Applications are now open for York Summer Theory Institute. Art History and Picture Theory.

Although not all artworks are pictures and not all pictures are artworks, art history has always had many ideas, sometimes inchoate, about the nature and history of pictorial representation as a distinctive means of communication - how depiction works perceptually and culturally, what pictures can be used to do socially, how picturing relates to language, when depiction is an art, and so on. But important work has also been done outside art history in psychology, philosophy, media archaeology, digital humanities, and elsewhere, even if it’s unclear whether there’s a transdisciplinary ‘picture studies’. We will look at the range of this scholarship and consider what it can offer to art historians, as well as what art historians can contribute.

Depending on participants’ backgrounds, interests, and research projects, topics might include the status of pictorial ‘illusions’ in different cultures; the development of picturing in children; the theory of visual propaganda and stereotype; gender, age, and other variables in ‘picture perception’; sculptural pictures; pictography; the history of virtual pictorial space; gesture and depiction; pictorial ‘presence’ and the ontology of pictures as objects; tactile/haptic and acoustic ‘cross-modal’ properties of pictures in different historical traditions; pictures, visualisation, and mental imagery.

YSTI is led by Professor Whitney Davis (University of California at Berkeley and University of York). In addition to the morning and afternoon seminar sessions, there will be two evening public lectures and a final group dinner.

Please submit a 250 word statement setting out how you envisage your attendance contributing to your research.
Please also include your name, affiliation and the stage of your research (MA, PhD, Postdoc etc.)

Send your application to histart-ystiyork.ac.uk by 5pm on 20 March.

YSTI is free of charge, but places are limited. In order to increase the diversity of its participants, the History of Art department is able to offer some support for travel and accommodation expenses for students who reside beyond 100 kilometres from York.

If you are a graduate student from, for example, Liverpool, or an international student working over the summer in London, do specify it in your statement.

Please note that the department is unable to cover costs for national and international flights.