Drayton Hall Awarded Decorative Arts Trust Funding Prize
From the press release (25 November 2024) . . .
Drawing Room Ceiling, Drayton Hall (Charleston, South Carolina; photo by Willie Graham).
The Decorative Arts Trust is thrilled to announce that the 2024 Prize for Excellence and Innovation will be awarded to Drayton Hall Preservation Trust in Charleston, South Carolina, for projects to include the conservation of the plaster ceiling in the house’s Great Hall, the investigation of the plaster ceiling in the Drawing Room, and digital and in-person access to these spaces during conservation treatment and the results of the interventions. Drayton Hall, built 1738–50, is the earliest example of Palladian architecture in the United States. Surviving in relatively untouched condition, and displayed devoid of furnishings, Drayton Hall offers architectural historians the rare opportunity to study materials and designs from every period in the house’s history.
The Decorative Arts Trust Prize for Excellence and Innovation, founded in 2020, funds outstanding projects that advance the public’s appreciation of decorative art, fine art, architecture, or landscape. The Prize is awarded to a nonprofit organization in the United States for a scholarly endeavor, such as museum exhibitions, print and digital publications, conservation and preservation projects, and online databases. Past recipients include the Concord Museum; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive; and Craft in America.
More information about the Prize for Excellence and Innovation is available here»
Exhibition | Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery
Sacred to the Memory of Isabella Clarke, Unidentified Member of the Clarke Family, Richmond, Massachusetts, ca. 1795 c
(Private Collection)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release for the exhibition:
Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery
Detroit Institute of Arts, 13 December 2024 — 15 June 2025
Curated by Kenneth Myers
The Detroit Institute of Arts presents Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery, a loan exhibition featuring a large selection of remarkably beautiful and well-preserved samplers and silk-on-silk embroideries produced by American girls and young women in the colonial and early national periods. Comprising 69 embroideries and one painting, Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery will be on view from 13 December 2024 until 15 June 2025.
From the early 1700s until about 1830, the education of American girls from well-to-do families emphasized reading, writing, simple arithmetic, and needlework. For these girls, a finely worked embroidery worthy of being framed in their homes served as a kind of diploma. The samplers and silk-on-silk embroideries demonstrated both their mastery of an important practical skill and that they had achieved the self-discipline and refinement expected of the most privileged girls and young women in early American society. Juxtaposing historic embroideries with contemporary ones by the feminist artist Elaine Reichek, Painted with Silk draws attention to cultural assumptions and values related to gender, race, and class.
“Exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts present opportunities to encourage inquiry about ourselves, our history, and our world, and this wonderful presentation is a rare chance to learn more about this important American artform” said DIA Director Salvador Salort-Pons. “The historic and contemporary embroideries displayed in the exhibition will highlight ways in which our values and assumptions are both like and unlike those of earlier Americans.”
These Are My Jewels: Having Educated Them with Care for the Service of Their Country, Catherine Langdon Wright (age 11), Susanna Rowson’s Academy, Boston, Massachusetts, 1808 (Private Collection).
Except for one painting and two early English samplers drawn from the DIA’s own collection, all the works in the show were hand-crafted by American school age girls between 1740 and about 1830. Embroidered with fine silk threads on linen, wool, or silk supports, and often framed for display, many of these embroideries became treasured family heirlooms which were passed from generation to generation. Since the early 1900s the most charming and beautiful of them have been sought out by collectors who treasured them as evidence of the skill and values of early American women. Almost all of the embroideries in Painted with Silk are on loan from private collectors eager to share their treasures with the DIA community.
The exhibition is installed in three galleries, beginning with simpler embroideries which were used to teach the alphabet and numbers, and leading to larger and more complex embroideries made with more complex stitches and paint to create more complicated pictures illustrating stories from the Hebrew and Christian Bible or contemporary literature. Many represent home as a place of safety and love. Others emphasize virtues, such as the need to obey and respect parents, teachers and other figures of authority. Some of the largest and most complicated celebrate famous women who sacrificed themselves for the good of their children or husbands.
