflect the institute’s interdisciplinary and international character. As such, this two-day conference will provide a platform for PhD students in the humanities, from Leiden as well as other universities in the Netherlands and abroad, to present and exchange their ideas in an international and interdisciplinary environment. The organising committee invited two internationally renowned senior academics from different disciplines to act as keynote speakers, participate in the discussions and provide feedback to the papers presented at the conference.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Lorraine Daston, Professor and Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago

Proposals
The LUCAS Graduate Conference welcomes papers from all disciplines within the humanities. The topic of your proposal may address the concept of rule breaking/transgression from a cultural, historical, classical, artistic, literary, cinematic, political, economic, religious or social viewpoint. Possible themes for papers may revolve around, but are not limited to, the following concepts:
• Heresy, Agnosticism, Sin, Adultery, Immorality, Redemption
• Rebellion, Revolt, Revolution, Conflict, Anarchy, Emancipation
• Corruption, Criminality, Outlawry, Oath Breaking
• Innovation, the Sublime, Supernaturalism, Ugliness, Obscenity
• Illegal Migration, Crossing Borders, Exile, Nomadism, Exclusion
• Cultural or Sexual Hybridity, Creolization
• Exoticism, Orientalism, Barbarism, Savagism

Please send your proposal (max. 300 words) to present a 20-minute paper along with a brief bio (150 words) before 15 October, 2014 to lucasconference2015@gmail.com. You will be notified whether or not your paper has been selected by 1 November, 2014. Should you have any question regarding the conference and/or the proposal, please do not hesitate to contact the organizing committee at the same email address. The conference website can be found here. A selection of papers will be published as conference proceedings in the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference. For those who attend the conference, there will be a registration fee of €50 to cover the costs of lunches, coffee breaks, excursions and other conference materials. Unfortunately, we cannot offer financial support for travel or accommodation expenses.

The Organizing Committee
Nouzha Baba
Cui Chen
Katarzyna Durys
Wieneke Jansen
Thijs Porck

A late addition to the CAA 2015 sessions:

Did You Read That? Art Editing on the Web
Session at the 103rd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York, 11–14 February 2015

Proposals due by 31 July 2014

Sponsored by the Association of Art Editors, the session “Did You Read That? Art Editing on the Web” will explore the current state of art editing on the web. Panelists will discuss the varying levels of work and practices involved in editing texts for publication online, from the mechanical and technical aspects (research, fact checking, making corrections after publishing) to larger conceptual and ethical matters (changing attitudes toward quality). Writers and editors today have access to a wide range of resources—from Google searches and Wikipedia to JSTOR and Oxford Art Online—that were unavailable (and even unimaginable) twenty or thirty years ago. How has the advent of such resources affected the editorial process?

This session, whose format will be a roundtable conversation, with the chair serving as an active interviewer rather than a passive moderator, will focus on specific examples and case studies rather than on generalizations and abstractions. Speakers, who may include authors, critics, editors, or publishers, will address personal and academic
websites, online versions of printed publications, born-digital journals, and blogs; they may also consider the training of younger writers, critics, historians, and editors.

The chair seeks four participants for the session. Speakers are not required to present a paper prepared in advance, although a brief presentation of five to ten minutes can be accommodated. Please send a letter of interest, a CV, and your area(s) of professional interest and expertise to Christopher Howard at chris@christopher-howard.net.

From the conference website:

The Beauty of Letters: Text, Type, and Communication in the Eighteenth Century
Birmingham, 14–15 March 2015

Proposals due by 1 July 2014

The Baskerville Society, in conjunction with the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City University, is pleased to announce the theme for its second two-day conference, The Beauty of Letters: Text, Type, and Communication in the Eighteenth Century.

In his preface to Paradise Lost (1758), John Baskerville described himself as ‘an admirer of the beauty of letters’. This conference takes his phrase as a starting point to explore the production, distribution, consumption and reception, not only of letters, but also words, texts and images during the long eighteenth century (c. 1688–1820). This conference will consider how writing, printing, performance and portrayal contributed to the creation of cultural identity and taste, assisted the spread of knowledge and contributed to political,
economic, social and cultural change in Britain and the wider world.

Writing: teaching of writing and penmanship; styles of handwritten script; copybooks; shorthand; handwritten documents such as diaries, account books, letters, legal and parliamentary documents; the creation of texts by authors, poets and playwrights of the eighteenth century.*

Printing: printers and typefounders; technology and technology transfer; typefaces and typography; manufacture and distribution of texts; libraries, and education; publishing and bookselling; the production of different forms of print media: books, newspapers, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, conduct manuals, scientific and medical literature, histories, travel literature, religious, legal and political texts, ephemera and street literature.

