Category: call for papers

CFP: Photography Network Virtual Symposium

Photography’s Frameworks
Photography Network Virtual Symposium
October 12–14, 2023

Photography Network’s third annual symposium will be held virtually and hosted jointly with the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. In honor of the UWC’s New Archival Visions Programme—an initiative to activate the university’s archival holdings through research, fellowships, and curatorial projects—this symposium considers the subject of frameworks in the study of photography.

In recent years, “framing” and “reframing” have become buzzwords for describing new approaches to the study of photography, including the 2018 volume Photography Reframed: New Visions in Photographic Culture, the ReFrame project at the Harvard Art Museums launched in 2021, and the ongoing archival initiative, “Framing the Field: Photography’s Histories in American Institutions.” Projects like the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2023 Field Guide to Photography and Media exhibition and catalogue and the recent Vision & Justice initiative encourage reflection on how histories of photography have been constructed and how certain interventions can be made to create a more equitable field moving forward. Such interventions might also draw on “reframing” projects from the global south that interrogate colonial and metropolitan categories and temporal schemas in the history of global photography, such as the 2020 Kronos special issue on “Other Lives of the Image” and the 2019 publication Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History.

This symposium aims to gather these types of initiatives into one space for shared reflection and future collaboration. Using the construction of a “framework” in reference to both conceptual schema and physical structures, we ask how larger patterns of social, ideological, material, economic, and environmental forces have shaped and continue to shape photographs as objects in circulation and in archival repositories. How have past theoretical, methodological, and institutional frameworks structured, and in many instances limited, the field? What work have these frames performed in the creation and interpretation of photographs and their histories? Which frameworks have been overlooked, and what types of interventions can make the most impactful changes?

While papers should seek to address these questions, our definition of “framework” is capacious and inclusive. Proposals might therefore consider critical approaches to frameworks that include:

• Archival: private art collections, public collections (schools, universities, museums, government agencies), informal private holdings, artist collectives, and activist archives (including national liberation, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid collections)
• Colonial, postcolonial and decolonial: state-sponsored photography, anthropological studies, tourist photography, humanitarian photography, documentary discourses
• Cultural: linguistic, religious, or ethnic practices and beliefs
• Dysfunctional: decay or erasure of contexts, allowing for slippage, appropriation, and reinterpretation of photography
• Ethical: displaying, discussing, and teaching certain images; scientific, anthropological, and legal rationales

Submission Information

Photography Network invites proposals across disciplines and a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographic and thematic diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their careers are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the conference will be in English.

The symposium organizers encourage a variety of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 20-minute papers, we also seek alternative-format presentations (e.g., workshops and roundtables). We will also host a Lightning Round for new research on any topic from students, curators, academics, and practitioners. Applicants may submit up to 2 proposals, provided that one is in an alternative format; you are welcome to apply only to the Lightning Round. Sessions will be organized around accepted submissions, rather than prescribed themes.

To be considered for a panel or alternative-format presentation, please prepare:
(1) a 250-word abstract with a clear indication of format, and
(2) a three-page resume or CV.

To be considered only for the Lightning Round, please prepare:
(1) a 100-word abstract clearly labeled as a Lightning Round proposal and
(2) a three-page resume or CV.

All files should be named “[LAST NAME]–CV” or “[LAST NAME]–ABSTRACT.”

Email completed materials by June 15 to the Photography Network Symposium organizing committee: Katherine Bussard, Patricia Hayes, Josie Johnson, Caroline Riley, and Jessica Stark at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com.

Notifications of accepted proposals will be emailed by July 19. The schedule will be announced by August 1 and the symposium will be held October 12–14, 2023.

Note: All are welcome to apply. Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. We have a sliding scale membership: $20 (student/unaffiliated), $40 (Affiliated), or $100 (Senior). We also have free need-based memberships. Please visit the Photography Network’s membership page (www.photographynetwork.net/memberregistration) for more information on how to join.

