CFP 14.04.2017

Sessions at RSA (New Orleans, 22-24 Mar 18)

RSA Conference, New Orleans, 22.–24.03.2018

H-ArtHist Redaktion

Calls for papers received:

[1] The Problem and Promise of the Baroque: New Approaches in Research, Historiography, and Pedagogy
[2] Technologies of War
[3] Spaces of Making and Thinking

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[1]
The Problem and Promise of the Baroque: New Approaches in Research, Historiography, and Pedagogy

In the 2011 book, Rethinking Baroque, editor Helen Hills and the contributing authors proposed to both interrogate and re-energize the study of the baroque, a much-maligned concept and one Hills termed the “grit in the oyster of art history.” The authors sought to come to grips with the term from a wide array of chronological and methodological approaches, problematizing and reshaping the landscape of inquiry. By contrast, the following year Gauvin Bailey’s Baroque and Rococo re-entrenched the Baroque as a category for study, seeing it as a moment of unified global exuberance. More than five years later, however, it is unclear where these two divergent approaches have left researchers and teachers. In what ways is the Baroque continuing to be critically reevaluated and used as an interpretive tool? Where does the study of Baroque art currently stand and where is it going, especially in relation to the rising emphasis on the “Early Modern”? What is at stake in surrendering the Baroque in favor of modernity? Hills herself asked “Can the apparent contradictions between periodization and critical strategy be reconciled?” In this panel, we seek to engage with and extend these questions.

This session will examine the utility of the ‘Baroque’ in several different ways. First, we are interested in historical case studies of objects, spaces, and experiences that engage with or challenge the Baroque style in new and exciting ways. We are open to research that argues for the preservation of the term as a site of legitimate scholarly discourse or provides a compelling argument to reject it. Second, we seek approaches that deal with the historiography of the Baroque, but also with the state of the field, critically interrogating the risks and benefits of how we discuss periodization and the problems inherent in a linear approach to art historical inquiry. Third, we seek to include papers that address what is at stake pedagogically when dealing with the period 1580-1730. How do educators approach the paradox of the Baroque at a time when the term itself has been challenged and reassessed in ways that are not often reflected in standard undergraduate course offerings and textbooks? How do we leverage these complex discussions into more fruitful classroom discourse? Papers need not deal with all three prongs of inquiry though crossover is encouraged.

Please submit your paper proposal by May 15 to Saskia Beranek (srb43pitt.edu) and Rachel Miller (Rachel.millercsus.edu). Proposals must include the following:
• Name, affiliation, email address
• Paper title
• Abstract (250-word maximum)
• Keywords
• CV (1 page)

[2]
Technologies of War
Interdisciplinary/Comparative Panel(s)

Papers may take a literal or figurative approach to “technologies of war.” Topics may include the machinery or mechanics of weaponry as well as the training and management of troops, from conscription and deployment to armed conflict, collection of booty, and returning in victory or defeat. Work is welcome on maritime infrastructures and modalities of war as well as war on land, including the military encampment in its material and spatial dimensions and the social relations peculiar to the logic that informed its late medieval and early modern instantiations. Also of interest are the discursive and/or embodied practices that constituted opposing forces as subaltern and inimical, from rallying songs to the subjection of prisoners and the mutilation of the bodies of fallen adversaries. Geographic focus is unrestricted; temporal limits, c. 1300-1700.

Submissions Guidelines
Proposals should be for 20-minute papers and should include

a preliminary title for the paper
an abstract of 150 words
a 1-page CV, including current institutional affiliation(s)
current contact information
Submit your proposal to kbarzmanbinghamton.edu by Wednesday, May 31, 2017.

[3]
Spaces of Making and Thinking

In the early modern period, conventional spaces enabled and limited a wide range of enterprises that required processes of thinking and making, including religious reflection, political theorizing, military engineering, medicinal intervention, scientific inquiry, literary composition, musical performance, artisanal production, business practices, and household management. Scholars have recently been revisiting these activities to consider the overlap between the processes of making and thinking in contradistinction to a prevailing historiographical emphasis on their strict separation. The series of panels proposed here seeks to build on such work by asking how early modern conceptions of space and place could allow for the interconnectedness of head and hand, or mind and body, in productions of all kinds. What activities did early modern spaces afford? How did spatial structure, atmosphere and environment, decoration, or location shape occupants and their practices in the studiolo, the forge, the workshop, the academy, the kitchen, the cloister, the council chamber, the home, the field, the ship, etc.? Could conventional spaces be redefined and adapted to accommodate changing activities, or were new kinds of spaces necessary?

With the sponsorship of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, we welcome proposals for papers to be presented as part of a series of panels on the theme of “Spaces of Making and Thinking” at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in 2018 (New Orleans). We propose that notions of space, making, and thinking be understood in broad terms, in order to invite wider interdisciplinary participation, although we also ask participants to consider and to explain the parameters they themselves set for these terms. Topics could include but are not limited to:

• The impact of religious, political, and social change on spaces of making and thinking
• Artisanal workshops as places of knowledge production
• Spaces of embodied cognition
• The overlapping spaces of the liberal and mechanical arts
• The scope and role of making in the university
• Gendered spaces of making and thinking
• Nature and the outdoors as spaces for epistemic activities
• Making and thinking in the urban context
• Thought occupying space in instruments of contemplation and imagination
• The concealment or display of work and labour in privileged spaces of study
• The body or mind as metaphor for spaces and buildings
• How spaces of thinking and making transform over hours, days, months, years
• Liminality and movement between spaces of thinking and spaces of making
• Spaces of dilettante practitioners compared to those of professionals
• The language of manual and mental working spaces
• Collaboration and the expansion of spaces
• Mobile spaces of material and immaterial production
• Space and the health of practitioners
• Light and darkness in the space of production

Please send paper proposals to Colin Murray (colin.murrayutoronto.ca) and Tianna Uchacz (thu2102columbia.edu) before 1 May 2017. All proposals must include a paper title (15 words max), an abstract (150 words max, see guidelines here), keywords, a brief cv (300 words max, NOT in prose form, see guidelines here), and any a/v needs. Please include your first, middle, and last name as well as your affiliation in your email.

Quellennachweis:
CFP: Sessions at RSA (New Orleans, 22-24 Mar 18). In: ArtHist.net, 14.04.2017. Letzter Zugriff 28.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/15221>.

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