Call For Papers
“Threads of Circulation”

Ohio State University, Department of History of Art
Proposals due: January 17, 2014 (extended deadline)

This conference seeks papers that address and examine the shifting trajectories and connected histories of individual objects and ideologies across time and space. Over the last decade, there has been increased interest in network culture in ancient cultures, the early modern world, and postmodern globalization. This conference will focus on the ways in which material culture – singular artworks, objects, and technologies – reveals what Sanjay Subrahmanyam proposes as “the at times fragile threads that connect the globe.” In paying particular attention to perhaps paradoxical heterogeneity and following the “fragile threads” of memory, history, and culture, this conference confronts and questions historical and cultural transmission across time and space.

In the spirit of connectivity, multiplicity, and circulation, we seek papers from a number of disciplines – art, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, experimental film and media, literature, philosophy, science and technology, visual culture – and from a range of historical periods.

Keynote speaker: Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art, Smith College. Her research addresses both indigenous visual culture in colonial Latin America and trans-Pacific trade in the early modern period. She has published on indigenous maps and manuscripts, hybridity in colonial visual culture and the trade between China and Mexico.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
borderland theory
center-periphery
copy culture and forgeries
correspondence art
cross-cultural and/or transhistorical appropriation
cultural rituals – art as agency/living presence
diasporas, “glocality,” and/or repatriation
digital humanities and recreating the past
early modern transatlanticism
eastern philosophy in western contexts/western philosophy in eastern contexts
expanded cinema, film in art galleries
experimental ethnography
hybridized visual and material cultures
imitation of foreign works for trade
language and translation
media archaeology
necropolitics and haunting
reenactment, reperformance
precolonial and postcolonial societies
prints, manuscripts, and publishing
private media in public spaces
spolia and propaganda
subaltern studies
value and exchange – auctions, economics, regulation, trade

Please submit 350-word proposals and a resume to OSUcirculation2014gmail.com by January 17, 2014.