On the occasion of Professor Elizabeth Edwards’ retirement, the 2016 Photographic History Research Centre Annual International Conference will address themes from her complex and wide ranging scholarship on the cultural work of current and historical social photographic practices. Thus, "Photography: Between Anthropology and History" aims to showcase scholarship driven by engagements with research methodologies that informed the material and ethnographic turns in the study of photographic history, and opened up a variety of innovative critical spaces for the re/consideration of photography and its history.

We welcome applications from all disciplines and career stages, and would like to invite abstracts for 20 minute papers on topics such as, the colonial-era photographic image, photographic museum practices, photography’s printed ephemera, the sociability of photographic knowledge, its development and dynamics of exchange, and the local, national or trans-national photographic imagination. Applicants might also consider different subject matters, related but not limited to the following themes:

Photography and anthropology
Photography in historical studies
Photography and geography
Photographic collections
Photographic ethnographies
Photography and material culture
Historiography of the social history of photography
Photographic practice and social as well as technical change

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to: phrcdmu.ac.uk by the 20th of January 2016. We will inform candidates within two weeks from this date whether their application has been successful.