Monthly Archives: June 2012

Art and Its Afterlives – Call For Papers

Art and Its Afterlives
Fourth Early Modern Symposium
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
17 November 2012

Proposals due by 1 July 2012

Art and Its Afterlives aims to address the ways in which the work of art continues to resonate after its creation. While much art history takes as its focus the initial facture of the work of art, this one-day symposium explores what happens to early modern art after the moment of its making. How did early modern works continue to be created in their display, preservation, and reception from the moment of their creation on? Papers will examine how art is shaped by its afterlives – whether these collect, curate, cut up, cut out, copy or correct it – and the ways in which art both persists and changes through time as a material object, a field of generative meaning, and a subject of debate and interpretation. Material, technical and social histories as well as theoretical approaches drawn from the discipline of art history and other fields of the humanities are welcome. Accounts from curatorial practice and the field of museology are also encouraged.

The question of afterlife is an pertinent topic for art history in general, where the work of art is uniquely tied to a particular assemblage of materials which inevitably change with time, rendering fraught questions of preservation, the presence or possibility of copies, the idea of original state, and how a work of art is staged for a viewer. Less material but no less concrete, the interactions between the work and the viewer, and between the work and the its assumed referent are not stable but open to change. The question of afterlife is particularly relevant for the early modern period, when emergent art markets and cultures of collection allowed not only the circulation of artworks, but also their appropriation and adaptation. Taking as its point of departure Bourdieu’s encouragement to investigate ‘not only the material production of the work but also the production of the value of the work’, this symposium privileges the afterlives of art and the alternative histories they present.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

  • Histories of collection and display – acquisition and the accrual of value; assignment of category or genre; travel and re-contextualization; political appropriation and/or subversion
  • Conservation and technical art history – preservation vs. restoration of past state; hidden layers and the discovery of the underneath; changing material support
  • Reception and criticism –boundary between art and reception; development of art historical practice; shifting contexts of viewership and viewer negotiation
  • Copy and imitation – changing perceptions of a master’s hand vs. workshop; forging and faking; serial reproduction; changing conceptions of emulation and originality; contemporary uses of early modern works and spaces
  • Destruction and embellishment – iconoclasm and the religious image; revolution and vandalism; disassembly and remaking; framing and re-framing

Art and Its Afterlives is the fourth symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern Department. We invite proposals from scholars and postgraduates for papers that explore the theme of art and its afterlives in all forms of visual and material culture from the early modern period (c.1560-1848) including painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, performance, print media, graphic arts, and the intersections between them. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words by 1 July 2012 to laura.sanders@courtauld.ac.uk and francesca.whitlum-cooper@courtauld.ac.uk.

Reframing Ekphrasis – Call For Papers

Reframing Ekphrasis
Comparative Literature Graduate Conference
King’s College London
Friday, November 9th, 2012

Conference Website

Keynote Speaker: Stephen Cheeke (University of Bristol)

Ekphrasis is a literary mode that spans the entire breadth of literature, from Achille’s shield to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. Defined by James Heffernan as “the verbal representation of graphic representation,” the referential scope of ekphrasis has expanded and contracted according to critical taste. In the light of the increasingly complex way contemporary scholars have come to view visual literacy and culture, ekphrasis once again demands reconsideration. The “visual turn” in criticism, alongside the upsurge of interest in digital and material cultures, has enlarged the boundaries of what representation entails, and has questioned its stability. In an age of interdisciplinarity, ekphrasis could provide a model for comparison that moves beyond binary encounters between discrete categories, such as national literature, art history, and the classics? Rather than sublating image to word, might we resituate ekphrasis as a multi-media negotiation of meaning and form?

In this conference, we are interested in questioning not only the nature of ekphrasis, but also the supposedly essential nature of representation. What dualisms, such as literature/visual arts, subject/authority, are implicit in traditional modes of ekphrasis, and how might other creative forms, like music, subvert this? What kinds of power structures or hierarchies are embedded in ekphrasis, and how might we negotiate these, especially in the light of post-colonial and transnational theory? What type of gaze does ekphrasis entail, and is this related to anxieties about the form? What other art forms might be included in ekphrastic poetics that would contribute to interdisciplinary modes of thinking, such as architecture, performance art, or digital media? How far can ekphrasis provide a self-reflexive model for comparison?

Potential topics for papers might include, but are not limited, to:

  • Literature as a translation of the visual
  • Ekphrasis and the Modern Languages
  • Ekphrastic hierarchies: word/image, dominant/submissive, etc.
  • Taste and aesthetics
  • Relations of space and time in ekphrasis
  • Stasis and movement
  • The reverse: art depicting literature
  • Anxieties of ekphrasis
  • Ekphrasis in the digital age reproduction
  • Music and ekphrasis
  • New media and ekphrasis
  • Icononology and iconoclasm
  • Metapictures
  • Architecture and ekphrasis

The organising committee invite proposals for 20-minute papers exploring any aspect of ekphrasis as an inherently comparative mode. Please send 300 word abstracts plus a short biography to reframingekphrasis@gmail.com. Deadline for abstracts is 31st July 2012. We will inform participants of acceptance by 15th August 2012.

