Call for papers
DISCOVERING DALMATIA
Dalmatia in 18th and 19th century Travelogues, Pictures and Photographs

The idea of the Grand Tour, which began in the 17th century, gained extreme popularity throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Although the Grand Tour originally focused on Rome, the exploration of the Ancient World, in which the origins of the Neoclassical period lay, its reach widened to further areas once part of the Roman Empire, among which Dalmatia held a prominent position. Drawings and literary works by travel writers-artists from that period are treasured in prestigious European museums and libraries and together constitute a priceless portion of the European cultural heritage.

There are two fundamental reasons why Dalmatia became a major destination of the European Grand Tour in the 18th and the 19th centuries: it presented a fountainhead of Ancient forms, knowledge of which helped in the quest for a universal language of architecture, and in addition it was almost an uncharted territory inspiring Enlightenment intellectuals to discover and get to know the world.

Ancient architecture presented the dominant cultural infrastructure of that period in Europe. The outline of the European Grand Tour embraces places which preserved the traces of those idealised times. However, travel writers also collected information of another kind; on the topography and customs, language and religion and in short a general representation of the area they wanted to come to know and write about.

The overall aim of the conference is to identify, problematise and integrate the issues related to the phenomenon of description of space, predominantly Dalmatian. This phenomenon was a formative factor in the development of European Neoclassicism and Romanticism in literature, the arts and architecture. Invited to the conference, accordingly, are art historians, literature comparatists, historians, architecture historians and theorists and experts from cognate disciplines to contribution to the research into the role of Dalmatia in the European Grand Tour in all its aspects.

The conference arises out of the research project Dalmatia – a destination of European Grand Tour in the 18th and the 19th century (2014-2017) of the Institute of Art History, under the aegis of the Croatian Science Foundation.

Please visit our website at http://grandtourdalmatia.org/ to learn more about this project.

Registration:
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers. Proposals consist of a 250-word abstract and 1-page CV, sent via email as a pdf attachment to asverkoipu.hr by 28/02/2015

Important dates
- Registration: by 28/02/2015
- Notification of acceptance 09/03/2015
- Conference day 21/05/2015

Academic Committee
Josko Belamaric (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)
Cvijeta Pavlovic (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Milan Pelc (Institute of Art History Zagreb)
Ana Sverko (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)
Elke Katharina Wittich (Fresenius University of Applied Sciences, AMD Hamburg)

Organizing Committee
Josko Belamaric (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)
Cvijeta Pavlovic (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Milan Pelc (Institute of Art History Zagreb)
Ana Sverko (Institute of Art History – Centre Cvito Fiskovic Split)

Important information
- Registration fee is 50 euros.
- The registration fee includes: welcome reception on 20/05/2015 evening; conference material; lunches and refreshments during the scheduled breaks.
- Registration fee can be paid by bank transfer. The invoice of the participation fee will be sent to the participants by e-mail within 5 days of the notification of acceptance.
- The organizers could arrange accommodation for the participants.
- The organizers are not able to pay the travel expenses of the participants.
- Conference languages: English and French
- The duration of a spoken contribution should not exceed 20 minutes.
Contributions will be divided into sections according to topics.
Each section will be followed by discussion.
- Selected papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Please send final written version by 31/08/2015.

If you have questions about the conference, please contact the organizing committee at asverkoipu.hr