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Call for Proposals: Race in Design History, An Anthology (deadline Mar. 15, 2023)

Race in Design History: An Anthology

edited by Kristina Wilson, Professor of Art History, Clark University and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Curator of Architecture and Design, National Museum of African American History and Culture

How has race shaped the objects of our designed world? We invite contributors to submit to an edited volume that will focus on the ways design and design histories have engaged ideas about race, whether implicitly or explicitly. Race is a contested category with shifting meanings over time, and perceptions about race influence design history in multiple ways: how objects are designed; how designers imagine their ideal consumer; how designs are put into production and how those designs are marketed. Ultimately, race has an impact on the scope and structure of the residual design archive that historians are left sifting through. This edited volume welcomes contributions in the form of close readings of design objects as well as critical interrogations about design through the lenses of practice, pedagogy, curation, and historiography.

Recent work in design history has emphasized the importance of decolonizing the predominantly Western and Northern biases of the modernist canon. This anthology aims to contribute to that work, and embraces the goals of critical race studies of design, with an investigation of the role of race in all aspects of design history. It welcomes scholarship that looks at under-valued objects of design, scholarship that expands our understanding of what it means to have a career as a designer, and scholarship that illuminates design history in new contexts. We seek narratives of design history that interrogate our assumptions about what is knowable in the past.

We invite contributions on decorative objects, interiors, fashion, architecture, and graphic design, among others, 1800 to the present, global in scope. Proposals should be made for one or more of the following types of essays:

1) Scholarly essays of 3,500-4,000 words: these might be case studies that investigate a movement, a designer, a specific exhibition, or production materials and processes; should engage historical context and demonstrate methodological innovation.

2) Short essays of 1250-1500 words: close readings of objects, keywords, or terms that give the reader an immersive encounter; the style of writing in these essays could be more experimental, and these short pieces will complement the larger contextual discussions offered in the longer essays;

3) Questions of practice essays of 3,000 words: essays that address aspects of museum practice, teaching and pedagogical practice, designers’ practice.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a CV to:

KrWilson@clarku.edu and WilkinsonM@si.edu with “Race in Design History” in the subject line by the deadline of March 15, 2023. Contributors will be notified by mid-April, and drafts will be due September 15, 2023.

CFP: “Questionnaire: The Animacy of Objects” in American Art Journal

Call for Submissions: “Questionnaire: The Animacy of Objects”
Deadline: August 15, 2023
American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, seeks to publish papers demonstrating cultural perspectives that recognize objects as animate beings. Authors are invited to submit brief essays in reply to this question, posed by co-organizer heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation): How does acknowledging and engaging with objects as animate beings—recognizing them as relatives and respecting that they carry a form of peoplehood—expose the knowledge they hold and carry, knowledge that is otherwise invisible and unrecognized?
Contributors are encouraged to interrogate how the Western discipline of art history, and particularly the focus of this journal—the role played by art and related visual culture in the ongoing transnational and transcultural formation of “America” as a contested geography, identity, and idea—would benefit from these perspectives. Toward this goal, essays are welcome from scholars who are working both within and beyond North American topics, as well as those coming from other disciplines and fields, including artists, art historians, linguists, cultural specialists, and others working on philosophical questions related to the animacy of objects. Diverse orthographies are welcome and will be accommodated whenever possible. Please click here for more information.
The journal’s standard guidelines on originality, quality, and submission format apply; click here for details. Please submit manuscripts of 1,500–2,000 words (including notes) with 1–4 images, to AmericanArtJournal@si.edu by August 15, 2023. Selected articles will be workshopped with authors, rigorously edited and fact-checked, and published in American Art in 2024. Inquiries are welcome.

CFP: Full Bleed journal

www.full-bleed.org/submit

Full Bleed, an annual journal exploring the intersection of the visual and literary arts, seeks submissions for its sixth issue, forthcoming in Spring 2023.

We publish criticism, belle lettres, visual art, illustration, poetry, fiction, and graphic essays. We are always happy to feature collaborations between writers and artists; ekphrastic creations; and groundbreaking critical essays.