Alongside the historic works, the exhibition presents a selection of contemporary embroideries by the acclaimed artist Elaine Reichek. Reichek originally trained as a painter but gave up the practice for embroidery—a medium historically associated with women and dismissed as a craft rather than art. Adapting the form of nineteenth-century schoolgirl samplers, Reichek developed a distinctive visual language which she uses to critique culturally dominant assumptions about society, gender, identity, and culture.
“Early American embroideries are fascinating survivors from our nation’s past,” said Kenneth John Myers, the DIA’s Byron and Dorothy Gerson Curator of American Art. “Often very beautiful, they are also inherently fragile. Silk threads can get stained, unravel, break or fade. Many surviving embroideries are in poor condition. But thanks to the generosity of several private collectors, the DIA team has been able to share an unusually large selection of very accomplished embroideries in exceptionally fine condition. And the embroideries by Reichek are fabulous.”
To complement the exhibition, the DIA will host several events, many intended for families, providing rich opportunities to learn more about American embroidery and history. Upcoming highlight events include:
Sunday, 15 December 2024
Curator Kenneth Myers will give an overview of the exhibition and discuss collecting with several of the private collectors who have lent embroideries for this show.
Wednesday, 12 February 2025, 6.30pm
Emelie Gevalt, a curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, will discuss the presence and absence of people of color in historic American schoolgirl embroideries.
Wednesday, 2 April 2025, 6.30pm
DIA curators Kenneth Myers and Katie Pfohl will host contemporary artist Elaine Reichek.
Call for Papers | Textiles and the Texture of Ideas in Europe, 1589–1801
From the Call for Papers:
Textiles and the Texture of Ideas in Early Modern Europe, 1589–1801: How the Craft and Its Products Interacted with Philosophy, Literature, and the Visual Arts
Procida Island (University of Naples L’Orientale), 8–14 September 2025
Proposals due by 31 January 2025
Joint project: University of Naples L’Orientale and Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse. Two joint conferences will be organized:
Conference 1 | Textiles and the Texture of Ideas in Early Modern Europe, 1589–1801: How the Craft and Its Products Interacted with Philosophy, Literature, and the Visual Arts
Procida Island (University of Naples L’Orientale), 8–14 September 2025
Conference 2 | The Circulation of Textile Designs, Patterns, Skills, and Representations in Early Modern Europe
Université de Haute Alsace – Mulhouse, June 2026
The Virgin’s chemise at Chartres Cathedral (9th century), the fabrics used as support for his paintings by Luca Pignatelli (1962–) or employed by Ann Hamilton (1956–) in her installations, and textile architecture are only a few examples of how fabrics can step out of their typical function s (e.g. as daily clothing, drapery, etc.) to enter the arts and the collective imagination in rather unique ways. Evidence of textile technology dates back to the Palaeolithic (Bender Jørgensen et al., 2023); and, according to Leonardo da Vinci, it was a craft ‘second [only] to the printing of letters’ and ‘more beautiful and subtle in invention’. If artifice has traditionally aimed at producing something ‘rare’ as opposed to ‘common’ (at least until the advent of plastic according to Roland Barthes [1972: 98]), textiles are among the artifacts through which the aspiration to create rarity has been best expressed throughout the centuries. The invention of weave patterns and dyeing techniques as well as printing pattern design prove that in the production of textiles—as indeed in all crafts according to Richard Sennett—“thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making” (Sennett 2008: 7).
For these joint interdisciplinary conferences, we invite papers with a focus on the interaction between the material and the immaterial aspects of the craft of weaving, approached from various angles, in the early modern period. The aim is to explore aspects of the interactions between textile manufacturing and its products and the individual or collective imagination, intellectual life as well as the ‘world picture’ and mental representations in the early modern period. Those interactions, although sometimes acknowledged, appear to have been understudied so far. How did the immaterial life of ideas as well as the cultural context impact on the creation of fabric designs? And, vice versa, how did textile manufacturing, in either its pre-industrial or early industrial stage, impact on the personal or collective imagination? How were early modern textile artefacts, alongside the material conditions and early modern technologies of their production, perceived by contemporaries? Were they perceived as ‘symbolic capital’, in Pierre Bordieu’s acceptation (1979)? Can the study of representations, descriptions, references, or even allusions to textiles and the textile manufacture, but also of the metaphorical usage of textile-related vocabulary in various texts—from poetry to philosophical essays—or of references to the textile world in the early modern visual arts—paintings, sketches, illustrations, plates—add to our knowledge of the early modern episteme?