University of Western Australia, School of Music Seminar Series – Two Lectures of Interest

There are two lectures coming up at the School of Music at the University of Western Australia in August which may be of interest to members.

UWA School of Music Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 August 2012: 5.00pm – 6.30pm

Dr Alan Maddox, ARC Centre of Excellence for History of Emotions, University of Sydney. “A vivid imitation in the theatre”: Andrea Perrucci’s treatise on the rhetoric of speech and song (1699).

Tuesday 21 August 2012: 5.00pm – 6.30pm

Dr Penelope Woods, ARC Centre of Excellence for History of Emotions, The University of Western Australia. Musical Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage.

All lectures take place in the Tunley Lecture Theatre (G05) in the School of Music Building. See this location on the UWA Crawley campus map.

The Society for Medieval Archaeology Student Colloquium 2012 – Call For Papers

The Society for Medieval Archaeology Student Colloquium 2012
Cardiff University
8-9th November 2012

Conference Website

The first call for papers is now open for the Society of Medieval Archaeology Student Colloquium, to be held at Cardiff University, 8-9th November 2012. The event aims to provide a platform for postgraduates and early career professionals to present and discuss their current research.

Papers from across the medieval period (5th-16th centuries AD) and from all geographical areas are welcomed. Papers from subjects other than archaeology, but which have a broader medieval significance, will also be considered. Abstracts for posters are also encouraged.

Abstracts should be written concisely in English (no more than 150 words) and submitted using the abstract submission form which can be downloaded from the Conference Website. Please note that papers will be 20 minutes in length with a 10 minute discussion for each session. Presentations will be restricted to postgraduates and early career researchers but we welcome posters from all medievalists.

Completed abstract forms should be sent to: medieval.archaeology@googlemail.com. The deadline for all presentation and poster abstracts is Friday 7th September.

NB: This conference will be held in English.

For any further enquiries contact the SMA Colloquium team at: medieval.archaeology@googlemail.com

Alternatively, check out their Facebook and Twitter pages:
Facebook: Society for Medieval Archaeology
Twitter: SocMedArch

The Society for Medieval Archaeology/Gymdeithas Archaeoleg Ganoloesol: www.medievalarchaeology.co.uk

Journal of Early Modern Studies: Creative Experiments – Call For Papers

The Journal of Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for its second issue (Spring 2013). It will be a special issue, devoted to the theme:

Creative experiments: Heuristic and Exploratory Experimentation in Early Modern Science

Editor: Dana Jalobeanu

The past decade has seen a renewed interest in multiple aspects of early modern experimentation: in the cognitive, psychological and social aspects of experiments, in their heuristic and exploratory value and in the complex inter-relations between experience, observation and experiment. Meanwhile, comparatively little has been done towards a more detailed, contextual and specific study of what might be described, a bit anachronistically, as the methodology of early modern experimentation, i.e. the ways in which philosophers, naturalists, promoters of mixed mathematics and artisans put experiments together and reflected on the capacity of experiments to extend, refine and test hypotheses, on the limits of experimental activity and on the heuristic power of experimentation. So far, the sustained interest in the role played by experiments in early modern science has usually centered on ‘evidence’- related problems. This line of investigation favored examination of the experimental results but neglected the “methodology” that brought about the results in the first place. It has also neglected the more creative and exploratory roles that experiments could and did play in the works of sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers of nature.

This special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies aims to bring together articles devoted to the investigation of particular cases of early modern experiments or early modern discussions of experimental methodology. We aim to put together a selection of interesting and perhaps relevant case studies that would further what might prove to be an interesting line of research, namely the investigation of the heuristic, analogical and creative role of early modern experiments.

JEMS is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal of intellectual history, dedicated to the exploration of the interactions between philosophy, science and religion in Early Modern Europe. It is edited by the Research Centre “Foundations of Modern Thought”, University of Bucharest, and published and distributed by Zeta Books. For further information on JEMS, please visit http://www.zetabooks.com/journal-of-early-modern-studies.html.

We are seeking for articles no longer than 10,000 words, in English or French, with an abstract and key-words in English. Please send your contribution by the 1st of October 2012 to: jems@zetabooks.com.

The Permissive Archive: a CELL conference – Call For Papers

The Permissive Archive: a CELL conference
Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL)
Queen Mary, University of London
9 November, 2012

Conference Website

For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters has pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate this anniversary, in early November 2012 we will be holding a conference examining the future of the ‘Permissive Archive’.

The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives – not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories.

Too long associated with settled dust, archival research will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 – 1800. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • The shape of the archive – ideology and interpretation
  • The permissive archive: its definition and its past, present and future
  • Alternatives to the permissive archive
  • Archival research as discovery or construction
  • The archive which challenges or disrupts
  • Uncatalogued material – how to find it, how to access it, how to use it
  • New findings
  • Success and failure
  • Broken or dispersed collections
  • The archive and the environment
  • The archivist and the historian
  • The ethics of the archive
  • The comedy of the archive
  • Order and anarchy

Please send 300-word proposals to hjgrahammatheson@gmail.com
Deadline 31 July

Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as group sessions, trips or guided walks. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.