Call for Papers:

Visualizing the Invisible

The 21st Annual Boston University
Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art
March 19, 2005

"Visualizing the Invisible," co-hosted by Boston University Department of
Art History and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on March 19, 2005, seeks
papers from all areas of art history, architectural history and related
fields which address the legibility of the unseen, the internal, or the
invisible. The visual arts often give physical form to ideas, emotions and
experiences that are not by nature available to the eyes. Such
circumstances have led to both severe artistic constraint (the fixed
iconographical structures in both Eastern and Western religious art) and
freedom (the visualizations of sound, as one example, in abstract art).
Papers could consider, but are not limited to, such questions as how
national symbols are created, the ways in which internal emotions like joy
and pain are conveyed in art, how built environments can encompass or alter
our understanding of history, the capacity of physical spaces or objects to
shape memory or experience, how the inclusion of the other senses (touch,
hearing, etc.) in visual representation can change the formal
characteristics of a work of art, what role the viewer may have in making
the invisible visible, or what thought might look like.

Proposals should include a 1-page abstract and c.v. and may be sent by email
to: sgmayerbu.edu or by mail to Stephanie Mayer, Boston University,

Department of Art History, 725 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 302, Boston MA,
02215. Deadline: December 3, 2004.