Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas.
Friday and Saturday, September 16-17, 2011
Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Keynote Speaker, Prof. Lubaina Himid, International artist and curator, University of Central Lancashire
Call for Papers Deadline 15th September 2011
In 1995 Kobena Mercer published the first in his Annotating Art’s Histories edited series, Cosmopolitan Modernisms. In his introduction, Mercer stated that the series would offer:
‘[A] fresh approach [to art history] by showing how a shared history of art and ideas was experienced differently around the globe … In a situation where the aspiration to be all inclusive has become the official watchword of institutional policy, has the very idea of ‘inclusion’ now become a double-edged sword?’
In 2011, as a developing generation of artists, curators, art historians and academics enter the field of visual arts, this symposium at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, seeks to investigate how we are to engage with the challenges of a shared and plural art history that Mercer, and so many others, speak of. What is the meaning of ‘inclusion’ today, sixteen years after Mercer’s publication? The symposium hopes to explore the numerous ways in which issues of race, culture, class, sex and gender have been considered across the various arenas of visual art, and how this emerging generation of those operating in the visual arts engage with the existing challenges of the past, present and future.
Otherwise Engaged is a one-day symposium that invites postgraduate students to submit proposals that consider the challenges of intervention, integration, separatism, confrontation, assimilation, ghettoisation and accommodation. How have marginalised spaces and mainstream institutions engaged with these challenges? We are interested in exploring the processes, relationships and pluralities of the various sites of the marginal and the mainstream. What are the experiences and examples of specific interventions, theoretical strategic models, and tactical approaches from contemporary art practice and writing, culture, education and curating?
Otherwise Engaged is an interdisciplinary event that crosshatches experiences, perspectives and analyses from art history, fine art, cultural studies, museum and curatorial studies, feminist studies, gender studies, sociology and post/colonial studies, although papers from other disciplines are also welcome. While the symposium is situated in contemporary Britain and the complexities of representation and identity internal to Britain, we strongly encourage the exploration of relationships with other sites, both geographically and generationally.
We invite abstracts of a maximum length of 300 words by 15 September 2011 (20 minute papers). You will receive confirmation of acceptance of the proposed presentation by October 1, 2011. You will need to submit your proposal together with a completed form available from the conference organisers – contact espencermills@yahoo.com.
http://www.aaastudies.org/2012/call/
Washington, DC April 11-14, 2012
Submissions due by Saturday, October 1, 2010
EXPANDING THE POLITICAL: POWER, POETICS, PRACTICES
The theme, “Expanding the Political: Power, Poetics, Practices,” refers to the location of the meetings in Washington, DC, the seat of politics and power in the United States. Asian Americans play an increasing role in U.S. and international politics in their roles as voters, politicians, and policy makers. At the same time, we wish to highlight the everyday and informal political practices of Asians in America as they use art, academics, and activism to engage—and change—the world around them. We invite submissions that address formal politics and informal politics in their multiple dimensions.
We welcome presentations that explore traditional conceptions of “politics” and political action on topics such as electoral politics, Asian Americans in the government, activism and social movements, and political interests and issues. Do Asian Americans constitute a political block (or have they ever)? How can we interpret the increasing presence of Asian American Republican politicians? Is “Asian America” a useful political category? Simultaneously, we hope the conference will expand our conception of the political to other areas including, but not limited to, the politics of: commemoration and memorialization; war and peace; dynamics within/across/outside Asian American communities, communities of color, and multiracial Asians; immigration, refugee status, citizenship, and national belonging; the relationship between Pacific Island Studies and Asian American Studies; Asian settler colonialism; empire and race. What generative political work emerges in the conversation between academics, activists, and artists? How do Asian Americans contend with the politics of the everyday? The overarching emphasis for this meeting is the analysis of power in its various manifestations in Asian American lives.
We encourage submissions representing all the disciplines covered in Asian American Studies and from individuals engaged in political work, broadly speaking, outside the academy, including politicians, artists and activists. We especially encourage panels incorporating a range of institutional and extra-institutional locations, from students to senior scholars, and from painters to policy makers. Complete panel submissions (with a minimum of three papers and a maximum of four, with a moderator) that attend to the conference theme and reflect this heterogeneity will be given priority, but we will consider individual submissions as well.
In addition to panels, workshops, and roundtables, this year we introduce an inaugural invitation for chaired WORKING PAPER sessions dedicated specifically to this year’s conference theme. For these sessions, panelists will submit longer papers (15-25 pages) prior to the conference, and sessions will be devoted to intensive commentary and discussion on a set of 2-3 papers with a shared theme. A faculty expert on the theme will chair each session and deliver detailed feedback to each author. This format will foster a deeper scholarly exchange and engagement, and showcase the common intellectual threads that run through our diverse research projects. We encourage scholars from various ranks to submit their papers to the Working Paper sessions.