The dates 1589–1801 have been chosen for their significance in the progress of textile manufacturing, but papers focusing on any period of time from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century are welcome. 1589 was the year when William Lee invented the stocking frame knitting machine in England; only a few years later, at the beginning of the 17th century in Paris, the Gobelins manufactory was established. 1801 was the year when the Jacquard loom was first introduced; Charles Babbage’s ‘difference engine’, the early calculating machine designed and partially built during the 1820s and 1830s, was inspired by the use of punched cards in the Jacquard loom (see Essinger 2004), which testifies to the potential of textile-related creativity. Could there be more, still unknown, regions of cross-fertilisation between textile manufacturing and other realms of knowledge?
We welcome interdisciplinary papers at the crossroads of, but not limited to, any ones of the following: cultural history, social history, microhistory, history of ideas or intellectual history, the history of technology, philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, material studies, visual arts studies, crafts, aesthetics, memorial studies, intermedial studies. We especially welcome papers based on archival research and adopting a microhistorical approach—recalling here Carlo Ginzburg’s statement that “the prefix ‘micro’ is related to the microscope, so to an analytic approach to history” (Carlo Ginzburg 2015). Such analytical approach we would like to extend to the study of different texts, also for a cultural analysis of the impact of the textile world on the early modern intellectual imagination. For both conferences, we therefore invite papers aiming at uncovering references to the textile world in famous and less known, or even overlooked, written texts—for example ballads, poems and emblems, plays, diaries, commonplace books, essays, philosophical texts, pamphlets and newspapers—which may be revealing of the cross-fertilisations between material and immaterial culture in the early modern period. Another space of investigation will be the visual: were there drawings, sketches or paintings representing textile manufactures and their workers as well as the manufacturing process? Were there early modern manuals or handbooks about textile production? Did they include illustrations (of the patterns, the weaving techniques, the acts and process of making fabrics)? And, if so, how much could a study of those different texts contribute to the history of early modern culture and ideas (about the human, ingenuity, nature and technology, and so on)? Could such a study be relevant in the same way as, for example, the study of plates in early modern anatomical books has proved to be? Another area of research we invite to explore is the possible connections between textiles and book-making in early modern Europe, for example the intersection between textile manufacturing and book-printing. Textile metaphors have been extensively used by philosophers and writers alike, with the textile operating at once “as language, concept and matter” (Dormor 2020: 1); they have sometimes been used by critics too, who have suggested that in early modernity “texts could be, and were, read like tapestries” (Olson 2013: 2). We also welcome papers that look at the dissemination and uses of textile vocabulary in the early modern intellectual and philosophical spheres, the collective imagination, the literary imagination as found in individual texts and that offer analyses of their implications for the history of ideas.
More specific questions may be: how did the workers of early modern textile manufactures relate to their activity and their products? In their humdrum routine work, was there any space for relating to it in imaginative and creative ways? Were they mere animalia laborantia, to adapt Hannah Arendt’s definition? Alternatively, assuming that thinking was involved at all levels of textile production—in actual manufacturing as well as in pattern designing and/or textile printing—are there traces left of that? Did early modern workers or designers in textile craftsmanship and the textile industry leave any impressions, thoughts (in the form of written notes or sketches or other) about their craft, or which may be related to it (either inspiring or being inspired by it)? Did any of the workers keep notebooks? Is there any way one could contribute further to the history of ideas ‘from below’ beginning with archival research and looking for extant traces left by those involved at different levels in textile production—the designers, the workers, the investors, the customers and the patrons? Taking inspiration from Ginzburg (1980), we ask: would something else, atypical with respect to our present knowledge of the times, emerge? With respect to the designs, patterns or prints in the weaving craft and the textile industry, would a study of possible points of contact between technical inventions and manufacturing processes, on the one hand, and the historical—global, local and even personal—moment, on the other, add to our knowledge of the wider ideas circulating in early modern Europe? Is there any such thing as a philosophy of textile technology and design? Our aim is to relate these material aspects of the craft with the imagination and the history of ideas.
