Call for Papers: "Translation: Transformative Shifts in Process and Exchange"

The 47th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Association Symposium
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Submissions due May 31, 2012.
Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Hay, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Graduate students are invited to submit abstracts for "Translation: Transformative Shifts in Process and Exchange," the 47th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Association Symposium. To be held on October 20, 2012, the symposium will provide a forum for emerging scholars to explore the idea of translation in visual art and culture. We invite papers that engage with the lives and afterlives of works of art, questions of poetics and translatability, and relationships created, mediated, and shifted by art and its creation, display, and history. Contributions engaging any period, region, and artistic medium and practice are welcome, as are submissions from students working in art history, museology, visual and material culture, history, anthropology, and any related discipline.
Possible questions to address include, but are not limited to: In what ways have motifs, artists, and objects crossed boundaries, found meaning, and re-entered their original contexts? What different forms do these relationships take - for example, are they reciprocal, hegemonic, or syncretic in nature? How have "mistranslations," acting not as mistakes but as retakes, affected art production and meaning, and in what ways do these acts disrupt or inform them? How might we explore the place of the diasporic artist? How are art and artists locationally indexed and how are we to approach the importance or rejection of this spatial orientation? In what ways might translation be thought of temporally?
Abstracts of 300 words or fewer and a current curriculum vitae are due by 5 p.m. on May 31, 2012. E-mail submissions to arthistorygradsymposiumhumnet.ucla.edu

Jonathan Hay is an art historian whose research areas include Chinese painting, visual and material culture, art theory and method, and contemporary art. Dr. Hay is Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor of Fine Art in the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. In 2007, he served on the advisory council for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and from 2002-08 he was a member of the National Committee on the History of Art. Some of his recent and major publications include Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (2010), "The Value of Forgery" (2008) in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, "Double Modernity, Para-Modernity" (2008) in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, and Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (2001). Dr. Hay will also be publishing "Painting, Prison, and Pagodas at the Early Northern Song Capital" in Song Painting and Its Heritage, an upcoming book honoring Richard M. Barnhart. In addition, he has served as a contributing editor for RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and has published extensively in journals, including Art Bulletin, Orientations and Journal of Asian Studies.

For more information, please visit http://www.arthistory.ucla.edu/translation/.