For Issue Six, we are especially interested in submissions on the theme of materials—their unique aesthetic qualities, social histories, means of production, environmental costs, and layered meanings. Send us work that contemplates the virtues, potential, or politics of ink, paper, oil paint, dye, textiles, charcoal, lead, soil, wood, etc.

This call is open to all with the exception of current students at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), which publishes Full Bleed.

All submissions should be sent between September 1, 2022 and January 15, 2023. Those interested in first sharing essay proposals may do so by November 15 (also through our Submittable page). Note that acceptance of proposals does not guarantee publication in the issue. Also, you need not have sent a proposal to submit completed work.

Final selections for the issue will be made by the journal’s editor and board members in close consultation with participants in Publishing Culture, an upper-level, spring-semester course at MICA. Each contributor will receive a modest honorarium and a complimentary copy of the issue.

For more details, please visit:
www.full-bleed.org/submit

We are excited to review your work and thank you in advance for sharing it with Full Bleed.

CFP: US Art and Critical Whiteness Studies at CAA 2023

U.S. Art and Critical Whiteness Studies: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Session will present: In-Person

James W. Denison
Email Address(s): jwden@umich.edu

More than fifteen years have passed since the publication of Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, which was widely celebrated for bringing a promising new category of analysis, critical whiteness studies, into the discipline of U.S. art history. However, despite its potential to speak to issues of social stratification and power at the core of the history and historiography of U.S. art, critical whiteness studies has yet to become a regular component of the analytical toolbox employed by scholars of American art. Recent years have seen a spate of scholarship focused on white supremacism and eugenics in U.S. art, but incorporation of the insights of the broader field of whiteness studies, especially regarding more everyday forms of racial bias and self-understanding, remains infrequent and haphazard. How have American artists of various backgrounds visually articulated “whiteness”, and how can we historicize such articulations? How have artists propelled or stymied prejudice through their representations of “white” people? How has whiteness affected how artists represent racialized people, places, and objects? How has it intersected with other forms of identity, including ethnic, gender, and class identities? Finally, what has kept critical whiteness studies from entering the mainstream in art history, a field so long dominated by white artists and scholars? This session seeks to analyze and address these and related questions, inviting papers that examine the past and future of whiteness as a subject of analysis in American art studies and/or offer new directions for such investigation.

Potential topics for papers might include:
·         The history and future of critical race art history
·         Whiteness and nationalism in the history of American art history
·         Whiteness, the art world, and elitism/class concerns
·         Relationships between critical whiteness studies and other forms of critical race studies within art history
·         The invisibility of whiteness/the visualization of whiteness
·         Whiteness and ethnicity/historicizing whiteness
·         Whiteness and gender, including masculinity, femininity, and feminism

·         Whiteness and modernist primitivism

CFP: Histories of People of Color @ Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference

The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association is currently collecting papers for potential inclusion in their 2023 conference, to be held at the end of March in Sacramento, CA.  We are seeking papers to include in a panel proposal for the conference and would love to hear from those interested in participating. The working description for the panel is described below.  We welcome scholars from any discipline interested in participating in our panel to submit an abstract and one page CV no later than August 25th.  Abstracts and CVs can be emailed directly to  ahazar1@saic.edu andwcastenell@wlu.edu.  If the panel is chosen, panelists will need to be current members of NCSA by the time of the conference.