We accept electronic submissions. Paper and panel applicants must be members of the Association for Asian American Studies and all presenters must register and submit their conference fee to be included in the printed conference program. Please check the “WORKING PAPERS” box if you would like your paper or panel submission to be considered for the Working Papers chaired sessions. Relevant information, including the membership form and submissions guidelines, is available at the Association for Asian American Studies Web site at http://www.aaastudies.org/forms
We look forward to seeing you at the 2012 Association for Asian American Studies conference in Washington, DC!
Committee Co-Chairs,
Sylvia Chong and Nitasha Sharma
*All paper and panel applicants must be members of AAAS in order to submit conference proposals. AAAS membership number or confirmation of membership from JHUP will be required with all proposals.
**AV equipment will be available on request but on a limited, first-come-first-served basis due to budget restrictions. Please make your requests when sending in your proposals.
THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Kress Foundation Department of Art History
Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor in Art History
(Open specialization)
Nominations and applications are invited for this endowed chair. The Murphy Professor will join a large and diversified department with an established PhD program and rich undergraduate curriculum. The University of Kansas, with more than 27,000 students and 1,500 faculty on the Lawrence campus, is the major educational and research institution in the state. The university has a full complement of 15 art and architectural historians in Asian and Western art. Endowments support active visiting lecturer programs, teaching initiatives, and research travel for faculty and doctoral candidates. The department is located in the Spencer Museum of Art, the collections and exhibitions of which provide a foundation for introductory and graduate course work. The Murphy Library of Art and Architecture, with holdings of over 170,000 volumes, and a large visual resources collection offer essential support of research and instruction.
The Murphy Professor will exercise leadership in research, teach undergraduate and graduate courses, and supervise theses and dissertations. S/he is expected to promote interaction among scholars in related fields and to provide service to the department, the university and the profession. The position will be awarded with tenure and is endowed with substantial research support; a reduced teaching load is expected to yield substantial and continuing research productivity.
The search is open to any art historical specialization. Candidates should have a distinguished international reputation for research and publication in their area of specialization. They should be significantly engaged in other professional activities and provide evidence of outstanding teaching abilities. It is expected that candidates should be tenured professors or have equivalent credentials. Women, minorities, and candidates who will contribute to the climate of diversity in the university, including a diversity of scholarly approaches, are especially encouraged to apply.
The University of Kansas is especially interested in hiring faculty members who can contribute to four key campus-wide strategic initiatives: (1) Sustaining the Planet, Powering the World; (2) Promoting Well-Being, Finding Cures; (3) Harnessing Information, Multiplying Knowledge; and (4) Building Communities, Expanding Opportunities. See http://www.provost.ku.edu/planning/themes/ for more information.
Salary: Commensurate with experience; substantial research support.
Starting Date: expected to begin as early as 18 August 2012
First consideration will be given to completed applications received by October 17, 2011, and will continue until the position is filled.
Go to https://jobs.ku.edu, search for position 00003119, and complete the application. Upload cover letter, CV, and names and contact information for three references. Nominations and inquiries should be addressed to Prof. Linda Stone-Ferrier, Chair, Murphy Search Committee, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, Spencer Museum of Art #209, University of Kansas, 1301 Mississippi Street, Lawrence, KS 66045. Email: LSF@ku.edu. EO/AA Employer.
Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1890-1940
September 9 and 10, 2011
http://www.udel.edu/mediamorphosis/
This two–day symposium will provide a forum for literary scholars, historians, media historians, and art historians to share works–in–progress on the transformations of print media and transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century. The symposium will feature work that probes artificial literary and art historical boundaries, challenges national divisions and the divide between nineteenth– and twentieth–century print culture studies, and links texts and writers across different genres or sectors of the print media of the period. There will be ample time for open discussion; there will be no concurrent panels. Presentations will engage substantially with the following areas of common interest:
• advancing our understanding of print culture’s role in the period’s movements for racial, class, and gender equality;
• identifying and theorizing the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural (transatlantic, transnational) writing, reading, and publishing;
• bringing the theories and methods of material culture studies to bear on the analysis of print artifacts as “objects” or “things”;
• grasping the increasing textual hybridity of the period’s print artifacts, by examining such phenomena as the interactions between illustration and text and the complex collage effects created by advances and experiments in typography and image reproduction;
• developing our knowledge of Anglo-American links, interactions, and networks among writers, publishers, editors, agents, and other participants in the period’s print culture;
• analyzing and theorizing the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship and the literary, including the role of the nascent academic field of English, in Britain, the United States, and/or the colonies/commonwealth.
