Creativity and the City, 1600–2000
University of Amsterdam
27–29 October, 2016

Organized by Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Keynote Speakers

• Jo Guldi, Brown University
• Ilja Van Damme, Antwerp University
• Scott Weingart, Carnegie Mellon University

This international and interdisciplinary conference on the history of creativity and the city aims to bring together recent research in the fields of history, arts, and digital humanities. In the last decade, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have explored the complex interplay between places and their culture using a variety of methods and approaches. The conference examines the relationship between cultural artefacts (art, books, etc.) and the urban networks and spaces in which they were conceived, (re)produced, distributed, mediated, and consumed in early modern and modern Europe. How such issues can be studied by means of existing and novel (digital) methods, as well as comparative and long-term approaches, is the second major theme of the conference.

We invite researchers in the fields of history, arts and culture, urban studies, media studies and the digital humanities to submit abstracts. Papers may address all kinds of cultural expressions and products—from books, (applied) arts and theatre, to films, media and music. The committee particularly invites scholars who will reflect on methodological questions and the use of computational techniques for historical research.

The list of possible themes includes but is not limited to:

• Space and place (built environment, local amenities, spatial distribution, transnational connections, etc.)
• Entrepreneurs and firms (business strategies, networks, collaboration and competition etc.)
• Intermediaries and institutions (guilds, societies, museums, policy, etc.)
• Markets and labour markets (distribution, training, cross-sectoral linkages, etc.)
• Text analytics for historical corpora (information retrieval, pattern recognition, tagging and annotation, etc.)
• Digital cultural heritage (3D/4D modelling, visual and audio-visual content analysis, etc.)
• Analysis and visualization (prosopography, network analysis, discourse analysis, etc.)

Please submit your details, abstract (300 words max.) and 5 key words before 15 November, 2015 through the conference management system. When your paper is embedded in a larger research project, please also provide its title and affiliation. A scientific committee will evaluate the abstracts and sessions will be formed on the basis of the selected papers. For inquiries, please contact us at achi.red@uva.nl.

Abstract submission: 15 November, 2015
Notification of abstract acceptance: Early January, 2016
Registration will open in February 2016.

Shakespeare and Indian Cinema
London
27-30 April, 2016

Screenings with Q&A: Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy Maqbool, Omkara, Haider in collaboration with the British Film Institute – 29-30 April

Keynote Panel: Scriptwriters in discussion

• Abbas Tyrewala (Maqbool, 2004)
• Robin Bhatt and Abhishek Chaubey (Omkara, 2006)
• Basharat Peer (Haider, 2014)

Indian Shakespeare on stage has garnered the increasing attention of academics both Western and Eastern, yet local and regional screen versions continue to be largely overlooked within the scope of Shakespeare on film. It has been a decade since the publication of India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (2005), where Poonam Trivedi observes that despite the seven hundred million speakers of different Indian languages worldwide, Shakespeare’s impact on the theatre and films in these languages has yet to be accorded the critical attention it merits.

In 2014, we hosted a one-day conference in London to discuss the relationship between Shakespeare and Hindi cinema/ Bollywood, the world’s largest cinema industry. In 2016, we seek to widen this discussion to include the relationship between Shakespeare and Indian cinema, bringing together researchers and practitioners to establish the state of current scholarship in this vibrant, underexamined field.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers (and panels), posters and creative approaches, from scholars of all disciplines including film studies, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies and translation studies. These could be on any aspect of Shakespeare and Indian cinema, especially regional cinemas and overlooked aspects of Shakespeare in Bollywood.

Topics could include:

• prehistories
• Indian film translations/adaptations/appropriations of Shakespeare’s works
• practitioners’/directors’/writers’/others’ experiences
• intertextual adaptations/intermedial crossovers
• Shakespeare in Indian film festivals
• documentaries on any aspect of Shakespeare in India/Indian Shakespeares
• screenplays
• economics global and local
• comparisons of Shakespeare in Indian cinema to Shakespearean adaptations in other countries
• Shakespeare in Indian cinema and regional audience reception
• beyond Parsi theatre: Indian Shakespeare cinema and other indigenous performance traditions
• Shakespeare and South-Asian diaspora films
• challenges of researching Shakespeare and Indian cinema
• challenges to and importance of building an archive
• Shakespeare and socio-political campaigns in Indian cinema
• gendering Shakespeare in Indian cinema
• artwork and promotional material: posters, flybills, film trailers, coffee table books, music releases

Abstracts of 300 words and/or panel proposals (plus a 50 word bio) should be sent to shakespeareandbollywood@rhul.ac.uk by 25 November, 2015.

Responses will be made by 20 December 2015.