Working Panel Description:
Working Title: The Why of History: Rethinking Histories of People of Color Within Structures of Power in the Long 19th-Century US
The history of BIPOC people and other marginalized groups in the US is one that has been overlooked and continuously rewritten to preserve a narrative that privileges the majority population, and specifically those within structures of power.  These narratives have been put forward as the foundation of the history of many of the major events of the long 19th century, including the institution and effects of slavery, the Civil War, and westward expansion, among other histories. Throughout this history, the role and treatment of marginalized groups has been framed in a way that is at best heavily mediated, and is often inaccurate.  Although significant steps have been taken in recent years to rectify these oversights and reframe trends of history and culture that have formed our understanding of events and the mechanisms that surround them, it is still an area that requires investigation.  Doing this helps us to better understand how national narratives and histories have shaped the perception of past events and their impact on marginalized people by bringing to light new considerations that resituate these overlooked and misunderstood histories in the historical narrative.  This panel will interrogate the ways in which we have understood and continue to understand the history of BIPOC people and other marginalized groups in the US in the long 19th century, and the way that cultural artifacts including but not limited to images, literature, and other archival documents have mediated that understanding.

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference 2023

Remaking the Past
44th Annual Conference
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Sacramento, California
March 30 – April 1, 2023

Sacramento, host city for NCSA’s 2023 conference, lends itself to exploring issues of revivals and re-creations of the past. Sacramento’s nineteenth-century history encompassed California’s Gold Rush, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous populations, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the building of a capital city that became a stage for the reinventions–productive and problematic–of the past so central to the nineteenth century. Appropriately, Sacramento’s conference will explore the nineteenth century’s almost constant desire to re-envision and measure itself against the past, as well as our own responsibility as scholars to reassess the histories we tell about this era, using current critical approaches, concerns, and theories.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We seek perspectives into the wide range of nineteenth-century reinterpretations of the past and their consequences. We invite papers and panels covering and uncovering political history, social history, history of science, literature, visual and performing arts, and popular culture. We welcome interdisciplinary and inclusive approaches that revisit and broaden ways of looking at the nineteenth century, including those that interrogate constructions of gender, race, settler-colonialism, and ethnicity as seen in, or that were created about, that era. We also invite papers that examine communities, artifacts, or epistemologies that resist remaking the past, including those that explore cultures for which preserving the past unaltered was/is a form of survival and resistance.

In addition, we welcome papers that scrutinize historical consciousness during the nineteenth century. These could assess the varied tendencies to rewrite history, to revive or bury the past, and to appeal to the past as a legitimizing force, as a spur to the imagination, and as a field for questions and contradictions. Such papers could consider the past as a force in political discourses, in education and science, and in debates on the value of studying it at all.

Topics may include:

  • stylistic revivals in nineteenth-century art, architecture, and design
  • traumatic or “buried” histories of displacement, forced migration, genocide
  • recovering Indigenous and African-American nineteenth-century cultures of resistance
  • antiquarianism and issues of historical preservation and interpretation of nineteenth-century material culture
  • California history including Chinatowns, Spanish historical sites, settler-colonial sites of mourning, the preservation and interpretation of California’s Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian communities
  • uses of historical fiction and revivals of past authors, playwrights, and composers
  • imagery of the past in nineteenth-century popular culture and advertising
  • Neo-Victorianism, adaptations (both book and film), and digital/data-driven re-imaginings of the nineteenth century
  • the use of real or imagined pasts in literature and the performing arts, the notion of revival as a trope, or of retrospection as a creative device
  • remaking or “differencing” 19th-century canons, critical pedagogy, and banned books
  • utopian golden ages of the past and future
  • invented pasts/invented traditions, fakes, lies, and forgeries

Please use this google form to send 250-word abstracts with one-page CVs bySeptember 30, 2022. Abstracts should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and paper title in the heading. We welcome individual proposals, panel proposals with four presenters and a moderator, or larger roundtable sessions. You are welcome to share calls for panels and roundtable discussions on our social media channels. You may post your call to our Facebook page and we will share it, or tag us on Twitter and we will gladly retweet.

Note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend if accepted. Presenters will be notified in November 2022. We encourage submissions from graduate students, and those whose proposals have been accepted may submit complete papers to apply for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. For questions, please contact us at 2023ncsa@gmail.com.

CFP: “Playing Indian” at SECAC 2022

Please consider submitting to the session, Playing Indian: An American Visual Politic at SECAC’s 2022 annual conference, October 26-29 in Baltimore.