Finally, in both conferences, a special section will be site-specific: around the same years in the second half of the eighteenth century, textile manufacturing flourished in the Belvedere of San Leucio in Caserta and in Mulhouse. The hunting Lodge of San Leucio became home to the silk factory by will of Ferdinand of Bourbon; the idea and choice of place for the factory started in the 1760s, after completion of the Royal Palace in Caserta. San Leucio has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1997 and today it hosts a museum of the textile craft of the old days. The textile industry in Mulhouse began in 1747, when the first ‘indiennerie’—a cotton printing manufacture—was set up. The industry flourished to such an extent that Mulhouse became known as the ‘French Manchester’. Today the city’s Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes (Printed Textiles Museum) bears testimony to that significant past activity. For both conferences we welcome papers on the respective local histories of textile manufacturing.
Possible topics may include but are by no means limited to:
Cultural history, social history, microhistories
• The production of textiles 1589–1801: A cultural history
• The issue of ‘authorship’ in pattern and printing designs
• Textile design and patterns in Europe
• Ends of textiles: recycling long-lasting and short-lived fabrics in early modernity Designing textiles: inventiveness and the cultural imagination in early modernity Cloth merchants and drapers’ shops in early modern Europe
• Textile workers as readers
• A cultural and/or social history of the perception of the work and its products Memoirs of textile workers 1589–1801 and object biography: fabrics, textiles, cloth Museums today and heritage tourism: the history of textiles as cultural history
The literary imagination and beyond
• Textiles, tapestries and weaving, weavers and drapers in early modern literary texts and visual arts
• Representations of early modern textiles and/or textile workers in literary texts and the visual arts
• Recurring patterns: damasquinerie, ceramic decorations, and textile decorations
• A cultural analysis of figurative patterns in tapestries
Textiles and book-making in early modern Europe
• Books and textile practical knowledge
• Intersections beween textile manifacturing and book-printing
• The woven book: early modern printing on fabric
• Disseminating the craft: early modern books about fabrics, patterns, and techniques
Special section on San Leucio and Mulhouse: the impact of the textile industry on everyday life and the collective imagination:
• What impact did the textile industry have on the collective imagination? How did the workers feel about their jobs?
• Literacy among textile workers: did they (have time to) read? What kind of books or texts, if any, did they read? Practical texts? Others? Is it possible to trace a social history of reading among textile workers? Did they read more or less than other workers?
• San Leucio and Mulhouse in the literary imagination: are there references in then- contemporary literary texts—also ballads, songs, and so on—to the Bourbon experiment in San Leucio or the Mulhouse textile industry?
• The cultural impact of the decline of the textile tradition in San Leucio and Mulhouse The memory of the textile industry in San Leucio and Mulhouse today: museums, cultural activities and outreach. Is the textile industry of the past perceived as ‘cultural capital’ today?
Please send your paper proposals in English (300 words approximately) as well as a short biography to Anna Maria Cimitile (amcimitile@unior.it) and Laurent Curelly (laurent.curelly@uha.fr) by 31 January 2025. Responses to paper proposals will be given by 15 February 2025. Details about the conference (location, registration fees, travel information, etc.) will be provided before then.
r e f e r e n c e s
Roland Barthes. Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by Annette Levers. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972.
Lise Bender Jørgensen, Antoinette Rast-Eicher, and Willeke Wendrich. “Earliest Evidence for Textile Technologies,” Paléorient 49.1 (2023): 213–28.
Pierre Bordieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979), translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Catherine Dormor. A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
James Essinger. Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Carlo Ginzburg. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Carlo Ginzburg. “Microhistory,” Serious Science, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFh1DdXToyE, uploaded 25 June 2015, accessed 26 April 2024.