Performance: the enactment and communication of text in theatre, music, politics and education through writing and performance of plays, ballad operas, songs and lyrics; the presentation of scripts and musical scores; censorship; theatre programmes; theatre merchandising; speeches; sermons; scientific lectures.

Portrayal: the visual representation of text in maps; scientific drawings; architectural drawings; astronomical sketches; political/satirical cartoons; posters, labels; signs and shop-fronts including both architectural and fascia lettering; advertising.

*please note the conference is not exploring literary criticism

The Conference organisers, Professor Caroline Archer and Dr Malcolm Dick are inviting contributions from academics, heritage professionals, research students and independent scholars. Please send a suggested title, synopsis (200 words) and biography (100 words) via a word attachment to both: caroline.archer@bcu.ac.uk and m.m.dick@bham.ac.uk; by: 1 July 2014.

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The Baskerville Society is an international society dedicated to the study of the eighteenth-century typographer, printer, industrialist and Enlightenment figure, John Baskerville (1707–75).

From The Courtauld:

Sixth Early Modern Symposium | The Intelligent Hand, 1500–1800
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 8 November 2014

Proposals due by 30 June 2014

Organised by Austeja Mackelaite and Camilla Pietrabissa

The hand—the ‘instrument of instruments’—has fascinated artists, scientists and philosophers from Aristotle onwards. Its remarkable dexterity, anatomical complexity, and the ability to manipulate were seen as defining features distinguishing humanity from animality, as well as indicators of the superiority of the former. Taking as its starting point the sixteenth-century humanist Dominicus Lampsonius’ claim that ‘the Netherlander / Has intelligence in his hand’, this one-day Symposium will investigate the hand both as the means and the subject of representation in Early Modern art and visual culture.

Participants are invited to explore the hand as the locus where the relations between manual labour and ingenium, workshop and academy, the ‘low’ and the ‘high’ are defined and negotiated in the production of artistic value and new knowledge. Traditionally held to be subordinate to the creative drive of the mind, the artist’s hand may also be considered as an autonomous agent, manifesting itself on the surface of artworks through individual style, the manipulation of media or as an iconographic motif.

We welcome proposals for papers that explore the theme of the intelligent hand from the early modern period (c.1500–1800) including painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, graphic arts, and the intersections between them. Papers can explore artistic exchanges across nations and cover non-European subjects. Contributions from other disciplines, such as anthropology and the history of science, are also welcome. Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:
·  Formal and informal training of the artist’s hand
·  The hand of the master and the ‘hands’ of his workshop
·  The relationship between an artist’s hand and his individual style
·  The sense of touch in relation to sight and other senses
·  Gesturing as the language of the hand in visual representations
·  The hand in anatomical and scientific treatises
·  The hand as a mnemonic device
·  Historiography of the hand

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words along with a 150 word biography by 30 June 2014 to austeja.mackelaite@courtauld.ac.uk and camilla.pietrabissa@courtauld.ac.uk. Organised by Austeja Mackelaite and Camilla Pietrabissa (The Courtauld Institute of Art).

Picturing the Eighteenth-Century Novel through Time:
Illustration, Intermediality and Adaptation
Special Issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2016)
Guest-edited by Christina Ionescu and Ann Lewis

Abstracts due by 1 August 2014

‘Have you noticed that no book ever gets well illustrated once it becomes a classic?’, asked in passing Aubrey Beardsley when faced with the challenge of illustrating Les Liaisons dangereuses in the Art Nouveau era. Yet visually intriguing and conceptually intricate illustrations of eighteenth-century classics are abundantly present at key moments in the history of the book (Romanticism, the fin-de-siècle, the interwar period, amongst others). Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe’s Werther and Bernardin’s Paul et Virginie are just some examples of canonical texts that have inspired artists not only through time but also across national boundaries and different media. Such texts have produced visual corpora that are as vast as they are diverse. The timeless fascination with Paul et Virginie, for example, has resulted not only in illustrative series that steadily accompanied the text in its various incarnations as a book, but also in drawings, prints, sculptures, caricatures, tapestries, ceramics, clocks, etc., which circulated and were displayed independently of the text. Artistic transpositions and intermedial engagements with eighteenth-century bestsellers range from these visually static, yet geographically mobile forms of expression, to dynamic, performative adaptations such as films, operas and plays.

In spite of the increasing availability of digital images, critical approaches still tend to privilege the authorially sanctioned series (such as Gravelot’s engravings for Rousseau’s bestselling novel, commissioned and designed with the writer’s direct involvement), or ‘intervisual paradigms’ (patterns of iconographic representation considered independently of their text of origin). Moreover, theatrical or cinematic adaptations of eighteenth-century novels are seldom considered in relation to other forms of visual crossover, such as book illustration and decorative objects, though they all a priori rely on similar processes of visualising and adapting the text. The comparative analysis of different series of illustrations and of other forms of artistic representation of the same novel through time and space, however, allows us to explore the complexity of adaptation, to understand the visual representation inspired by text as an intermedial product and cultural phenomenon, and perhaps to grasp the fascination that the eighteenth century continues to exert upon us.

