Category: Call for Research

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.

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Call for Papers: 2022 Photography Network Symposium — apply by June 15

Intersecting Photographies

Photography Network’s 2022 Symposium, October 13-15 

The second symposium of the Photography Network will be hosted jointly by Photography Network and Howard University in Washington, DC. Depending on circumstances, the event will either be hybrid (in-person and virtual) or fully virtual. We will update speakers and attendees by August 15.

The 2022 symposium theme is “Intersecting Photographies.” Scholarship in the history of photography has until recently focused predominantly on its technical capabilities, patronage, and modes of representation. This focus elides the longer histories of colonialism and imperialism that the medium fosters­—and in which it can potentially intervene. Recent scholarship—including Ariella Azoulay’s “Unlearning the Origins of Photography” (2018), Mark Sealy’s Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019), and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s (Seminole, Muscogee, Diné) “When is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?” (1998)—are among many projects reconceptualizing photography as a site of encounter and exchange, fraught with historical inequities brought by colonizing desires.

The symposium contributes to art history’s ongoing interrogation of photography as a colonizing technology, as well as the exploration of the medium’s ability to promote social justice. “Intersecting Photographies” supports thinkers active in disentangling these histories by foregrounding three kinds of intersections: 1) those between peoples (intersubjective or intercultural); 2) those between photography and other media (intermedial); and 3) photographs, photographers, or photographic subjects that foreground multi-layered representations of social groups and self-fashioning, following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s conceptualization of identity’s “intersectionality.” 

Proposals drawing on these interwoven spheres of concern could consider subjects such as:

·      Methodological questions regarding authority to speak on challenging photographs and themes

·      Social formations and power relationships in the “photographic encounter” and contexts of display

·      Displaying history, colonization, and legacies of imperialism in museums and other institutions

·      The application of decolonization studies and/or digital humanities to archival holdings

·      The archive as a critical site of intersectionality 

·      Intercultural albums as documents and objects of self-fashioning 

Photography Network invites proposals for presentations that broach these and other subjects pertinent to “Intersecting Photographies.” We welcome proposals across disciplines and encourage a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographical diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their career are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the conference will be in English. The symposium organizers are also interested in attracting a range of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 20-minute papers, we also seek alternative-format presentations (e.g., workshops and roundtables). To encourage variety, applicants may submit up to 2 proposals, provided that one is in an alternative format. We will also host a Pecha Kucha for new research on any topic from students, curators, academics, and practitioners. If you would like to be considered for the Pecha Kucha, please note so in your email submission. You are welcome to apply only to the Pecha Kucha. Conference sessions will be organized around accepted submissions, rather than prescribed themes. 

Please send: (1) a 250-word abstract, (2) a clear indication of preferred format, and (3) a three-page resume or CV by June 15 to the Photography Network Symposium organizing committee: Monica Bravo (University of Southern California), Melanee Harvey (Howard University),Caroline Riley (University of California, Davis), Leslie Ureña (National Portrait Gallery), and Andrés Zervigón (Rutgers University), at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. To be considered only for the Pecha Kucha, please email us a 100-word abstract and a short, three-page resume or CV. Notifications of accepted proposals will be sent by email by July 19. The symposium will be held October 13, 14, and 15, 2022. The schedule will be announced by August 1 and will be determined after reviewing the abstracts and finalizing the conference format. Final papers from speakers are required by September 15.

 It is our hope that “Intersecting Photographies” will be live-streamed for those unable to attend because of geographic, financial, or other logistical barriers. ASL interpretation and enabling closed captioning for the live stream will make the symposium further available for those with language barriers.

Note: All are welcome to apply. Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. Annual membership is $20 (student/unaffiliated), $40 (Affiliated), or $100 (Sustaining Member). Please visit Photography Network’s website (https://www.photographynetwork.net/memberregistration) for more information on how to join. 

Call for New Sessions SECAC 2022 in Baltimore–Deadline Apr. 14, 2022

The Call for New Sessions for SECAC 2022 in Baltimore is open through Thursday, April 14 at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/18/home.

Now that we are reviewing the roster of sessions that were originally scheduled for 2021, we would like to invite proposals for newly conceived sessions. We are especially interested in new ideas, themes, and approaches, and in combined art history and studio art sessions, where appropriate. This call for new session proposals will be followed by a corresponding (and final) call for papers. 

Link to abstracts of sessions advanced from 2021:  https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/page/sessions


Conference Dates: October 26 – 29, 2022
Venue: Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel
Conference Director: Kerr Houston
Contact: secac2022@mica.edu
Call for Sessions: March 22 – April 14, 2022
Website: https://secacart.org/page/Baltimore

The Maryland Institute College of Art is excited to act as the institutional host for the 78th annual meeting of SECAC in Baltimore, MD, from October 26-29, 2022. Based at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel and informed by the theme Watershed, the conference seeks to foster thoughtful analyses of the myriad intersections between art, art history, education, and social and environmental justice. To that end, more than 130 individual sessions will be supplemented by a keynote address by the artist, educator and 2016 MacArthur fellow Joyce Scott, and by three optional walking tours led by local architectural historians, artists and activists. The conference will also include a show of work by the 2021 Artist’s Fellowship winner Brianna Harlan and an exhibition of work by SECAC members, juried by the artist and curator Jeffrey Kent Attendees will have the chance, too, to explore Baltimore’s rich artistic landscape, from The Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art to the American Visionary Art Museum, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and a vibrant local gallery scene. The conference hotel is within convenient walking distance of Baltimore’s celebrated Inner Harbor, as well as a number of nearby restaurants, historical sites, and attractions. MICA looks forward to welcoming you to Charm City!

