Innovative Course Design
How nice it would be to see an art history course included among this year’s three winners — and it comes with $500! So submit. . .
ASECS Innovative Course Design Competition
Proposals due by 1 October 2010
To encourage excellence in undergraduate teaching of the eighteenth century, the Society invites proposals from members in any of its constituent disciplines. Proposals should be for a new approach to teaching a unit within a course on the eighteenth century, covering perhaps one to four weeks of instruction, or for an entire new course. For example, participants may offer a new approach to a specific work or theme, a comparison of two related works from different fields (music and history, art and theology), an interdisciplinary approach to a particular social or historical event, new uses of instructional technology (e.g., web sites, internet resources and activities), or a new course that has never been taught or has been taught only very recently for the first time. Participants are encourage to include why books and topics were selected and how they worked. Applicants should submit five (5) copies of a 3-5 page proposal (double-spaced) and should focus sharply on the leading ideas distinguishing the unit to be developed. Where relevant, a syllabus draft of the course should also be provided. (more…)
European Architectural History Network
European Architectural History Network Conference
Brussels, 31 May — 3 June 2012
Proposals due by 19 December 2010
For those interested in architectural history and are based in Europe, do check out the European Architectural History Network, a sister counterpart to the more established Society of Architectural Historians. EAHN recently held its first international conference in Guimaraes, Portugal, and its second international conference will be in Brussels, Belgium on 31 May to 3 June 2012. One of the useful features of their website includes a searchable database of conferences, workshops, and seminars categorized by date, keyword, and country.
EAHN Mission Statement
The European Architectural History Network supports research and education by providing a public forum for the dissemination of knowledge about the histories of architecture. Based in Europe, it serves architectural historians and scholars in allied fields without restriction on their areas of study. The network seeks to overcome limitations imposed by national boundaries and institutional conventions through pursuit of the following aims:
- increasing the visibility of the discipline among scholars and the public
- promoting scholarly excellence and innovation
- fostering inclusive, transnational, interdisciplinary, and multicultural approaches to the history of the built environment
- encouraging communication among the disciplines that study space
- facilitating the open exchange of research results
- providing a clearinghouse for information related to the discipline
New Online Art History Publication — ‘RIHA Journal’
RIHA, the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, is pleased to announce the launch of RIHA Journal, the new international online-journal for the history of art, on April 14, 2010. A joint project of 27 institutes in 18 countries, the journal provides an excellent medium for fostering international discourse among scholars. Funding is provided by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, BKM). RIHA Journal (ISSN 2190-3328) features research articles in either English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish, and invites submissions on the whole range of art historical topics and approaches. Manuscripts undergo a double blind peer review process and are published within few months from submission. A not-for-profit e-journal committed to the principles of Open Access, RIHA Journal makes all articles available free of charge. RIHA Journal welcomes submissions at any time; for details, please contact the RIHA institute in your country and/or field of expertise.
Cultural Intermediaries: Seminar Participants
The ISECS site includes a PDF file with the following list of participants for this year’s Seminar for Junior Scholars, to be held at Queen’s University in Belfast, 16-20 August. The theme is Cultural Intermediaries.
- Danna Agmon (University of Michigan), “Professional intermediaries in eighteenth-century French India”
- Vanessa Alayric (Université de Lille), “Cultural transfers of exotica: material exchanges between China and Europe through trade, mission and art”
- Angela Byrne (Royal Irish Academy), “Irish-born British diplomats in Russia, 1733-1767”
- Florence Catherine (Université de Nancy), “Albert von Haller (1708-1777), intermédiaires culturels dans les espaces français et germaniques au XVIIIe siècle”
- Mariana D’Ezio (University of Rome), “Cultural intermediaries across Europe: cultural and literary intersections between British and Italian Women writers and salonnières in the age of the Grand Tour (1700-1799)”
- Sébastien Drouin (École pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne Paris-IV), “Journalistes, érudits et informateurs au Refuge : les réseaux intellectuels de l’Histoire critique de la République des Lettres (1712-1718)”
- Olivera Jokic (City University of New York), “The Death of a Beautiful Moor Woman: Obstinate Clerks and the Form of Evidence in the British Colonial Archive”
- Eszter Kovács (Université de Szeged, Hongrie), “Une catégorie à part du “voyageur par état” : la réflexion de Diderot sur les missionnaires”
- Diego Lucci (American University in Bulgaria), “American Political and Social Life in Luigi Castiglioni’s Travels in the United States of North America”
- Katrina O’Loughlin (University of Western Australia), “‘A smaller compass’: body and text as cultural intermediaries in eighteenth-century women’s travel”
- Maria Petrova (State University for Humanities, Moscow), ‘The diplomats of Catherine II as cultural intermediaries: the case of the Princes Golitsyn”
- Natalie Rothman (University of Toronto), “Dragomans in the Republic of letters: cultural mediation and the making of the Levant”
- Frederik Thomasson (European Institute, Florence), “Cultural intermediaries: another way of addressing or circumventing the centre-periphery dichotomy?”
