[1] Uttering: Magic and Alternative Spiritual Practices in Art
From: Elena Parpa, parpa.eunic.ac.c
Date: 06 Oct 2022

This session concentrates on modern and contemporary art’s enchantment with magic and esoteric themes. It does so at a moment when a presumed turn towards the numinous is recorded in various aspects of culture, which coalesces with philosophical re-evaluations of magic as a cosmological and cosmogonic project that therapeutically tackles the world’s current state of emergency and nihilism (Campagna 2018). In the visual arts, this ‘turn’ is evidenced in the interest of artists to incorporate elements from various areas of the counter-cultural in works that seek to encourage the reconsideration of our relationship to religion, politics, communal processes, colonialism, nature and technology. Yet art’s engagement with esoteric modes of thinking is hardly new. Artists have always been drawn to spirituality and the inexplicable, despite modernity’s emphasis on scientific objectivity and rationalism.

This session considers the influence of counter-cultural mysticism and alternative spiritual practices on visual art from 19th century modernism until the present. Acknowledging the overlapping traditions and definitions of what is meant with terms such as ‘magic’, ‘esotericism’, ‘mysticism’ or ‘occultism’, it reflects on how their appropriation by artists can be read through a series of approaches. These span the re-evaluation of gender roles, local cultures and identities, marginalized systems of knowledge and cosmological worldviews in a spirit of decolonization and pluralism that interrogates Eurocentric canons, extractive capitalism, patriarchal order and the colonial ethnographic gaze.

The initiators will aim for the papers of the session to be published in an edited journal or book volume.

Please submit a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words for your proposed paper, as well as your name and institutional affiliation to:

Elena Parpa, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, parpa.eunic.ac.cy
Evi Tselika, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, tselika.eunic.ac.cy

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[2] Written in the Margins
From: Patricia Manzano, dxqj47durham.ac.uk
Date: 07 Oct 2022

Early modern artistic literature is a crucial source for the study of art between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Treatise writers such as Vasari, Pacheco, Baldinucci, and Palomino were crucial to the construction and future interpretation of art and their texts, most of them of hagiographical nature, provide insight into early modern artistic theory and practice, while offering a glimpse of the lives and works of artists.

This session focuses instead on the readers and owners of these texts, many of whom have left annotations, scribbles, drawings, and poems on the book. Much can be learned from these comments written in the margins. For instance, the copies of Vasari’s Vite which were annotated by El Greco, Scamozzi, or Carracci, indicate how artists interpreted the text. Thus, through an interdisciplinary approach, the session seeks to deepen the study of art treatises (whether in their original language or translated) as key factors of knowledge transfer and we invite proposals that examine either manuscripts or printed books as an object, their readers in the early modern period (up to 1850), or their annotations.

If interested, please email Mario Zamora Pérez (mario.zamorauam.es) and Patricia Manzano Rodríguez (patricia.manzano-rodiguezdurham.ac.uk) with a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any). Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the digital programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two
weeks.

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[3] Visualising Addiction
From: Halliwell Hannah, hannah.halliwelled.ac.uk
Date: 07 Oct 2022

Experiences of addiction span human history and extend across all cultures. Yet it was not until 1877 that Eduard Levinstein published the first Western medical definition of addiction. Since then, our understanding of addiction has continued to evolve. From the 1970s onward, the notion of what constitutes an addictive source expanded to include sugar, pornography, gambling, sex, shopping and, more recently, internet usage and gaming. Today, addiction in all its forms constitutes a major public health issue. Stigma and shame endure, shaping societal attitudes towards addictive behaviour and the possibility of rehabilitation.

This panel welcomes papers on the representation of substance and behavioural addictions in visual culture. What does addiction look like? How has the experience of addiction been rendered in visual and performance art? How do people with substance or behavioural addictions view themselves? How is art used in addiction recovery? What do these visualisations tell us about how society views addiction? The art-historical treatment of addiction has been dominated by Western perspectives and voices, which risks reinforcing unhelpful stereotypes and limits understanding of the complex relationship between addiction and identity.

We are especially interested in constructing a more complex global narrative of addiction through its visualisations. The panel welcomes papers from a broad geographical and chronological range. Themes might include, but are not limited to:
• Social barriers and/or stereotypes relating to addiction.
• Addiction and identity, including gender, racial and class identity.
• Images and/or narratives of cravings, satisfaction, withdrawal.
• Recovery and relapse.
• Pleasure and pain.

Please provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
Email your paper proposals direct to the session convenors, Hannah Halliwell (hannah.halliwelled.ac.uk) and Lucy Weir (lucy.weired.ac.uk).
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[4] Media and Militarism
From: Knapp Ivan, ivan.l.s.knappgmail.com
Date: 10 Oct 2022

Confronted with the televised spectacle of Operation Desert Storm during the American war in Iraq in the early 1990s, Hal Foster described experiencing “a thrill of technomastery.” For the art historian, footage drawn from cameras mounted on missiles and new semi-autonomous devices such as “smart bombs” gave the viewer a “super machine vision” which reconfigured the relationship between spectating and participating in the war. Implying that one could now speak of a modernist and a postmodernist fascist imagination, Foster argued that the new interactions between media and military technologies served to affirm a subjecthood “defined against cultural otherness both within and without.”

