From: Rose Logie <rose.logieutoronto.ca>
Date: Apr 2, 2016
Subject: CFP: Secrecy and Materiality in the Eighteenth Century

CSECS/SCEDHS Annual Conference: Secret/s & Surveillance
Session: Secrecy and Materiality in the Eighteenth Century

This session seeks papers that address the topic of secrecy in the long eighteenth century with a particular focus on its material dimensions. By attending to tactility, manipulability, and other somaesthetic properties of the period's objects, texts, and architectural spaces, how might our ideas surrounding the transmission of covert knowledge be refined? In what ways can the potential for matter and substance to hold a subversive "double-agency" speak to the assertions and risks of eighteenth-century subjecthood? This session welcomes papers exploring a range of topics, including: the materiality of secret images, objects, texts, furniture, and spaces; the role of specific materials in the transmission of clandestine communiqués and subversive exchange (erotic, libertine, freemason, etc.); the material dynamics of display (and concealment), including encasements, hidden compartments /apartments, faux façades, veilings, maskings, and reframings, in addition to any other topics that address aspects of eighteenth-century secrecy's materiality.

Please send a proposal of approximately 200 words to Rose Logie, University of Toronto (rose.logieutoronto.ca) by April 15, 2016.