[1] Research through spatial images in Digital Humanities Research

From: Angela Dressen
Date: June 14, 2024
Deadline: July 20, 2024
This panel wants to discuss current methods related to spatial concepts in humanities research, connected to Renaissance architectural spaces, places, and images. These concepts address preferably an hypothesis on lost architecture, or lost historic conditions, via spatial concepts in an image and through the means of an image. The background of the question is connected to the understanding, whereas the custom in architectural design to develop a creative idea by a concrete manifestation of a spatial concept, is transferable to the development of a scientific hypothesis. To picture a spatial concept, either by drawing or a 3-dimensional model, becomes the decisive point of departure for further reflective processes. These processes are comparable to a catalysator. The conceptional image becomes the instrument of research between reflective and communicative exchange among scientists. In some cases, when the image has been created via a 3-dimensional model, it serves likewise as a spatial evaluation, as verification of the spatial hypothesis. Furthermore, the image may provoke a subjective and emotional reaction beyond objective information. This effect assigns power of persuasion both to architectural projects as well as scientific hypothesis, which should not be understood as leading to an illusion, but as a departure for further scientific questions.
We are asking for examples, where conceptional images of spatial hypothesis (preferably abstract and diagrammatic) are helping to resolve a scientific question, or leading to new ones. These concepts should be based on the intersection of Renaissance spaces and Digital Humanities research.

Please send your max. 200 word abstract and a short CV to Angela Dressen (adressenitatti.harvard.edu ) and Dominik Lengyel ( lengyelb-tu.de) by July 20, 2024. Speakers must be members of the RSA by the time of the conference.

https://www.rsa.org/page/rsaboston2025

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[2] Ecocriticism & Art Historical Methods in Conversation

From: Elizabeth J. Petcu and Maurice Saß
Date: June 19, 2024
Deadline: July 30, 2024

This panel will explore how the growing range of ecocritical perspectives in early modern art history can interact with the discipline’s more established methods to mutually challenge and enrich each other.

Over the past two decades, early modern art history has witnessed an ecocritical turn. Researchers have investigated ecological dimensions of artistic materials or practices and their circulation, ecological imagery in art, and relationships between ecological change and the production and reception of art. While such studies are sometimes seen as radical, they have often relied on well-worn methods and theoretical frameworks of early modern art history, such as technical examination, archival investigation, formal analysis, iconography/iconology, the social history of art, gender theory, and postcolonial critique. They have also leveraged familiar strategies of disciplinary disruption, such as expanding the canon, critiquing institutions, and questioning hierarchies between media and genres.

This panel will use methodologically reflective case studies to ask how ecocritical research can upend or even renew established methods of early modern art history and its strategies of disciplinary revision, and what such frameworks can, in turn, contribute to ecocritical art history. For example, papers could reflect on the extraction, processing, and circulation of artistic materials to show the points of contact between ecocritical art history and material studies or technical art history. They could probe documentary records or pictorial figurations of resource management or environmental infrastructures to interrogate the alliances and dissonances between ecocritical art history and archival work or iconography/iconology. Alternatively, papers can consider parallels between ideological positions of ecocritical early modern art history and the field’s feminist, queer, and/or postcolonial perspectives. The goal of the panel is to evaluate how ecocritical interventions can draw upon and invigorate more established practices of early modern art history while expanding the field’s modes of self-critique.

We invite papers representing any geography and are interested in foregrounding diverse perspectives historically underrepresented at RSA. It is foreseen that speakers can contribute to a special issue of an international, peer-reviewed journal arising from the panel.

Please submit the following to epetcued.ac.uk and Maurice.Sassalanus.edu by 30 July 2024:

• paper title (15-word maximum)
• paper abstract (200-word maximum)
• Short CV with PhD or other terminal degree completion year (.pdf or .doc upload)
• full name, current affiliation, and email address.

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[3] Venetian Art in Boston. Save Venice Session

From: Sarah Blake McHam
Date: June 19, 2024
Deadline: July 22, 2024

This session seeks to present new research about artworks from Venice and the Veneto held in Boston-area collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Harvard Art Museums. In these museums in the past two decades some works have received great attention in special exhibitions (e.g., Crivelli, Titian) or new permanent collection galleries (Vivarini). These and other paintings and sculptures have benefited from scientific examination and conservation treatments, revealing much about their making, original appearance, and present condition. The extensive conservation work undertaken in Boston parallels the spectacular recent campaigns of restoration in Venice and the Veneto sponsored by Save Venice Inc., which have treated dozens of paintings by Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Giulia Lama, and many others, plus a wealth of sculpture, decorative arts, works on paper, and more. A large Tintoretto painting in the Accademia was even restored by Save Venice for an exhibition in Boston in 2009. We welcome studies from a range of approaches and on any medium of Venetian artworks in Boston-area collections. Their connections to works remaining in Venice are of particular interest.
Please send your full name, current affiliation, paper title (15-word maximum), abstract (200-word maximum), PhD completion date (past or expected), keywords, and a 1-page non-narrative curriculum vitae to the organizers:
Sarah Blake McHam (mchamarthist.rutgers.edu) and Patricia Fortini Brown (pbrownprinceton.edu).