In his 1994 seminal book, Playing Indian, Philip Deloria describes the specifically American, primitivist phenomena of Indian Play. Beginning with national founding moments, such as colonists donning pseudo-Mohawk costumes to dump tea into the Boston harbor, Deloria describes how, “for the next two hundred years, white Americans molded similar narratives of national identity around the rejection of an older European consciousness and an almost mystical imperative to become new” (2).  Playing Indian, appearing in such diverse forms from the Boy Scouts to the New Age Movement, encapsulates the paradoxical desire to both glorify and become the “Indian” but also erase actual Indigenous peoples and cultures. Because of the desire to appear as native, Playing Indian is an overwhelmingly visual politic, however, Indian Play has received little art historical attention, outside the work of some Americanists studying the early 20th century, such as Elizabeth Hutchinson or John Ott. This panel seeks to begin to address this scholarly gap by featuring examples of Playing Indian from across American visual culture whether that be representations from popular culture such as sports mascots, accounts of artists and others, such as Jimmie Durham, erroneously claiming Indigenous identities, or responses to these histories from Indigenous artists.

The Call for Papers for SECAC 2022 in Baltimore is open through May 19 at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/16/home.

A list of sessions is available at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/page/sessions.

CFP: African American Art History Symposium at Boston U

Boston University’s Department of the History of Art & Architecture is hosting a symposium featuring five late-stage doctoral candidates and recent postgraduates (within three years of defending) in the field of African American art history on November 11-12, 2022. The symposium will feature presentations on recent research, networking opportunities, and a concluding roundtable. This program is committed to advancing the connection and collaboration between diverse members of the Boston University community and emerging scholars of African American visual art, material culture, and architecture. The Present Coordinates: African American Art History symposium will provide honoraria and travel expenses for the panelists to travel to Boston.

Early-career scholars are invited to submit proposals for 45-minute research presentations on a topic of their choosing. Proposals may engage the current state of the field of African American art history; consider innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies; or investigate alternative frameworks and unstudied artists. Full details about proposals, which are due May 15, can be found here: https://www.bu.edu/haa/2022/03/31/call-for-papers-african-american-art-history-present-coordinates/

CFP: “Behind the Scenes of Object-Based Art Histories” Book

Book chapter proposals are invited for a forthcoming collection entitled “Behind the Scenes of Object-Based Art Histories,” edited by Carl Schmitz and Tracee Ng.

“I guess what I’m asking is this: are these the only kind of questions that art historians should be asking: Whodunnit? Or whatisit? Is there nothing else we can say?”                                                                                                                                                                                                                             —Michael Ann Holly

From the proposition that the ontological basis of art history remains a fertile ground for discovery, this project seeks perspectives on the relationships between the objects and subjects of study within the discipline. In conceiving of art historiography as an expanse of multifarious genealogies, what are the conditions of possibility for an art history oriented toward the art object? Are other ontologically dichotomous or even non-dichotomous art histories possible? How can the single artist catalogue raisonné—perhaps the ultimate expression of subject and object specificity—be recontextualized as part of a speculative art history? With these questions in mind, we invite our colleagues to explore the possibilities of object-based art historical research through related investigations.

In addition to art historical case studies, art histories that organically reveal their sources of inspiration (anywhere from art historiography to the personal) are also encouraged, as are scholars from outside of the discipline of art history whose work nevertheless revolves around the art object.

Proposals should include a short CV and/or biographical statement along with a 300-word abstract. All proposals should be sent to the editors (btsbook@catalogueraisonne.org) by June 15, 2022. 

Once accepted, we will ask you to consider the following publication details:

Deadline for full article: December 31, 2022

Length: 5,000-8,000 words

Submission: btsbook@catalogueraisonne.org

The concept for this forthcoming volume was based upon a session organized by the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association, and presented at the College Art Association annual conference in 2021. The four participating panelists will be adapting their conference papers for inclusion in this project. Further information on the panel is available on the CRSA website.

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