Call for Papers for the 2010 College Art Association Conference

Session: Authors of Cultural History from the Ottoman Empire
to Nation-States

Chairs: Belgin Turan Ozkaya and Elvan Altan Ergut

This session critically engages with 'authors' of cultural
production who shaped contemporary discourses often informed by
larger historiographical projects during the dissolution of the
Ottoman Empire into nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.Focusing on such 'pioneer' and 'powerful' intellectuals,
that is, art and architectural historians, archaeologists, and
museum founders, among others, the papers should ask what kinds
of pasts they envisaged, what kinds of aesthetics they propagated,
and how their historical and aesthetic preferences affected the
cultural contexts of their time. Papers should analyze cases imbued
by various kinds of modernization as well as imperialism, colonialism,
nationalism, and orientalism, yet go beyond the hitherto tired usage
of these concepts by defying conventional oppositions - particularly
geographical oppositions such as the 'West' versus the 'non-West'-
and show that such seemingly familiar categories can work in
unexpected ways.

Please submit an abstract and CV by May 8, 2009 by email to
beltmetu.edu.tr, tomrismetu.edu.tr or by mail to:

Belgin Turan Ozkaya and Elvan Altan Ergut
Department of Architecture
Middle East Technical University
Inonu Bulvari
06531 Ankara
Turkey