This symposium is hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and supported by: the Center for Material Culture Studies, the Departments of Black American Studies, English, and Women’s Studies, the University of Delaware Library, the Institute for Global Studies, the University Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE), and the Delaware Humanities Forum.
Detailed information on 15,000+ African-American emigrants to Liberia
can be found at the website: www.liberianrepatriates.com. While access
to the site is free of charge, news users are required to register.
The database includes information on birth year (where available),
town/country of origin, state of origin (including “Indian
Territories”), denominational affiliation, family relations among
emigrants, destination in Liberia, ships on which they travelled, and
year of emigration.
The many features of the site can be best experienced by searching for
“Hilary Teage” or “John Brown Russwurm,” for example. Their pages
include genealogical links and maps showing locations where they
lived, as well as other information and images. Over time, similarly
detailed information will be added for as many persons in the database
as possible.
Given its interactive features, www.liberianrepatriates.com offers
intriguing possibilities as a teaching tool. If incorporated into
historical methods seminars or state history courses, it would enable
students to examine national (and even global) trends at a local
level. In so doing, it would help help them concretize the life
choices faced by historical actors within the constrains of their
place and time. History faculty interested in incorporating the site
into courses should address inquiries to cpburrowes@mac.com.
Ireland, America and the Worlds of Mathew Carey
Philadelphia
27-29 October 2011
Cosponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies,
The Program in Early American Economy and Society,
The Library Company of Philadelphia, and
The University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
This first part of a trans-Atlantic conference will feature
presentations and discussion about printer and editor of influential
periodicals, on Mathew Carey (1760-1839). By the mid-1790s, he had
transformed himself from printer to publisher, from artisan to
manufacturer, and into one of the early republic’s foremost political
economists. Carey’s identity as an Irish-American and a Catholic, and
his contributions to the economy and politics are inseparable from the
trans-Atlantic print culture of the early national era. This conference
is free and open to everyone interested in its themes. To review the
program and read pre-circulated papers for this conference, which will
be posted in late September, please register electronically at:
http://www.librarycompany.org/careyconference/
The second part of this trans-Atlantic conference will be
held at Trinity College Dublin, on November 17-19, 2011. It will hosted
by the Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies and Trinity
College Dublin, and the Trinity Long Room Hub in association with the
National Library of Ireland, University College Dublin, and the
University of Aberdeen. For further information please contact Johanna
Archbold at: johanna.archbold@tcd.ie
Atlantic Slave Database Network.
The Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network (ASDN) project is intended to provide a platform for researchers of African slaves in the Atlantic World to upload, analyze, visualize, and utilize data they have collected, and to link it to other datasets, which together will complement each other in such a way as to create a much richer resource than the individual datasets alone. There is a significant need for such a collaborative research site about Atlantic slavery.
“Textile Trades and Consumption in the Indian Ocean World, from Early
Times to the Present”
Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC)
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
2-4 November 2012
Co-Organisers: Gwyn Campbell (IOWC, McGill University), Sarah Fee (Royal
Ontario Museum), and Pedro Machado (Indiana University)
This multi-disciplinary international conference aims to bring together
scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to share findings,
methodologies and theoretical perspectives on cloth’s critical role in
driving exchanges in the Indian Ocean World from early times to the present
day.
Oceans have emerged as promising intellectual frameworks for reinterpreting
past and present spatial and temporal constructs. The Indian Ocean World
(IOW) in particular has recently attracted academic attention as a space of
movement and inter-relation that transcends conventional paradigms centring
on the nation state, regional studies, and European empires. Stretching from
East Africa through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to China, the
IOW forms a unique macro-region where the monsoon regime of winds and
currents largely moulded production and exchange. Indeed, the IOW emerged
during the first millennium CE as arguably the first “global” economy,
defined as a sophisticated and durable system of long-distance exchange.
There is further debate as to the impact on the IOW trading structure of
Europeans from the sixteenth century, the international economy of the
nineteenth century, European colonialism and its aftermath, and modern
globalisation.
Central to these debates is the role of textiles. For centuries, cloths of
various origins, fibres, colours and patterns have been carried along coasts
and across vast distances to communities that demanded certain types in
accordance with their specific cultural, social and political universes.
