Call for Papers HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF THE BAROQUE, 1880s-1945

Proposals for papers will be accepted until August 14th for a panel at:

Society of Architectural Historians
64th Annual Meeting
April 13-17, 2011
New Orleans, Louisiana

deadline for submissions August 14, 2010

HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF THE BAROQUE, 1880s-1945

Baroque architecture bore two political stigmas-the absolute power of the
Ancien Régime and internationalist Catholicism-before it became a discrete
art historical concept. Because on both counts the Baroque era stood in
opposition to the nineteenth-century project of nation-formation (in which
art history was fully enlisted), the study of the period lagged decades
behind ancient and Medieval art, with intensive study starting only in the
late 1880s. For the next one hundred years especially Germanic art
historians-whose investigations have been most enduring-found ways either to
reconcile this problematic period of architectural production with the
political values and needs of the day or to use it as a negative example.

This session aims to capture an astonishingly strong strain of research today
(among North American, European, Latin American and Australian scholars)
around the historiography of Baroque architecture. The primary though not
exclusive interest in this session, which welcomes papers from historians of
European or Colonial Latin American historiography, lies in the motivations
for the emergence of the study of the Baroque in addition to measurable
consequences of its study. In addition to the imbrication Baroque studies
with the emerging nation-states, the nascent monument preservation movement
brought specialists to contend with Baroque monuments as did the voracious
march through historical styles in the contemporary decorative arts. In the
1890s and 1900s new analyses of the Baroque that emphasized space (Raum) also
provided a stimulus to architects, some would say leading to the emergence of
modern architecture as a spatial art. This session welcomes contributions
from scholars in and about all countries that contended with their Baroque.
Papers should deal with the stakes, practical, political or otherwise, in the
study of the Baroque and the characterizations of it from the 1880s through
WWII. Please submit proposals via email to evonne.levyutoronto.ca : (Evonne
Levy, Associate Professor, University of Toronto)

FOR SAH SUBMSSION and PAPER GUIDELINES: See
http://www.sah.org/clientuploads/TextFiles/Call4Papers_NewOrleans.pdf