Call for Papers
PoNJA-GenKon10th Anniversary Conference
“For a New Wave to Come: Post-1945 Japanese Art History Now”
Japan Society, New York City

September 12, 2014, Friday, afternoon workshop
“Reports from the Field: On Archival Documents”
co-organized with Japan Society and NYU’s East Asian Studies
15-20 minute presentations

September 13, 2014, Saturday, afternoon symposium
“New Scholarship” (tentative title)
co-organized with Japan Society
15-minute presentations (student panel, x5 papers)
20-minute presentations (professional panel, x 4 papers)

For both, we would like you to send us below:

1) your proposal, no more than 500 words
2) your CV, no more than 2 pages
3) if you want to attach image(s), no more than 1MB (please learn to scale down)

Send to: mailponjagmail.com
Due: March 20

Please specify CFP A/student, CFP B/professional, or CFP C/workshop. For all of these, you are welcome to submit more than one proposal (two new ideas or two terrific archival documents) or apply for more than one slot (panel and workshop). This is because we want to know what members are working on as much as possible. Although we don’t have specific critical frameworks right now, a theme or two may emerge from a bigger pool of proposals. However, we would also like to have as many members presenting, so you will have only one paper to present during the two days of the program.

General Parameters
Proposed papers should be based on original and critical research within the following parameters:

1) the paper must address the work of art and related media (e.g., visual culture, such as film, design, architecture, manga, etc.) produced after 1945
2) the artist(s) must have been either born in Japan, of Japanese descent, or active in Japan
3) the work must demonstrably relate to aesthetic or socio-political situations in Japan after 1945.

CFP A/student, 9/13
CFP B/professional, 9/13
With this conference, we would like to understand and present the latest scholarship in our field. In other words, proposals should address: “What’s cooking now?” Therefore, we want unpublished materials that will hopefully point to new directions of our field.

CFP C/workshop, 9/12
Recently, archives have emerged as a new subject in art history worldwide. While creating and organizing an archive is a relatively new effort, using one as a researcher/scholar has been a historian’s basic methodology. Although archival discoveries feed into our scholarship, the thrill or surprise of finding something unexpected in an archive barely enters into our discourse. However, that is in no small manner one of the driving forces behind our efforts in constructing history. This workshop is planned as an occasion to share our experiences. As such, the presentation can be less formal than the 9/13 panels.

Just one archival document may provide a glimpse into history, or even a new revelation about history. Conversely, a document may only deepen questions, pointing to new avenues of inquiry. Archival materials are in that sense, “objects” of interest for any historian, in art or otherwise. Part of the “return to objects,” this workshop invites presenters to share their archival findings and demonstrate how they relate to their study of history.

Here, archives can be broadly interpreted. It can be institutional or private, it could be a library’s special collection (such as Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyujo’s “exhibition postcard collection”) or uncataloged museum holdings (such as Matsuzawa Yutaka materials from Art & Project at MoMA). Those materials require active “digging up” from hidden (i.e., unpublished or unpublicized or unlisted) places.

Please direct any question to mailponjagmail.com

Organizing Committee
Co-Chairs: Reiko Tomii and Miwako Tezuka
Honorary chair: Alexandra Munroe
Members: Ming Tiampo, Midori Yoshimoto, and Mika Yoshitake