Rebecca Olson. Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013.
Richard Sennett. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Exhibition | The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World
I saw the exhibition last weekend at the DIA: so many amazing objects, especially from the Middle Ages, but also plenty of 18th-century treats (with a stunning catalogue). –CH
The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World
LACMA, Los Angeles, 17 December 2023 — 4 August 2024
Detroit Institute of Arts, 22 September 2024 — 5 January 2025
Unknown painter (French School), Enjoying Coffee, Turkey, first half of the 18th century (Istanbul: Pera Museum).
The Art of Dining brings together more than 200 works from the Middle East, Egypt, Central and South Asia, and beyond to explore connections between art and cuisine from ancient times to the present day. Paintings of elaborate feasts, sumptuous vessels for food and drink, and historical cookbooks show how culinary cultures have thrived in the Islamic world for centuries. Highlighting the relationship of these works to preparing, serving, and enjoying food, the exhibition engages multiple senses and invites us to appreciate the pleasures of sharing a meal.
Originally organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the exhibition includes works from 30 public and private collections from across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and 16 from the DIA’s collection.
Linda Komaroff, ed., Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting (DelMonico Books, 2023), 375 pages, ISBN: 978-1636810881, $85.
Conference | Travel Narratives and the Artistic Heritage of Dalmatia
From ArtHist.net:
Travel Narratives and the Fashioning of a Dalmatian Artistic Heritage, ca. 1675–1941
The Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre, Split, 12–14 December 2024
Conceived and organised as part of the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) project TraveloguesDalmatia of the Institute of Art History, led by Dr Ana Šverko.
This conference brings together historians and theorists of art, architecture, urbanism, literature, anthropology, and ethnology, and other experts engaged in travel narratives. It aims to explore travel as an autonomous multidisciplinary and multimedia practice, as well as to investigate how perceptions of Dalmatia in the European imagination have been shaped through various travel narratives. These narratives span diverse genres, recording media, authorial backgrounds, and travel motivations.
t h u r s d a y , 1 2 d e c e m b e r
9.30 Introductions
• Vesna Bulić Baketić (Split City Museum)
• Ivana Vladović (Tourist Board of Split-Dalmatia County)
• Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Conference Opening
• Renata Schellenberg: Living the Journey Twice: Travel Writing as Genre
10.30 Session 1 | Changing Perceptions of Dalmatia in Travel Narratives, 17th to the 20th Century
Moderators: Joško Belamarić and Sanja Žaja Vrbica
• Jesse Howell — Disorientation, Friction, and Anxiety in Dalmatian Travel Narratives
• Ulrike Tischler-Hofer — ‘Dalmatia Is His Majesty’s Passive Province… and Will Remain So for at Least Another 20 Years’ (1803): Mutual Perception and Rejection in Times of Transition, 1797–1815
• Mateo Bratanić — Early 20th-Century British Travel Writers in Dalmatia: The Change of Perspective
11.30 Coffee Break
12.00 Session 2 | The Evolution of Travelogues in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Part 1
Moderators: Ana Šverko and Irena Kraševac
• John Pinto — Advent’rous in the Sacred Search of Ancient Arts
• Frances Sands — Travels of the Mind: Travel Literature at Sir John Soane’s Museum
• Nataša Urošević — Dalmatian Journeys: Discovering Dalmatia on the Route of the Lloyd’s Steamers
13.30 Lunch Break
17.30 Presentation of the TraveloguesDalmatia Project
18.30 Journal Promotion — Život umjetnosti (Life of Art), Volume 113, No. 2 (2023)
f r i d a y , 1 3 d e c e m b e r
9.00 Walking Tour: Diocletian’s Palace
10.45 Introduction
11.00 Session 3 | The Evolution of Travelogues in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Part 2
Moderators: Mateo Bratanić and Mirko Sardelić
• Renata Schellenberg — Travel Reading and Travel Writing: Johann Georg Kohl’s Journey through Dalmatia (1851)
• Irena Kraševac — Arthur Rössler and Bruno Reiffenstein Discover Dalmatia on Their 1905 Journey
• Maciej Czerwiński — Competing Travel Narratives on Dalmatia: Giuseppe Modrich and Izidor Kršnjavi
12.20 Coffee Break