- Ellen R. Welch (University of North Carolina), “Intermediaries and the Media: Ambassadors and Emissaries in the French Periodical Press, 1672-1763”
- Laurence Williams (Magdalen College Oxford), “Mediating the Oriental City through the Arabian Nights: British Tours of Constantinople, 1719-1797”
CAA Now Accepting Nominations for Its Publications Committee
As noted at CAA News:
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two members-at-large to serve on the Publications Committee for a three-year term, July 1, 2010–June 30, 2013. Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the committee’s work. Museum-based arts professionals with an interest and experience in book, journal, or museum publishing and those with experience in digital publishing are especially encouraged to apply.
The Publications Committee is a consultative body that advises the CAA Publications Department staff and the CAA Board of Directors on publications projects; supervises the editorial boards of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews, as well as CAA’s book-grant juries; sponsors a practicum session at the Annual Conference; and, with the CAA vice president for publications, serves as liaison to the board, membership, editorial boards, book-grant juries, and other CAA committees. The committee meets three times a year, including once at the CAA Annual Conference; members pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference. Members of all committees volunteer their services to CAA without compensation. Candidates must be current CAA members and should not serve concurrently on other CAA committees or editorial boards. Applicants may not be individuals who have served as members of a CAA editorial board within the past five years. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Appointments are made by the CAA president in consultation with the vice president for publications.
Please send a letter of interest describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Vice President for Publications, c/o Alexandra Gershuny, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Materials may also be submitted to agershuny@collegeart.org. Deadline: 15 April 2010.
Print Culture and the American South
2010 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book:
The Global American South
& Early American Print Culture
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, 14- 18 June 2010
Applications due by 12 March 2010
What happens when we view the imagined community of U.S. print culture from the vantage point of the South? How might such a reoriented book history challenge emerging transatlantic, transnational, and cosmopolitan histories of the U.S.? At a moment when industrial print culture was consolidating itself in the Northeast, “the South” appeared in print on several spatial scales. While asserting an “American” identity, Southerners represented themselves as a sectional alternative to the nation. Boasting a distinctive regional culture, they simultaneously celebrated local diversity. The seminar will investigate how these complementary practices of national, regional, and local self-definition circuited through print cultural conditions on the ground. How, we will ask, did distribution, copyright, authorship, and reading inflect the South’s sectional self-fashioning, its attempt to lay claim to the nation, and its engagements with the wider world?