This panel asks how we might assess the mass mediation of militarism from within our current digital condition. Whilst drone warfare and techniques of remote death may have continued on the path Foster described, another trajectory has bent towards invisibility and the internet of things, where technological devices are not opposed to the organic environment but seamlessly integrated with it. This panel
welcomes papers which address the intertwining of contemporary display culture and military spectacle from a range of critical perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches, especially those that foreground questions of gender and race.

Please submit a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words for your proposed paper, as well as your name and institutional affiliation to: Ivan Knapp, ivan.l.s.knappgmail.com

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[5] Picturing Wartime Sexual Violence Before Modernity
From: Péter Bokody, peter.bokodyplymouth.ac.uk
Date: 07 Oct 2022

The ubiquity of sexual violence at times of military conflict has been recognised in a range of geopolitical contexts. Historically, the principal targets of wartime rape have been women and girls, nevertheless, victims can include men and boys or those who reject the binary identification of sexes. The recording and visualization of these events can significantly vary across cultures. Created from the perspectives of aggressors or victims, they can glorify, deny, eroticize or condemn gender-based violence. Stereotypical understandings of sexuality can significantly determine the depictions of such acts. They can operate with different strategies of metaphorical displacements or the staging of the body. The 2020s will mark the 500th anniversary of several traumatic sieges in Renaissance Europe, such as the Sack of Rome in 1527, and the presentations may therefore inform teaching and curatorial practices.

The session solicits papers that examine the images of wartime rape before the widespread use of photography from all geographic areas. Proposals dealing with the phenomenon from a transcultural perspective outside North-Atlantic and European centres are particularly encouraged. The two primary aims of the session are: i) to expose the ways the dominant forms of political propaganda and memorialization can influence the depictions of gender-based violence in the context of war; ii) to trace the impact of the medium and artistic tradition(s) on the imagery including the semiotics of exposure and concealment.

Please email your paper proposals directly to Péter Bokody (peter.bokodyplymouth.ac.uk). You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any).

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[6] Last Works, 1500–2000
From: Alejandro Octavio Nodarse, anodarsefas.harvard.edu
Date: 11 Oct 2022

Convenors:
Tai Mitsuji, PhD Candidate, Harvard University: tmitsujig.harvard.edu
Alejandro Nodarse, PhD Candidate, Harvard University: anodarsefas.harvard.edu

Art history is, most often, a history of beginnings. Its art historical chronologies invoke a history of firsts: first artists, first artworks, first movements. Classification and periodization often accord with an artist’s life, and acts of initiation and points of inception have overwhelmingly been afforded significance and scholarly exposure. In his 1936 essay, “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin sought to reverse this naturalization: death, rather than life, provides its own artistic and narratological source. Or put another way, finality proffers creative authority. Several decades after Benjamin’s pronouncement, we ask again: How has the idea of an “end” shaped and reshaped artistic and art historical enterprises?

In this session, we invite scholars to contemplate “lastness” as an art historical concept. Our discussion invites proposals that span both a global geography and wide temporal range; however, three interrelated lines of inquiry will guide our conversation. First, how do works come to an end through the willed actions of their creator(s) (for example, via verbal renunciation or, in extreme cases, physical destruction)? Second, what authority do last works accrue because of their finality? And, third, what historiographic pressures are placed on an artist’s last works to testify to a mythologised self? We welcome analyses of “last works” in any medium from 1500 to 2000.

Please email us your title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper, with your name and institutional affiliation (if any) by November 4, 2022.

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[7] Scales of Landscape, 1750–1900
From: Nicholas Robbins, n.robbinsucl.ac.uk
Date: 12 Oct 22

This panel invites contributions about the different scales — spatial, historical, social — at which landscape representation operated between 1750 and 1900. Natural historical thought in this period transited between, on the one hand, the minute and the infinitely small, and on the other, the unimaginably vast spans of planetary circulation and deep time. The project of landscape representation was likewise located across various scales of political and social organization: the local, the national, the imperial, and the multiple positions of communities at the edges of such spatial and political boundaries. And yet, beyond merely naming quantitative or comparative relationships, we can understand scale to designate an entire field of correspondences that encompass the structural and the pictorial. This panel aims to bring together work on landscape and the visual cultures of natural history in this period, in any medium and across geographic boundaries, which investigate this period’s fascination with the possibilities and the perils of the scalar imagination.

Please send a 250 word abstract, along with your name and institutional affiliation (if any) to the session conveners: Stephanie O'Rourke (so38st-andrews.ac.uk) and Nicholas Robbins (n.robbinsucl.ac.uk)