Call for Papers: American Identities on Land and at Sea
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 21 April 2017

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Landscape and seascape have been abiding interests in the history of American art, inspiring iconic national imagery and stimulating significant bodies of literature. Many studies have considered how landscape and marine painting encode American culture, politics, and philosophy, often promoting a monolithic notion of American identity. As histories of American art become more culturally and geographically expansive, how can scholars reinterpret images of land and sea?

This conference seeks papers that reconsider American landscape and marine art across media. How can new approaches to landscape and seascape challenge, subvert, or transform traditional conceptions of American identity? Moreover, can methodologies of land and sea inform one another or are they necessarily distinct spaces with separate attendant issues?

Possible topics may include:

• Ecology and environmental studies
• Histories of mobility, tourism, cartography, or navigation
• Histories of technology and industrialization
• Transnational or global approaches
• Cross-disciplinary methods, such as Atlantic and Pacific Studies
• Water-based methodologies, including studies of rivers and inland waterways
• Women’s contributions to the histories of land or sea
• Relationships between landscape, seascape, and race in the Americas
• Material culture studies
• Histories of collecting
• Studies of regional landscapes
• Modern or contemporary artists engaged with land or sea

We invite established scholars and advanced graduate students to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words along with a CV to americanidentitiesconferencegmail.com by January 8, 2017. Accepted participants will be notified by January 30, 2017. Limited travel funding may be available.