Call for Papers

Sensorial Encounters: Body, Object, and Environment
2016 KU History of Art Graduate Student Symposium

Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, Lawrence

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Bissera Pentcheva, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University

The multi-sensory nature of experience has been the focus of much recent art historical scholarship. Many of these writings have drawn on the important critical and philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Didier Anzieu, and Luce Irigaray. Participants in this symposium will explore some of the ways in which the senses, broadly conceived, generate and/or mediate aesthetic encounters. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that consider how interactions between and/or among bodies, objects, and environments, whether real or virtual, make meaning.

We welcome proposals from graduate students at the M.A. or Ph.D. level that address topics from a wide range of time periods and geographic locations. We invite object-based and theoretical approaches.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

- Embodiment and perception
- Intertwining
- Five senses and beyond
- Artistic process
- Sensations
- Performance, ceremonies, and rituals
- Materiality
- Objects meant to be touched, handled, and/or carried
- Writing, action, and gesture
- Environments
- Spectatorship and participation
- Trauma
- Skin-ego and the sound envelope

Please submit an abstract (250 – 300 words) and C.V. to kusymposiumgmail.com by April 1, 2016. We will notify successful applicants by May 2, 2016.