[1] From: Shira Gottlieb
Subject: Witches, Hags, and old Bags!? Visuals of Elderly Women across Times

This call is for submission of presentations that if selected, will be included in a full panel proposal for the CAA 2025 conference that will be held in New York in February 2025.

Witches, Hags, and old Bags!? Visuals of Elderly Women across Times
Organizers: Mati Meyer and Shira Gottlieb, The Open University of Israel

In “The Grace of Time: Narrativity, Sexuality and a Visual Encounter in the Virtual Feminist Museum,” Griselda Pollock ponders whether “Old women in art are there to terrify us as a memento mori, juxtaposed as scary witches, hags, old bags to the soft fullness of the one moment of feminine desirability: youth.”
Are Pollock’s polarized options the only ones to consider in the examination of elderly women in art history? For sure, there are more alternatives. Yet, if we turn to the extant scholarship, we discover a near absence of studies examining representations of elderly women in art.
The proposed session is born out from this impulse. Another motivation is the wish to carve out the varied iconography of elderly women in their narrative perspectives and within the timeframe and cultural context of the works’ production. Additionally, we ask if there are salient, common issues crossing over art historical periods. Finally, the session is set to offer tentative answers to the question of why the proposed subject is nearly absent from any systematic study.

Please send proposals of 250 words and a CV to mati938gmail.com and shira.gogmail.com by April 18, 2024.
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[2]
From: Michelle Oing
Subject: The Visual Culture of Festivals in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe

We are seeking submissions for the HGSCEA-sponsored panel at CAA 2025, to be held in New York City from 12-15 February 2025.

Paper proposals should be submitted by April 21, 2024 to the panel chair, Michelle Oing, at mkoingaya.yale.edu.

CFP:
Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational work on carnival has inspired countless studies on festivals around the world, and the idea of the world turned upside down. Though Bakhtin’s focus was on literature, much subsequent work on festivals has been produced by anthropologists, social historians, and theater historians, for whom the inversion of carnival provides a useful framework to consider myriad themes (social hierarchy, humor, reform, etc.).
But what makes a festival a festival? What is often most striking is their rich visual culture. From the elaborate ephemeral architecture of early modern royal entries, to Midsummer celebrations involving maypoles and bonfires, and the Krampusnacht parades of Austria and Central Europe, these festivals make full use of the visual impact of masks puppets, floats, costumes, automata, and the manipulation of architectural and/or natural spaces. Ephemeral live events, records of festivals also often survive only in visual form, whether in photography, painting, engraving, or other forms of visual record-keeping. This panel seeks papers that consider the highly visual and spatial aspects of the festival in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe through an art historical lens.

We welcome submissions that blend art historical and other theoretical approaches in order to explore what the tools of art history can bring to the study of the festivals from this region, from antiquity to the present.

Proposals and questions can be sent to mkoingaya.yale.edu by April 21, 2024.