[1]
From: Elizabeth Savage <leu21cam.ac.uk>
Date: Jul 10, 2016
Subject: CFP: Prints in Books

CFP for all-day session:
Prints in Books: The Materiality, Art History and Collection of Illustrations

Convenor: Elizabeth Savage (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Cambridge University, leu21cam.ac.uk)

Book illustrations, especially from the hand-press period (1450-1830), are an essential but traditionally overlooked source of art historical information. Although the hierarchies of fine art over popular art are dissolving and modern disciplinary distinctions between text and image (or art and book) are giving way to cross-disciplinary and holistic approaches to printed material, printed images that happen to be inside books often fall outside the remits of art historical, literary, bibliographical and material research.

One reason is that practical and academic barriers impede access to the art historical information that book illustrations can provide. Due to incompatible cataloguing standards dopted by libraries and art museums, researchers can struggle to identify book illustrations across collections. Cataloguing protocols may reduce hundreds of significant woodcuts in a book to the single word ‘illustrated’; some world-leading graphic art digitisation initiatives exclude book illustrations. As the global digitised corpus expands, will book illustrations be more represented in print scholarship or will they continue to fall into the gap between art and book? As material objects and visual resources, should they be considered bibliographical, art historical or iconographical material? And how do such classifications influence their interpretation?

This interdisciplinary, all-day session seeks to establish a platform for discussion about the position of printed book illustrations in graphic art scholarship. Theoretical and object-based papers related to any aspect of collecting, cataloguing and interpreting printed book illustrations, broadly defined, are welcome, as are papers that explore the materiality, iconography, historiography or art history of pictures printed inside books.

Please email 250-word paper proposals, including your name, affiliation and email, to the convenor by 7 Nov 2016. Full guidelines at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2017/session25.

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[2]
From: Lawrence Buttigieg <lawrence.buttigiegalumni.lboro.ac.uk>
Date: Jul 10, 2016
Subject: CFP: Subverting the 'Stare' at the Disabled Female Body

Subverting the ‘Stare’ at the Disabled Female Body
Convenors:
Claire Azzopardi Lane, University of Malta, claire.lucille.azzopardi.lanegmail.com
Lawrence Buttigieg, Artist/freelance researcher, lawrenceaboutlawrence.com

This session invites artists and scholars to address the representation of the disabled female body in contemporary western art. Mindful of the conflation of femaleness and disability in the history of bodies, it questions whether the relatively neoteric disability studies in feminist discourse have succeeded in bringing about the desired shift from the circumstance of staring to that of witnessing, or what Kelly Oliver describes as a process contingent in mutual and unconditional engagement, one that allows the female subject to fully embrace her disability (Oliver 2001). By engaging with the psyche of their female subjects, artists such as Matthew Barney and Joel-Peter Witkin succeed in making aesthetic statements out of the peculiarities of their bodies while averting their objectification.

This session also wishes to serve as a platform for the deliberation on the problems encountered by artists intent on overcoming the stereotyping of disabled female bodies and obliterating the presumed distinction between disabled women and what Rosemarie Garland Thomson refers to as the ‘normate’ ones (Garland Thomson 1997). A cue in this respect is the striking portrayal of Dadina (Giovanna Vignola) in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (2014), a female character who not only successfully embodies and embraces her novel corporeality and overcomes adversity, but outshines her colleagues in more ways than one.

In sum, presenters are invited to explore whether artists channel their valorisation of the alterity ascribed to disabled women toward a representation of their diversely lived bodies. And, in the process, whether they succeed in promoting an unconditional engagement with them.

Deadline: 7 November 2016