Call for Participation:

Seeing Across Cultures: Visuality in the Early Modern Period

College Art Association Annual Meeting,
February 20-23, 2008, Dallas, TX

Proposals due: May 11, 2007.

What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern
period? How were differing visualities assigned spiritual, economic or
cultural meaning? Between 1500-1800, political expansion, cross-cultural
trade, scientific exploration, and discrete religious traditions required
new ways of making the unknown visible. No less important were desires and
imperatives to preserve or create invisibility, to render certain things
"un-seeable". This session asks whether, and how, the ocular-centricism of
early modern European cultures was challenged by sustained encounters with
different peoples and practices. Papers might focus on the kinds of sight
prompted or repressed by sacred images, material objects, urban
constructions, ritual or other bodily practices. We seek studies that
consider both the interactive space between diverse cultures and the
history of vision as much or more than images as visible objects.

Mail proposals to both co-chairs:

Dana Leibsohn
Art Department, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063

Jeanette Favrot Peterson
Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of California,
Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7080.