AAH Session on Nations, Identities and Art Histories in Central Europe
AAH2015 Annual Conference at the University of East Anglia Sainsbury Institute

Session Convenors:
Klara Kemp-Welch, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, klara.kemp-welchcourtauld.ac.uk
Beata Hock, University of Leipzig, beata.hockuni-leipzig.de

The collapse of Imperial and Soviet empires after the Great War and the Cold War saw the (re-)formation of individual nation states and the production of new cultural identities. These changes brought new opportunities for artists and art historians across Central Europe and beyond, but also new challenges. This session invites participants to explore how art, art history, and criticism in Central Europe have engaged with shifting approaches to nation and identity (embracing considerations such as class, ethnicity, gender, religion) across the modern and the contemporary.
The session invites papers that consider: the critical framing of domestic or national artistic developments in relation to local concerns; Central European art in an international framework; histories of minority communities; Central European historiography; the construction of identity through print media and popular culture. What do 'minor' art histories reveal about mainstream ones, and vice-versa? To what extent are the processes observable in national and international art and art history between the wars comparable to the tensions between the local and global that have come to the forefront since the end of the Cold War? In view of the present violence in the Ukraine, the resurgence of nationalisms across Europe in the post-Cold War period, and the alarming political polarisation in many European countries today, this session invites participants to critically reconsider ideas of nation and identity in the region from a range of art historical perspectives.

Paper proposals, to be sent to the session convenor in accordance with proposal guidelines. Paper proposal deadline: 10 November 2014

See more at: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2015/session2