12.40 Session 4 | Travel Drawings: Shaping the Genre’s Definition, Part 1
Moderators: Frances Sands and Marko Špikić
• Ana Šverko — Before Spalatro: Clérisseau and Adam’s 1757 Journey from Rome to Split
• Svein Mønnesland — European Landscape Painters Discover a ‘Norwegian Fjord’, the Gulf of Kotor, 1810–1875
• Joško Belamarić — Sir John Gardner Wilkinson’s Gaze on Diocletian’s Palace
13.40 Coffee Break
14.00 Session 5 | Travel Drawings: Shaping the Genre’s Definition, Part 2
Moderators: Joško Belamarić and Ana Šverko
• Sanja Žaja Vrbica — Viennese Women Painters in the South of the Monarchy
• Elke Katharina Wittich — ‘Blue Sea and Black Mountains’: Visual Topoi in Travelogues and Guidebooks from the Mid-19th Century to the End of the First World War
• Nataša Ivanović — Genius Loci of Dalmatia in Zoran Mušič’s Oeuvre
15.30 Lunch Break
16.30 Visit to the Gallery of Fine Arts
s a t u r d a y , 1 4 d e c e m b e r
9.45 Introduction
10.00 Session 6 | Discovering Dalmatia: Identity through the Travel Narrative Lens, Part 1
Moderators: Mateo Bratanić and Elke Katharina Wittich
• Marko Špikić — Jacob Spon’s Language of Discovery of the Eastern Adriatic’s Cultural Heritage
• Frane Prpa — Maximilian de Traux and His Description of the Interior Regions of Dalmatia
• Antonia Tomić — Drniš: The Meeting Place of East and West
11.00 Coffee Break
11.20 Session 7 | Discovering Dalmatia: Identity through the Travel Narrative Lens, Part 2
Moderators: Marko Špikić and Ana Šverko
• Franciska Ćurković-Major and Boris Dundović — Professional Trip of the Society of Hungarian Engineers and Architects to Dalmatia in 1895: A Travel Account by Gyula Sándy
• Brigitta Mader — Through the Eyes of a Prehistorian: Josef Szombathy’s Photo Journeys through Dalmatia, 1898–1912
• Mirko Sardelić — Alice Lee Moqué’s Delightful Dalmatia
12.20 Discussion and Closing Remarks
13.00 Closing Reception
15.00 Visit to the Meštrović Gallery
Scientific Committee
Basile Baudez (Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology)
Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Mateo Bratanić (University of Zadar, Department of History)
Iain Gordon Brown (Honorary Fellow, National Library of Scotland)
Hrvoje Gržina (Croatian State Archives)
Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University London)
Cvijeta Pavlović (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Comparative Literature)
Frances Sands (Sir John Soane’s Museum)
Marko Špikić (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Art History)
Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Elke Katharina Wittich (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Organising Committee
Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Tomislav Bosnić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Mateo Bratanić (University of Zadar, Department of History)
Ana Ćurić (Institute of Art History)
Matko Matija Marušić (Institute of Art History)
Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University London)
Cvijeta Pavlović (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Call for Papers | Recalling the Revolution in New England
From the Call for Papers:
Recalling the Revolution in New England
Online and in-person, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 27–28 June 2025
Proposals due by 13 January 2025
The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (founded in 1976) is pleased to announce the subject of its 2025 gathering, Recalling the Revolution in New England, to be held June 27–28 at Historic Deerfield. The conference keynote will be provided by Dr. Zara Anishanslin of the University of Delaware, author of the forthcoming book The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution.
On September 11, 1765, political leaders in Boston attached a plaque to a majestic elm and named it “Liberty Tree” to honor its role in an anti-Stamp Act protest the previous month. New Englanders thus started to commemorate the events of the American Revolution even before they had any idea there would be such a revolution. Over the following centuries, people from New England shaped the national memory of that era through schoolbooks, popular poetry, civic celebrations, monuments, and more. On the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife welcomes proposals for papers and presentations that address the broad range of ways the people of New England have looked back on the nation’s founding—and what they forgot, or chose to forget, in the process.
