Call for papers - RSA - Montreal, 2011

The conventional study of the history of art and architecture depends upon
attentive visual analysis, and yet as the emergent field of sensory
studies has shown, such analysis may be profoundly enriched when we expand
our investigation to consider the evidence of embodied experience. This
opens up new realms for research where the boundaries are anything but
fixed: as Michel Serres has suggested, even our notion of the senses
themselves remains radically open to debate. Overturning the traditional
concept of the senses as the gates of knowledge, Serres instead suggests
that the senses can be better understood as the principle means by which
“the body mingles with the world.”

In this session, we will consider how ideas and knowledge, social
relations and identities, were registered, interpreted, and transformed by
the human sensorium during the Renaissance, a period often characterized
as a momentous advance in the categories of human understanding and
experience. As Walter Ong has observed, each culture teaches its members
how to “organize the sensorium productively for intellectual purposes.” By
investigating the presence and function of sensation in Renaissance
culture, ideas, and practices, we will explore how sensory perception
helped to create meaning in the early modern world.

Please send a brief CV and 150 word abstract to Niall Atkinson (
nsa6cornell.edu) and David Karmon (dkarmonholycross.edu)

--
Dr. Niall Atkinson
Lecturer
School of Art
Texas Christian University
2800 S. University Dr.
Fort Worth, TX
76129