Call for Papers:
The Fourteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium

Theme: [Un]making Empires
Symposium Date: April 7, 2018
Keynote Speaker: Zara Anishanslin, Assistant Professor of History and Art History, University of Delaware

The history and experience of immigration, colonization, and nation-building in the Americas have contributed to a complex artistic legacy. From Incan quero vessels to Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, the arts of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean have engaged and served different imperial visions. A means of both consolidating and challenging state power, material and visual cultures of empire have also shaped the identities of individuals, larger communities, and entire countries alike.

The Fourteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium invites papers that present new ways of thinking about art’s relationships to colonialism and empire. We invite submissions from graduate students working on American art across all time periods and media. Papers of an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural nature are especially encouraged.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Artistic expressions of confederation, empire, or sovereignty by indigenous American peoples
• Early modern colonial art and architecture, including relationships between colonies and their respective metropoles, inter-imperial exchange, and global currents
• Colonial subjects and artists as agents of empire
• Slavery and diaspora
• Questions of artistic agency, appropriation, authenticity, and hybridity in colonial art
• Colonial tropes and allegorical representations of the Americas and “Americans”
• Arts of exploration, conquest, and Manifest Destiny
• Colonial “afterlives,” heritage, and memory (ex. the Colonial Revival, museums such as Colonial Williamsburg, etc.)
• Post-colonialism, independence, and decolonization
• Art of non-political empires (ex. religious or commercial empires)
• Neo-colonialism and modern imperialism

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV to americanist.symposiumgmail.com by January 26, 2018. Accepted participants will be notified in early February. Accommodations will be provided for all participants in New Haven, Connecticut.