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CALL FOR PAPERS:
COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE 2007,
NEW YORK, NY, USA

MEDIEVAL ART AND THE CIVILIZING PROCESS, 1100-1500

Organizers: Jacqueline E. Jung, University of California, Berkeley, and
Mitchell B. Merback, DePauw University

Focusing on medieval Europe from the twelfth through the early sixteenth
centuries, this session considers the role of art, architecture and visual
culture in the social and psychical transformations that Norbert Elias
famously called the “civilizing process.” We invite participants into a
practical engagement with Elias's conception of the changes in social
manners, affective self-control, bodily comportment, hygiene, and embodied
habitus, along with the parallel processes of state-formation and the
monopolization of violence, that characterized this period. How did the
shifting terms of image-making and reception reflect, contribute to, or
work against changes in subjectivity and subjecthood at the end of the
Middle Ages? What part did art's new emphasis on interaction, empathy and
identification – strategies linked to new genres, new media, new
audiences, and new forms of experience – play in the emergence of the
self-aware and self-controlling individual?

Please send submissions to: (for North American contributors) Mitchell
Merback, Peeler Art Center, 10 West Hanna St., Greencastle, IN, 46135,
USA; (for European contributors) Jacqueline Jung, The American Academy in
Berlin, Am Sandwerder 17-19, D-14109 Berlin, Germany.

Deadline: MAY 10, 2006