The annual Dublin Seminar is a meeting place where scholars of all kinds—academics, students, museum and library professionals, artisans and craftspeople, educators, preservationists, and committed avocational researchers—join in deep conversation around a focused theme in New England history, pooling their knowledge and exchanging ideas, sources, and methods in a thought-provoking forum. The 2025 seminar invites proposals for papers and presentations that illuminate how the peoples of the region have commemorated, memorialized, documented, invoked, fictionalized, and even forgotten the American Revolution through the Bicentennial period. Papers should examine events and trends in New England and adjoining regions.
The seminar encourages papers grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and original research, particularly material and visual culture, manuscripts, government and business records, the public press, oral histories, and public history practice or advocacy. Papers addressing such contemporary themes as gender dynamics, racial dimensions, and environmental aspects of Revolutionary commemoration are strongly encouraged.
Topics might include
• Efforts to recover the stories of marginalized participants in the American Revolution
• The processes of local commemoration in orations, pageants, reenactments, and more
• Recreating and depicting the American Revolution in popular fiction, theater, prints, and toys
• The collecting and preservation of Revolutionary-era artifacts and material culture
• Activating, maintaining, and interpreting historic sites, battlefields, monuments, homes, and other spaces
• The formation and activities of historical societies and heritage organizations
• Contesting the memory and meaning of the American Revolution
The seminar will convene in Deerfield, Massachusetts on June 27–28. This will be a hybrid program with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees. The program will consist of a keynote address and approximately fifteen 20-minute presentations. Speakers will present on site at Historic Deerfield. Speakers will be expected to submit the text of their presentation at least a week before the conference. To submit a proposal, please send (as a single email attachment, in MS Word or as a PDF file, labeled LASTNAME.DubSem2025) a one-page prospectus describing the paper and the archival, material, or visual sources on which it is grounded, followed by a one-page vita or biography. Please send proposals to dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org before noon (EST) on Monday, 13 January 2025.
Dublin Seminar presenters are expected to submit their papers (approximately 7000 words) for consideration to the Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar by 14 October 2025. The scholarship proposed for presentation should be unpublished and available for inclusion in this volume to be published about eighteen months after the conference.
New Book | Goethe, His Faustian Life
From Bloomsbury:
A. N. Wilson, Goethe, His Faustian Life: The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius, and the Poem that Made Our World (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-1472994868, $35.
Goethe was the inventor of the psychological novel, a pioneer scientist, great man of the theatre, and a leading politician. As A. N. Wilson argues in this groundbreaking biography, it was his genius and insatiable curiosity that helped catapult the Western world into the modern era. Wilson tackles the life of Goethe with characteristic wit and verve. From his youth as a wild literary prodigy to his later years as Germany’s most respected elder statesman, Wilson hones in on Goethe’s undying obsession with the work he would spend his entire life writing—Faust. Goethe spent over 60 years writing his retelling of Faust, a strange and powerful work that absorbed all the philosophical questions of his time as well as the revolutions and empires that came and went. It is his greatest work, but as Wilson explores, it is also something much more—it is the myth of how we came to be modern.
A. N. Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is a prolific and award-winning biographer and celebrated novelist, having written biographies of Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Milton, and Hilarire Belloc. In 2007, Wilson’s novel, Winnie and Wolf, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2020 The Mystery of Charles Dickens was published to great critical acclaim. He lives in North London.
New Book | A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days
From Norton, a translation of the original German, Die beste aller möglichen Welten: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in seiner Zeit, which appeared in 2022:
Michael Kempe, The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days, translated by Marshall Yarbrough (New York: Norton & Co., 2024), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1324093947, $32.
A biography of the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz told through seven critical days spanning his life and revealing his contributions to our modern world.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was the Benjamin Franklin of Europe, a ‘universal genius’ who ranged across many fields and made breakthroughs in most of them. Leibniz invented calculus (independently from Isaac Newton), conceptualized the modern computer, and developed the famous thesis that the existing world is the best that God could have created.