We can hear echoes of Southern print culture’s sectional and local accents in the American Antiquarian Society’s unsurpassed periodical holdings, which also allow us to track the printed South’s circulation, reception, and representation throughout the nation. The seminar will benefit from the AAS’ wealth of ephemeral print propaganda on the South’s major political crises: Indian removal, the slavery controversy, and nullification/secession. Finally, the seminar will provide an introduction to the Tinker Collection’s rich holdings in Francophone Louisiana materials-from legal ordinance digests to an original copy of Les Cenelles. (more…)
The Social Life of an Object
The Material Life of Things Project
Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2010-2011
Applications due by the 12 March 2010
Project coordinated by Dr Francesco Lucchini
In recent years, the evidence of technical and material analysis has become increasingly important to art-historical interpretation. Beyond their traditional role in informing the restoration of artefacts, technical investigations have greatly contributed to our understanding of how works of art were made. Yet, less critical attention has been paid to the ‘use-life’ of artefacts – that is, to the manipulation, exchange and consumption of artefacts throughout their life histories. Drawing together researchers from different areas of expertise including curators and conservators, this research project aims to explore the material lives of artefacts in a variety of media, encouraging object-based, methodological and theoretical discussions relating to the shifting relationship between artefacts, people and environments throughout the life history of particular objects or classes of objects. Emphasis is placed on works of art as material objects considering the ways in which they are manipulated, re-made and unmade by different individuals, at different times, manifesting different social and cultural practices
Aims, Issues and Themes
The aim of project is to draw together scholars working across the dicipline in order to research and discuss aspects of the material life of works of art from different periods, claryfying theoretical and methodological issues and advancing our understanding of the subject. Among issues that can be raised are the following:
- Temporality, authenticity and change
- Fragmentation and reconstruction
- Aggregation of artefacts and the status of the object
- Ritual damage/reparation and pre-modern restorations
- Material history and conservation of new media
- Durability, ephemerality and material residuals
- Recontextualisation/decontextualisation, artefacts in consonant and dissonant environments
- Confiscation, displacement and repatriation
- Individual vs. corporate attitudes towards materiality of art
- Commoditisation and decommoditisation
- Ownership, market and the value of materiality
- Historiographic and methodological approaches to the materiality of art
- The concept of ‘object biography’ and its implications/limitations (more…)
HBA Publication Grant
Historians of British Art 2010 Publication Grant
Due by 31 January 2010
The Historians of British Art (HBA) invites applications for its 2010 publication grant. The society will award up to $500 to offset publication costs of or to support additional research for a journal article or book manuscript in the field of British visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA. To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Pamela Fletcher, HBA Prize Committee chair, at pfletcher@bowdoin.edu.
Call for Submissions: Graduate Students Writing Visual Studies
Call for Submissions: Visual Studies Reader, Written Entirely by Graduate Students
The first fully collaborative, student-run publication on visual studies
All submissions due by 30 January 2010
The visual world is changing so fast that no conventional anthology can capture it. Our idea is to record the current shape of visual studies, across disciplines, as it is experienced by the upcoming generation of scholars and artists. We are gathering a group of about 100 authors. After we have completed a rough draft of the book, we will post the entire manuscript on our Wiki, and allow everyone on the internet to suggest changes, Wikipedia-fashion. All grad students are eligible; if you are studying for an MA, MFA, or PhD, or if you received your PhD in the last six months, you can contribute texts to this book.
The book is international and collaborative. It began with a group of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and now it includes about thirty students from 20 institutions around the world. Have a look at our Table of Contents to see how the book is developing. As the book grows, so does the community of editors. Everyone who joins the Reader can make suggestions about everyone else’s contributions: you will have final say over your own contribution, but you’ll also be involved in conversations with all the other participants.
After a further year of editing, in 2012, the entire book will be published by Routledge, and advertised and disseminated internationally. To apply, visit the wiki for full information:
and then send us a two-page description of what you’d like to contribute. Your proposal will be read by the grad-student authors who are currently in the project (the editor, Jim Elkins, doesn’t vote). Full instructions are on the wiki:
Book Prize
30th Annual Louis Gottschalk Prize
Nominations due by 15 November 2009
The Louis Gottschalk Prize is for an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century and carries an award of $1,000. Louis Gottschalk (1899-1975) second President of ASECS, President of the American Historical Association, and for many years Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, exemplified in his scholarship the humanistic ideals that this award is meant to encourage.
All scholarly books, including commentaries, critical studies, biographies, collections of essays by a single author and critical editions, written in any modern language are eligible. Books that are primarily translations and multiauthored collections of essays are not eligible.
- To be eligible for this year’s competition, a book must have a copyright date between November 2007 and October 2008.
- The author must be a member of ASECS at the time of submission.
- Submission must be made by the publisher, and five copies must be received by 15 November 2009.
Send all submissions and inquires to: ASECS — Louis Gottschalk Prize, 2598 Reynolda Rd., Suite C, Winston-Salem, NC 27106; E-mail: asecs@wfu.edu
Enfilade 
leave a comment