2009

Call for Papers

The Uses of Pathology
College Art Association Annual Conference
Los Angeles, CA, 25-28 February 2009

Session Chairs:
Rachael Z. DeLue, Princeton University
Allison Morehead, King's College, Cambridge

Deadline for paper proposals: 9 May 2008

As a term, idea, or description, pathology usually bears negative
connotations. Yet for certain artists and critics in the modern
period, pathology was practically and theoretically generative, a tool
for accessing and examining what was difficult to see or understand.
This panel will consider the uses of pathology - as a concept or
vocabulary - in seeing, understanding, and making art. We seek
proposals that go beyond socio-historical analyses of the diseased or
degenerate body and, instead, engage pathology as a rich critical or
formal language. How might the idea of pathology have been
methodologically or hermeneutically useful? How did different
definitions of pathology impinge on the possibilities for artistic and
critical practice? And how might attention to the uses of pathology
reveal the ways in which the fundamental methods and operations of art
and science - their modes of thinking and making - were mutually
implicated and informed?

Please send 500-word abstract, CV and letter detailing speaker's
interest, expertise and CAA membership status, by 9 May, to:

rdelueprinceton.edu
akm29cam.ac.uk

Paper submissions can be sent to:

Rachael Z. DeLue, Princeton University, Department of Art &
Archaeology, McCormick Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544
Allison Morehead, King's College, Cambridge CB2 1ST, UK