WORD AND IMAGE: VISUAL DIALOGUES

Call for Papers

6th Annual Graduate Humanities Forum Conference
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

February 16-17, 2006

Keynote Speaker: Michael Fried, Professor/Director of the Humanities
Center and Professor, History of Art, Johns Hopkins University

The Graduate Humanities Forum, a graduate student-run division of the
Penn Humanities Forum, seeks papers for its interdisciplinary
conference on this year's theme, "Word and Image." We encourage
interdisciplinary approaches and welcome proposals that consider any
facet of this topic. In addition to formal papers, we encourage
proposals for art displays, performances, panels, group discussions,
short seminars, or workshops.

Words and images lie at the heart of how we mediate the world and how
it is mediated to us. The nexus of word and image is ripe for
discussion, dissection, and deconstruction. How do words and images
construct reality? How has our relationship to words and images
changed over time? To what extent to words and images fuel hybridity
and to what extent can we say their collision repels? What can multi-
media communication address that other forms of communication cannot?
How can words and images convey song, dance, theatrical performance,
and religious ritual without sound and motion? Possible topics include:

Technology of Word and Image through the Ages
Advertising and Media Aesthetics
Performing Word and Image
Film as Conjunction of Word and Image
Multi-Media Communication: Seeing, Hearing, Reading
The Photo and the Caption: Illustration, Journalism, Graphic Novel,
Comix
Spectacular Spectacles: Opera, Musical Theater, Music Video, Film
Ritual - Text - Memory
Articulating the Ineffable: Synesthetic Experience
Documents, Documentation, Documentary
Material Text: Book Culture from Parchment to Cybertext
Picturing Others: Photography and Perception
Designing Experience: Advertising, Architecture, Main-Stream-Media,
Graphic Design, Landscape
Vision and the Sciences
Gender and Image-Fashion, Trends, Fashionability
Art Exhibitions/Performance
The Visual and Everyday Life
Judging a Book by Its Cover-The Marketing of Reading through Images
The Ideology of the Image
Iconography and Iconoclasm: Religious, Historical, and Political
Reactions to Word and Image
Cultural Icons
Memory and Monument
Literacies
Cinema: Intertitles, Subtitles, Credits

The deadline for proposals is December 30, 2005. E-mail abstracts of
no more
than 200 words to our Communications Chair, Jennifer Saltzstein:

jsaltzstsas.upenn.edu.

Notification of acceptances will be emailed by January
7, 2006.