Call for Publication

Visual and Material Culture Exchange across the Baltic Sea Region, 1772-1918

The long nineteenth century occupies a precarious place in the history of the visual and material culture of the Baltic Sea Region, at once containing the most popular and most obscured areas of art historical investigation. Since the 1990s, the concept of a Baltic Sea Region encompassing the sea and its surrounding land has fostered transnational thinking about the region, transcending Cold War binaries of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in an effort to view the area more holistically. Yet national funding schemes in these countries—Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Russia—continue to foster a historiographical imbalance that downplays the region’s extraordinary significance as a cultural crossroads of the world. By contrast, our publication foregrounds visual and material exchanges and the ideological or pragmatic factors that motivated them in order to frame the Baltic Sea as a nexus of entangled individuals and cultures always in conversation across the long nineteenth century (ca. 1770-1920).The volume draws from selected papers from our series of conferences in Greifswald in 2017, Berlin in 2018, Tallinn in 2019, and a final, anticipated, conference in Copenhagen.
The publication focuses on the following themes:

• Travelling Artists and Craftsmen
• Art Academies as International Hubs
• Slavery, Serfdom, and the Colonial Turn
• Relationship between Art and Science
• Art Commerce: Agents, Dealers, Collectors, Advisers
• Foreign Artists at Royal Courts
• International Constructions of ‘National’ Styles

While our volume addresses the long nineteenth century, we are especially keen to receive contributions that approach material culture of the region at the turn of the nineteenth century (ca. 1770-1820) as well as the mid-nineteenth century (1840-1870).
A paper proposal of 300 words, together with an accompanying short (max. 5-page) CV, should be submitted to mfacosindiana.edu, bcpushawgmail.com, and tmednickhotmail.com by 1 June 2020. We will notify you of our interest (or not!) by 1 July. The deadline for completed articles/chapters of 6-9,000 words will be 31 December 2020.