Submission deadline is July 22, 2024.
Notification of applicants will be by August 15, 2024.

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[4] The Powers of Nature, Ritual and History in Henri IV’s Château at Fontainebleau

From: Nicola Courtright, Emmanuel Lurin, Camille Serchuk
Date: June 19, 2024
Deadline: July 15, 2024

A favorite château of the Valois kings and the site of much decorative splendor and ritual display in its chambers, galleries, and gardens, Fontainebleau continued to be mightily expanded in the following Bourbon dynasty by its founder, Henri IV. Thus far, Henri IV’s enlargement of the château has been insufficiently interpreted in its entirety. At the heart of the château was the Queen’s Garden, altered by the new king. Surrounding and enclosing it, Henri IV built long galleries, lending the royal residence’s open-air interior an unusual, if not unique, retrospective character that hearkened back to antique Roman imperial garden structures to proclaim his political leadership.

This panel will focus on ideas about regal authority, political renewal and territorial dominion that were built into the Queen’s Garden at the center and its enclosing galleries: the Aviary Wing with its collection of singing birds; the two hunting galleries (the Deer Gallery and the Stag Gallery, with its painted wall maps); and the monumental Gallery of Diane, designed as the centerpiece of the Queen’s apartment.

The garden setting, the art and architecture, as well as the collections of living animals, hunting maps and trophies, and Roman antiquities, will suggest how natural and architectural landscapes continue to serve as metaphors of control and politics in Henri IV’s France; elaborate upon the powers inherent to plants, animals, and antiquities; suggest how these forces might also add to the authority of the consort Marie de’ Medici; and investigate multiple functions of the garden.

Primary field: Art & architecture
Additional fields: History, French literature and culture, history of collections

Submissions must include:
• paper title (15-word maximum)
• paper abstract (200-word maximum)
• resume (.pdf or .doc upload)
• PhD or other terminal degree completion year (past or expected)
• full name, current affiliation, and email address.

Submission deadline: July 15, 2024.
Notification date: August 1, 2024.

Co-organizers:
Nicola Courtright, Amherst College [nmcourtrightamherst.edu]
Emmanuel Lurin, Sorbonne Université [emmanuellurinyahoo.fr]
Camille Serchuk, Southern Connecticut State University [serchukc1southernct.edu]

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[5] Nature and Society in the Iberian Worlds.

From: Maria Vittoria Spissu, Marta Albalá Pelegrín
Date: June 22, 2024
Deadline: August 7, 2024

Organizers:

Marta Albalá Pelegrín, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and
Maria Vittoria Spissu, Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna

Panel sponsored by the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies [University of California, Los Angeles] and its journal Viator
Submission Deadline: 7 August 2024
In the early modern age, the Iberian Monarchies experienced an era of expansion, restless turmoil, and intricate challenges as they sought to exert control over a diverse empire as self-perceived Catholic and universal monarchies.
This panel seeks papers that illustrate and discuss strategic, polemical, ideological, and utopian conceptions of nature and society in the Iberian worlds, including the Ibero-American Viceroyalties, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines, with a focus on materiality, communities, and Salvation.
The contributions may focus on images, objects, maps, and texts to address questions as the following ones:
- How do these cultural productions depict and narrate ecological, territorial, and climatic
transformations, including traumatic events both real and imagined?
- How do they visualize, promote, or contest authority?
- What were the ecological and biopolitical histories of those who contested ideas of
social order and/or power?
- How do they address chaos, and how does the way they address chaos lead to the
formation of inclusive and exclusive spaces?
Possible topics include:

– Exchange of ideas and imageries concerning nature, society, empire, and evangelization;
– (Dis)Connected (art) histories and global studies;
– Microhistories and resistance cases of dissent, disobedience, discord;
– Movements of objects and iconographies, narratives, and ideologies;
– New paradigms of thinking about transmission, translation, and circulation;
– Early capitalism, material culture, climate imperialism;
– Transformation of models and ‘distributed agency’;
– Visions concerning natural changes and crisis, sovereignty, and authority through visual and
literary representations;
– Religious, political, artistic, and literary communities, networks, and agency.

Please make sure to include:

– Presenter’s first and last name

– Current academic affiliation (or “Independent Scholar”) and title
– Email address

– Paper Title (15-word maximum)

– Paper Abstract (200-word maximum)

– Short CV / Résumé (300-word maximum, expected).

To submit a paper proposal, please send a Word document to Maria Vittoria (Mavi) Spissu [mariavittoria.spissuunibo.it] & Marta Albalá Pelegrín [martaacpp.edu].