Month: October 2020

JOB: Assistant Professor of African American Art and Art History

The Department of African American Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of African American Studies specializing in Art and Art History.

We are searching for an innovative junior scholar with exceptional promise. The successful candidate will concentrate on African American art and art history and/or visual culture with varied emphases on art practices, theories, historiographies, digital humanities, and/or social movements. Scholars whose work engages African diasporic, intersectional Black Feminist, and Black Queer and Black Trans Studies are especially encouraged to apply, as are those scholars whose research also engages antiblackness, the Movement for Black Lives, structural racism, state surveillance and violence, and the carceral state.

The new hire will teach two courses per semester, including departmental surveys, specialized upper-level undergraduate seminars, and eventually graduate courses as the department expands to offer a Ph.D. in 2022. The new hire will also have the ability to cross-list courses with the Art History Department and also participate in advising graduate and undergraduate students.

The successful candidate will also have the opportunity to work in a diverse city hosting a rich array of cultural institutions. Atlanta is home to the APEX Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Hammonds House Museum, and the Trevor Arnett Art Gallery at Clark-Atlanta University, and Emory University features the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the African American Collection at the Rose Library, and the Arts and Social Justice Fellows Program.

Applicants should submit a cover letter (including discussion of the candidate’s research and teaching interests); CV; a statement about the applicant’s experience mentoring students from diverse backgrounds; and three letters of reference. Application deadline: December 15, 2020. Ph.D. is required by the time of appointment.

For any questions about the position or the application process, please contact the search committee chair kali.gross@emory.edu. All materials to be submitted via https://apply.interfolio.com/79715.

Emory University is an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer. Women, minorities, people with disabilities and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply.

CFP: Discovery @ Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference

DISCOVERY

The 42nd Annual Virtual Conference
Nineteenth Century Studies Association
March 11-13, 2021
Proposal Deadline: October 31, 2020

Website: ncsaweb.net/current-conference-2021-cfp/

NCSA welcomes proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and special sessions that explore our theme of “Discovery” in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Scholars are invited to interrogate the trope of “discovery” by questioning the term’s ideological and colonial implications. Why was the concept of “discovery” so appealing in the nineteenth century, and what does its popularity tell us about the people and social structures that were so invested in it? Papers might also consider indigenous perspectives that challenge ideas of western “discovery” and settler colonialism, new voices that theorize and critique nineteenth-century “discoveries,” intellectual exchange between cultures, and other methods of unmasking narratives of exploration and “discovery.”

As an interdisciplinary organization, we particularly seek papers by scholars working in art/architecture/visual studies, cultural studies, economics, gender and sexuality, history (including history of the book), language and literature, law and politics, musicology, philosophy, and science (and the history of science). In light of the many changes in pedagogy, research, and the exchange of ideas we have all experienced this past year, we particularly welcome papers, panels, or roundtable topics that address discoveries in the use of technology for nineteenth-century studies and teaching.

Papers might discuss recovering forgotten manuscripts, or discovering new ways of thinking about aesthetic and historical periods. Scholars might explore not only the physical recovery of the past (archeology, geology), but also intellectual recovery as old ideas become new (evolution, neoclassicism, socialism, spiritualism). Papers might discuss publicizing discoveries (periodicals, lectures), exhibiting discoveries (museums, world’s fairs, exhibitions), or redressing the legacy of nineteenth-century practices (decolonization of museum collections and the repatriation of colonial-era artifacts). Other topics might include rediscovering and revisiting the period itself: teaching the nineteenth century, editing primary texts, and working toward diversity and social justice in the humanities. For more details, visit: ncsaweb.net/current-conference-2021-cfp/

CFP: Afro Gothic

Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts
Call for Papers
For Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts, we seek work that explores the Afro-Gothic as an aesthetic and as a means of working through the trauma of colonial slavery. Although the Gothic genre is widely discussed as a purely European literary tradition, the gothic manifests as a global phenomenon. Every culture possesses its own ghost stories, monster tales, or myths about creatures with supernatural powers. This project examines how the tropes of the gothic—with its constructions of the monstrous, the villainous, the mad and the haunted—take on wholly different valences when they are studied within the contexts of blackness, particularly under the modern colonial project. In our view, one important characteristic of the Afro-Gothic that distinguishes it from its European counterpart is its rootedness in lived black experiences. The Afro-Gothic often addresses the everydayness of black horror in ways that attest to the repetitive violence against black bodies and the relentless haunting of traumatic pasts.

We seek work that explores Afro-Gothic sensibilities in film, fiction, performance, and the visual arts. What we might call Afro-Gothic narratives have emerged lately in popular works by Jordan Peele (Get Out and Candyman), in the series Tales from the Hood (1995/2018) and Lovecraft Country (2020), Childish Gambino’s This is America, and Kara Walker’s antebellum silhouettes, to name just a few. We are interested in works that expand and explode current generic definitions of the Gothic and highlight the ways in which contemporary black artists are reckoning with aesthetics. In what ways does the Afro-Gothic serve to frame our understanding of the contemporary moment through a dark prism of organized terror?

Possible topics to explore might include (but are certainly not limited to):
• colonial hauntings – living among ghosts and the walking dead
• the plight of the hunted and state-sanctioned violence
• dark tourism and haunted houses
• maritime Afro-Gothic – nautical narratives
• medical experimentation and the trope of the mad scientist
• miscegenation, hybridity, and the bodily mash-up
• conjuring, the witch doctor and practitioners of the dark arts
• urban decay and environmentalism – climate crisis, toxicities, eco-gothic and natural disasters
• Afro-Gothic and new technologies, soundscapes, surveillance, cyber-haunting, ghost in
the machine
• menageries of the grotesque and public display of monstrosity

• cannibalization and ‘Eating the Other’
• sexual exploitation and gendered violence
• bondage, dungeons, incarcerations, and the restricted body

Essays must be written in English, but we encourage international submissions on all African Diasporic Afro-Gothic topics. Accepted works will be included in our proposal for a special issue of an online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to black studies and aesthetics.

Please submit an abstract (300 words) along with a brief bio to afrogothiccfp@gmail.com.

The deadline for submissions is November 30, 2020.

Tashima Thomas, Editor Pratt Institute
Sybil Newton Cooksey, Editor New York University