In The Best of All Possible Worlds, historian and Leibniz expert Michael Kempe takes us on a journey into the mind and inventions of a man whose contributions are perhaps without parallel in human history. Structured around seven crucial days in Leibniz’s life, Kempe’s account allows us to observe him in the act of thinking and creating, and gives us a deeper understanding of his broad-reaching intellectual endeavors. On 29 October 1675, we find him in Paris, diligently working from his bed amid a sea of notes, and committing the integral symbol—the basis of his calculus—to paper. On 17 April 1703, Leibniz is in Berlin, writing a letter reporting that a Jesuit priest living in China has discovered how to use Leibniz’s binary number system to decipher an ancient Chinese system of writing. One day in August 1714, Leibniz enjoys a Viennese coffee while drawing new connections among ontology and biology and mathematics. The Best of All Possible Worlds transports us to an age defined by rational optimism and a belief in progress, and will endure as one of the few authoritative accounts of Leibniz’s life available in English.
Michael Kempe is the director of the Leibniz Research Center and the Leibniz-Archiv in Hannover and teaches early modern history at the University of Konstanz.
Marshall Yarbrough is a writer, musician, and German-to-English translator. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
New Book | John Locke’s Impact on Literature and Pictorial Art
From Krysman Press:
Joachim Möller and Bernd Krysmanski, eds., Creative Reception: John Locke’s Impact on Literature and Pictorial Art (Dinslaken: Krysman Press, 2024), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-3000555626, €30.
The authors of this volume—all of them recognized representatives of a wide range of academic disciplines—agree that Locke’s work must have had a considerable influence both on English and German literature and the visual arts of Great Britain, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the perspective of interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, the essays presented here deal with Locke as a source of ideas for Archibald Alison, John Constable, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Timotheus Hermes, William Hogarth, Immanuel Kant, Martin Knutzen, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, George Lillo, Edward Moore, Johann Gottwerth Müller, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Richardson, John Ruskin, Joseph Spence, Laurence Sterne, J. M. W. Turner, and Thomas Whately, among others.
Call for Papers | Emotions, Senses, and 18th-C. Art
From ArtHist.net:
The Emotions and the Senses in Eighteenth-Century Visual Art and Culture
Hogarth’s House, Chiswick (London), 6 June 2025
Proposals due by 31 January 2025
We invite scholars at all stages to submit papers for our upcoming conference, Senses and Feelings: Exploring Eighteenth-Century Visual Art, to be held on Friday, 6 June 2025 at Hogarth’s House in Chiswick.
Recent research has highlighted the nuanced understanding of emotional expression through its historical and contextual relevance. The eighteenth century has been identified by historical scholar such as Retford, Dixon, and Boddice as a critical era of change within emotional landscapes. Art theorists, importantly, have identified the nuanced role art plays in symbolising in an historical era and arousing emotions in its viewers.
We invite papers for an academic conference to mark the opening of a special exhibition on the Senses and Feelings in the Art of Hogarth. We encourage submissions that engage with these contemporary perspectives. Therefore, we welcome papers that explore topics including, but not limited to:
• The representation of emotions in painting and printmaking
• The representation of sensory practices and experience in visual culture
• The role of sensory perception in shaping artistic practices
• The intersection between the senses and the emotions in visual culture and artistic practice and expression
• Interdisciplinary approaches connecting art history and sensory studies
• The influence of societal and cultural shifts on artistic expressions of feeling or sensory experience
• The interplay between visual arts and culture and the ways social space, communities, and practices are defined or ordered by sensory or emotional practices
• The interpretation of sensory and emotional experience through visual culture in contemporary public or heritage settings
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief bio by 31 January 2025 to angela.platt@stmarys.ac.uk and stewart.mccain@stmarys.ac.uk. Selected papers will be presented at the conference, fostering rich discussions on how the visual arts of this pivotal era resonate with contemporary understandings of emotion and sensory experience.
Enfilade
leave a comment