We invite submissions of papers that address any of the following questions through interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches:
•    How does the illustration of an eighteenth-century novel through time respond to new techniques and to changing views of the function of illustration itself?
•    How do successive generations of artists shape the reception of an eighteenth-century novel at different moments in time?
•    How do illustrated translations of eighteenth-century classics reflect the geographical, linguistic and cultural displacement of the original text?
•    How does the gradual shift from the poorly paid artisan to the internationally known artist affect the illustration of an eighteenth-century classic?
•    How do publishers operating from lucrative centres of book production (Amsterdam, Brussels, The Hague, London, Paris, etc.) respond to the specific expectations of their subscribers or readerships in regard to illustration?
•    How do artists, publishers and/or stage directors facilitate or negotiate verbal/visual crossover? What is their respective involvement in this process?
•    How do individual artists re-view an eighteenth-century text when they illustrate it again for a different publisher or edition?
•    How does the phenomenon of extra-illustration exemplify a unique rapport of visual closeness between the collector and text? How is the reading process impacted by the insertion within a single volume of parallel illustrations of the same scenes, which were executed at different moments in time?
•    How do objects inspired by eighteenth-century novels become cultural artefacts and exist independently of the text? How are they integrated in home décor, private collections or museum space? And what impact do they have as things commissioned, inherited, or collected?
•    How is visual representation transposed from one medium to another (for example, from book illustration to film adaptation)? What are the similarities and differences in the ways in which the text is visually adapted for each medium of expression?

Please send an abstract of 500 words to a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk and cionescu@mta.ca by 1 August 2014. The deadline for submission of completed articles will be June 2015 (approximately 8000 words). Articles may be in French or English. As is usual for peer-reviewed journals, all final decisions concerning the acceptance of articles for this special issue will be made by the JECS editorial board. We also intend to host a workshop around the collection at the BSECS annual conference in January 2016.

A late addition to the CAA 2015 sessions:

Home Subjects: Domestic Space and the Arts in Britain, 1753–1900
HBA Session at the 103rd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York, 11–14 February 2015

Proposals due by 15 August 2014

Session chairs:
Melinda McCurdy (Associate Curator of British Art, Huntington Art Collections), mmccurdy@huntington.org
Morna O’Neill (Wake Forest University), morna.oneill@gmail.com
Anne Nellis Richter (independent scholar and adjunct instructor, American University), anne.nellis@gmail.com

Home Subjects is a new research working group which aims to illuminate the domestic display of art in Britain. Our goal is to examine the home as a place to view and exhibit works of art within the historical context of the long nineteenth century.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of the house itself and notions of ‘domesticity’ as important touchstones in British culture. At the same time, art historians have tended to focus on a history of British art premised on the display of art in public; according to this important narrative, British art developed in relationship to the public sphere in the eighteenth century. Art institutions and exhibitions asserted the importance of the display of art in forming audiences into publics in cultural and political terms. Such efforts continued in the ‘exhibition age’ of the nineteenth century, when display of artwork in museums, galleries, and special exhibitions solidified the important role given to art in articulating a public sphere. This narrative overlooks the continuation of older paradigms of display, especially those premised on the private and domestic audience for works of art. Within this context, the country house takes it place alongside the townhouse as an important venue for the display of art. We aim to explore this ‘counter-narrative’ of the home as the ideal place to view works of art, a view which permeated all areas of art and design and which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, despite the prevailing narrative of the development of public museums.

Also at stake in this project is a reconsideration of domesticity and its relationship to modernity. Important recent scholarship has illuminated some of the ways in which entrenched narratives of modernity and artistic modernism were defined in opposition to the domestic sphere. In a typical avant-garde gambit, artists distinguished works of art from objects of interior decoration by rejecting the private and the domestic.

This session aims to bring together scholars whose work addresses this topic in order to posit a new trajectory for modernity, one that can be traced through the private, domestic sphere. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• the display of easel painting and its relationship to the domestic interior
• decorative arts, their status as works of art and relationship to interior decoration
• domestic architecture and museum/gallery architecture, both public and private
• collecting and taste
• the interrelationship between private and public modes of display and decoration

Proposal abstracts should be no more than 500 words, and should be accompanied by a current 2-page c.v. and must be received by email to homesubjects@gmail.com by August 15, 2014. Please also include a mailing address, telephone number, and email.