Spaces and Places of Leisure, Recreation and Sociability in Early Modernity (c. 1500-1800)
German Historical Institute, London, England
19-21 May, 2016

Convener: Angela Schattner

This conference looks at practices of leisure, recreation and sociability in pre-modern societies and how these were reflected in and shaped by spatial practices. As is the case today, sociable, leisure and recreational practices and events were important means for strengthening associations and social bonds, creating local and regional identities, and maintaining distinctions. While the role and practices of sociability in clubs, societies and guilds have been well explored in recent decades, their connections with leisure and recreation have been neglected. Sociability has in recent years featured prominently in histories of consumer societies and material culture. A new interest in spatiality has also led to an intensive investigation of sociable public places such as coffee houses, clubs, salons, shops, and taverns and their connection with the emergence of a (political) public sphere. (Spatial) practices and modes of sociable leisure and recreation in early modern society, however, have received much less attention. The main research undertaken in this area is largely concerned with English urban developments in commercial leisure in the eighteenth century, while practices and spaces of recreation, diversion and sociability before 1660 and beyond Europe have only very recently come into clearer focus.

The aim of this conference is to take stock of the current state of research in the field of spatial practices of leisure, recreation and sociability. It aims to bridge the gap between histories of recreation, leisure and sociability in the eighteenth century and earlier periods, and to facilitate conversations between historians working on different case studies in Europe and beyond in order to develop comparative perspectives. Contributions might investigate spatial practices or the creation and usage of public, economic, exclusive or private places and spaces for leisure and sociability in urban, courtly or rural contexts. Papers are also welcome to explore different forms of leisure and recreation (sport, games, performances, drinking and eating etc.) and sociability (for example, with family, friends, neighbours, status groups, work and religious associations etc.)

Papers could address issues such as the following, but are not limited to this list:

• Topographies of places and spaces. What are the different places and spaces of leisure, recreation and sociability in early modern towns and villages? How are they connected? Are different spaces used by the same groups on different occasions or do they co-exist?
• Multi-functionality of spaces. What other purposes do sociable places serve and does the multi-functionality of places influence or reflect on the practices of leisure and sociability?
• Comparisons. How do practices and spaces differ between town and country, between different regions, between countries? Are there similarities?
• Transfer of practices from town to country and vice versa, between cities, between countries. Who are the agents of transfer? How are fashions created and transferred?
• Change over time. How did spatial practices of leisure and sociability change over time? Which spatial practices or places formerly in use were abandoned, and what replaced them? Who or what initiated these changes? Who opposed these changes and how?
• Social relations created in sociable places and spaces and modes of inclusion or exclusion (gender, status, age).

Proposals from scholars at any stage in their career are invited and papers with an interdisciplinary approach are particularly welcome.

Standard travel expenses and the cost of accommodation for the duration of the conference will be reimbursed.

If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit an abstract of up to 300 words and a short CV by 8 November, 2015.

All enquiries and proposals should be sent to Angela Schattner: schattner@ghil.ac.uk

GOLD: the 33rd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
Faculty of Architecture, Building & Planning and ACAHUCH (Australian Collaboratory for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage), Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia
6-9 July, 2016

Conference Website

GOLD, for millennia, has fascinated humanity and possessed an extraordinary value amongst most civilizations. It was the favoured ultimate currency in many cultures and served as the signal form of capital: both its accumulation and its waste. It was the catalyst of wars, and constituted its spoils. Gold is the adjective to describe mythical lands: for Marco Polo, Japan was ‘Zipangu, the Land of Gold’. There have been venerated building types celebrating religious and cultural beliefs like ‘golden’ temples and ‘golden’ houses like Nero’s Domus Aurea. There have been buildings to protect gold, buildings which openly display it. In art and architectural historiography, there have been ‘golden’ periods and ‘golden ages’. Gold is about luxury, glamour and excess. It also has as its direct opposite objects of no value, things that might be described as worthless.

The 33rd Annual SAHANZ Conference to be held in Melbourne in July 2016 is to be devoted to the exploration of architecture and gold. The public announcement in 1851 that gold had been discovered in the newly created state of Victoria changed the course of Australian history. Melbourne, the state’s capital, grew to be one of the world’s great provincial metropolises and gold was its motor. In 1854, the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee observed that “The discovery of the Victorian Goldfields has converted a remote dependency into a country of world wide fame; it has attracted a population, extraordinary in number, with unprecedented rapidity; it has enhanced the value of property to an enormous extent; it has made this the richest country in the world; and, in less than three years, it has done for this colony the work of an age, and made its impulses felt in the most distant regions of the earth.” Melbourne is thus the ideal conference venue for critically examining gold and the history of the built environment.