Rather than take a particular fibre, ‘country’ or European company as the
unit of study, this conference aims to explore the broader cross-currents of
textile flows in the IOW. It seeks to explore, in particular, structures of
trade, distribution, demand, marketing and consumption – in all of which
finance and credit played vital roles. It also strives to understand local
consumer demand as a vital force in shaping the economic, political, social,
and artistic history in both producer and consumer communities. Emerging
from the wider scholarship of culturally inflected material histories of the
movement and exchange of commodities, the study of textile consumption and
the logics of consumer tastes, as socially and culturally embedded
processes, can offer compelling insight into how societies, communities and
people create and maintain identities through strategies of self-fashioning,
and thereby shape the world around them. Moreover, it is when studied within
the same analytical frame as the production, distribution and marketing of
textiles that consumption can contribute most profoundly to an understanding
of the dynamics of the worlds of the Indian Ocean stretching from Africa to
East Asia.
This multi-disciplinary international conference invites paper proposals
that examine any aspect of the trade, exchange and consumption of textiles in
the Indian Ocean world from early times to the present day. We particularly
welcome papers that explore networks and structures of:
– local finance and credit
– distribution and marketing
– demand and consumption
and within these the significance of (i) gender and age; and (ii) religious
practice and ideology (including the ritual, political and social uses and
meanings attached to imported cloth)
Dates and Registration:
• Deadline for submission of abstracts (title; 1-2 paragraphs): 30
September 2011.
• The review process will be completed by 1st November 2001.
• Papers selected for the conference must be submitted no later than
1st September 2012.
• The registration fee is $175 US ($75 US for students) payable by
1st September 2012.
• The late registration fee (after 1st September 2012) is $200 US and $100
US for students
Kindly contact Sarah Fee <sarahf@rom.on.ca> or Pedro Machado
<pmachado@indiana.edu> with proposals (or with any queries).
African Music in the 21st Century – An Iconic Turn?
An International Symposium Celebrating the 21st Anniversary of the African Music Archives Mainz (AMA)
To be held at: Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. June 13th – 16th 2012
Convenors: Hauke Dorsch, Matthias Krings
Since the advent of the 21st century and the proliferation of digital media a shift in the consumption and marketing of music in a number of African countries occurred: Videos gained an increasing importance. Today, Video-CDs and DVDs are widely sold in African cities, bars and restaurants show music clips and music casting shows on TV, music videos are available online through sites like youtube, but also via homepages and blogs devoted to artists, genres, and (at least ideally) music of the entire continent.
Due to this online availability and easy circulation of discs the visual aspects of music, especially dance styles, clothing fashions, and coiffure spread more easily and rapidly than ever before between different African countries and between African and its Diaspora. For example, migrants stay up to date with regards to musical and fashion trends in their respective countries of origin thanks to these videos. Prior to the mediatisation of African music through visual technologies, dance styles could only be transmitted through the presence of human bodies. Due to the proliferation of videos African dance and music travel trans-nationally on South-South and South-North axes at an accelerated speed.
So far, the pictorial turn (Mitchell) or iconic turn (Boehm) in Cultural Studies informed only few studies on African music. Consequently, the change following the digitisation and video-isation of the production and dissemination of African music is still under-researched. Taking music videos as its vantage point, this symposium will look at visual aspects of the performance and analysis of music more generally.
We invite young researchers and established scholars to present papers on the different ways music in Africa (and beyond) is interpreted, illustrated, translated or extended in its meaning by visual representations. These may refer to the analysis of individual videos, the comparison of a number of videos, or genres, changing trends of video aesthetics, the convergence of visual and aesthetic trends from elsewhere – in Africa and beyond (i.e. MTV, Bollywood, etc.). Furthermore, papers on the transformation (or even emergence) of music industries in Africa due to the impact of the visual are welcome. How are music videos produced on the ground? Who are the agents of the iconic turn in African music? How does music television support the iconic turn in African music? Finally, we invite papers on other aspects of the visual in music, performance (i.e. looking at costumes, stage shows, stage lighting, etc.), on festivals and of course dance.
The symposium will celebrate the African Music Archives’ 21st anniversary. The AMA hosts Germany’s largest collection of recordings of African popular music. It includes roughly 10.000 recordings, from shellac records of the 1950s, to vinyl discs and singles from the 1960s to the 1990s, to music cassettes of the 1980s and 90s, to recent CDs, VideoCDs and DVDs.
The symposium will be hosted by the African Music Archives, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. It will take place on campus from June 13th to 16th. Organisers: Dr. Hauke Dorsch, Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
Please submit your proposal no later than Sept., 15th 2011 and your full paper no later than May, 23rd 2012 to Hauke Dorsch dorschh@uni-mainz.de.
ACRAH 