Papers are invited that examine and reflect on various aspects and examples of this theme within different cultural contexts. There are many ways that this can be approached as suggested by the following sub-themes:

• architecture and capitalism
• colonial and neo-liberal transformations in Asia and the circulation of people and commodities
• veins of gold: colonisation, imperialism and neo-liberalism
• Victorian prosperity: the phenomena of gold rushes in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, South America and elsewhere in the world
• towns: their landscapes, foundation and sometime disappearance
• gold rushes as triggers for migration and the transfer of ideas, people and technologies
• gold diggers: labour migration, mining and casino cultures
• golden lands, golden kingdoms and ‘gold’ places like the Gold Coast and the Golden Horn in Istanbul
• buildings and gold: treasuries, golden houses, golden temples, even the Smithsons’ Golden Lane housing
• gold medals: as accolades in architecture, for architects, expositions as in sport
• gold and its connotations of ornament, gilding, and the rise of décor
• the meaning of gold in different cultural settings like Japan and Mexico;
• Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’ and 1980s architecture culture
• ‘golden days’ and a ‘golden age’: questions of architectural history and historiography
• gold and the idea of preciousness in conservation
• gold, alchemy, materiality and craft
• gold and the interior (picture palaces, James Bond, the ‘solid gold’ disco era and 1970s glamour)
• penniless: spaces of abjection in new global economies
• “All that glisters is not gold”: reflections on architecture and authenticity

Abstract submission

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted via the Online Conference Paper Management website.

You will need to create a Login ID and password to allow secure uploading of your abstract. Abstracts will be blind reviewed by at least two members of the Conference Academic Committee. External referees may be called upon to review an abstract if needed. Full papers (4500 words, including notes) will be double blind peer reviewed and those accepted for presentation at the conference will be published on the conference website, with print-on-demand editions of the full conference proceedings available after the conference at additional cost.

Please note that in addition to a sole-authored proposal, a participant may also be named on a second, co-authored submission but no more. Irrespective of who would deliver the latter paper, if accepted for presentation and publication, each author is required to register to attend the conference. Authors may not present more than one paper as a sole author. Authors may not present more than two papers as a co-author.

Work submitted for review and for publication in the conference proceedings should be original research that has not previously been published elsewhere, or work that has undergone substantial development from a prior publication.

Plenary Session themes

Participants may choose to submit their abstract/paper for consideration in the general program, or submit the abstract for review in one of the plenary sessions listed on the website. The purpose of the plenary session is to provide a more focused forum for academics already engaged in specific topic with additional time for discussion and critical feedback. Plenary sessions will be allocated two hours in which speakers will present truncated 15-minute presentations, leaving one hour for discussion and debate. Plenary session participants are encouraged to distribute final accepted papers to each other for advanced reading before the conference.

Please note, inclusion in a plenary session does not guarantee acceptance into the final program and is dependent on the paper review process. All papers, including the papers of session chairs, are considered individual submissions, which will undergo the same double blind peer review process mentioned above. Some plenary sessions may expand into two if there are enough individual papers that fit under one theme. If plenary sessions fail to gather enough qualified papers, the session may be dissolved and accepted papers will be redistributed into the general conference program.

Participants interested in presenting at a specific plenary session should indicate their preference by uploading their papers under the plenary session theme on the Online Conference Paper Management website. Abstracts which have been accepted through the peer review process but not accepted into a plenary session will be invited to submit the full paper for peer review for the general program.

Abstracts due: 14 October, 2015.

Healing the Body and Soul From the Middle Ages to the Modern Day
Birkbeck, University of London
15-16 July, 2016

Conference Website

Convenors: Katherine Harvey, John Henderson and Carmen Mangion

In the contemporary Western world, religion and medicine are increasingly separated, but through much of history they have been closely interrelated. This relationship has been characterised by some conflict, but also by a great deal of cooperation. Religious perspectives have informed both the understanding of and approaches to health and sickness, whilst religious personnel have frequently been at the forefront of medical provision. Religious organisations were, moreover, often at the heart of the response to medical emergencies, and provided key healing environments, such as hospitals and pilgrimage sites.

This conference will explore the relationship between religion and medicine in the historic past, ranging over a long chronological framework and a wide geographical span. The conference focus will be primarily historical, and we welcome contributions which take an interdisciplinary approach to this topic.

Four main themes will provide the focus of the conference. The sub-themes are not prescriptive, but are suggested as potential subjects for consideration:

1) Healing the Body and Healing the Soul

• Medical traditions: the non-natural environment and the ‘Passions of the Soul’.
• Religious traditions (for example, the Church Fathers, sermons and devotional literature).

2) The Religious and Medicine

• Medical knowledge and practice of religious personnel, including secular and regular clergy.
• Nurses and nursing.
• Medical practitioners, religious authorities and the regulation of medical activity and practice.

3) Religious Responses

• Religious responses to epidemics, from leprosy to plague to pox and cholera.
• Medical missions in Europe and the wider world.
• Religion, humanitarianism and medical care.

4) Healing Environments and Religion

• Religious healing/ miracles/ pilgrimage.
• Institutional medical care (including hospitals, dispensaries and convalescent homes).

Proposals, consisting of a paper abstract (no more than 300 words) and a short biography (no more than 400 words), should be submitted to religionandmedicineconference@gmail.com by 30 October, 2015. We will to respond to proposals by early December. For more information please visit our website, at https://religionandmedicine.wordpress.com/, and follow us on Twitter @RelMedConf2016