If you wish to stop receiving email from us, you can simply remove yourself by visiting: http://secacart.org/members/EmailOptPreferences.aspx?id=55025866&e=keri.watson@ucf.edu&h=47c2f92155d7b436c1cc8d397a57a08239262053

SECAC
PO Box 9773
Wilmington, DE 19809-9773

CFP: Digital Art History article in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
Terra-sponsored Digital Art History Article in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
Deadline: April 15, 2022

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (NCAW) is pleased to announce the continuation of our series American Art History Digitally supported by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The editors of NCAW are now accepting proposals for the final digital art history article in the series to be published in spring 2023. To be considered, projects have to focus on art and visual culture of the Americas in the long nineteenth century, from the United States War of Independence to World War I, and must expand on existing histories of art by addressing understudied topics or historically marginalized constituencies while adopting research methods that are inclusive and equitable.

Proposals also should take full advantage of the potential of digital publishing by using digital technologies in the article’s research or publication phase, or both. Strong proposals will demonstrate how the production of digital tool(s) and/or components will lead to a scholarly argument’s key insights (either the tool/component enhanced the depth of insight or made it possible) and/or will illustrate aspects of that argument in dynamic/interactive ways. NCAW encourages authors to use open source software when possible.

While by no means limited to the following, proposals might explore:
• High resolution imaging or dynamic image presentation (e.g., panoramas, zoom images, visual essays, x-ray or infrared reflectography, moving images, 3D images of art objects, annotated musical scores, annotated digital facsimiles)
• “Big data” mining and analysis (e.g., social network analysis or text mining using analytics programs like Gephi, Network Workbench)
• Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (e.g., depictions of sites, locations of objects, paths of travel, using online mapping tools like MapBox, Timemapper, Neatline)

NCAW is a pioneer in publishing digital art history. For examples of already-completed projects, see the Digital Art History and Digital Humanities page. Authors are not expected to have extensive technical expertise themselves but should be able to articulate how digital research methods and NCAW’s digital publication format connect with their research questions. Upon acceptance of a proposal authors will identify, in discussion with NCAW editors, the digital tools/software to be used. NCAW editors will assist with the development of a timeline and with guidelines for workflow, but authors will be responsible for managing their projects.

To propose a digital art history project, please submit:
A. Abstract (500 words maximum) as a Microsoft Word document detailing the scholarly content of the article, including how information gleaned from the proposed digital tool will impact the article’s interpretive claims
B. Abstract (500 words maximum) as a Microsoft Word document outlining the appearance/format of the digital tool(s) and explaining how the author plans to present the article and tool within the NCAW framework (technologies used, layout, etc.). Also provide link(s) from existing digital project(s) that resemble your proposed project functionally, aesthetically, or in the technologies used, followed by several sentences describing which elements of that project will differ from/emulate your proposed digital tool
C. Budget (1 page maximum)
D. CV
If interested contributors have an idea for a digital art history project but would like to discuss it with the editors first, we would be happy to talk with you about your ideas in advance of the deadline. Please contact Carey Gibbons, Digital Art History Editor, at dah_editor@19thc-artworldwide.org.

Two Fellowship Opportunities at the Menil Drawing Institute

The Menil Drawing Institute is accepting applications for two of its fellowships for the 2022-23 academic year: the Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and the Morgan-Menil Research Fellowship.

The Menil Drawing Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship is open to American and international students whose doctoral research focuses on modern and/or contemporary drawing. The Pre-Doctoral Fellowship is 9 months in length, lasting from September to June each year.

The Morgan-Menil Research Fellowship is awarded jointly by the Menil Collection and the Morgan Library & Museum. This fellowship is 3 to 9 months in length. It is meant to support independent projects on some aspect of the history, theory, interpretation, or cultural meaning of drawing throughout the history of art. It is open to candidates at the pre-doctoral, post-doctoral or mid-career level.

For more details about these opportunities, please use the following link:

https://www.menil.org/drawing-institute/scholars

CFP: “In Situ” for Art Institute Review–deadline Mon., Oct. 11, 2021

CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 3: In Situ (September 2022)

Deadline for proposals: Monday, October 11, 2021

This issue of the Art Institute Review addresses the concept of in situ—a natural, original, or existing position or place. The notion relates to basic questions art historians, conservators, curators, and other cultural heritage professionals ask about all works of art: Where were they installed or exhibited? How were they experienced in their original time and location? To what extent did these initial contexts orient and shape artistic intent? Location and place may change over time. What happens when the physical context of a work of art is interrupted or upended? What are the stakes surrounding its placement and/or displacement? Research and analysis are themselves informed by position and place. How are art historical, conservation, and material science methods shaped in situ? How must they change when addressing a work of art that has been removed from its original context(s)?

Such questions regarding the past, present, and future of artworks have always been important in art history and related disciplines, but they have taken on even greater weight in our particular moment. What does it mean to recontextualize works in new spaces? What happens when we privilege one point in an artwork’s history over another—or when we deprioritize or disregard that history? How can digital tools and technologies help us better understand, question, and critique the “place” of art?

The third issue of the Art Institute Review invites you to consider, interrogate, and visualize the concept of in situ, understood broadly. We welcome topics from an expansive geographical, temporal, and theoretical range that could include: archaeological investigation and research, theoretical and practical projects of restitution and decolonization; community-based conservation; site-specific artworks and interventions, Gesamtkunstwerk, and land art projects; digital and material re-creations of artistic sites and architectural settings; and more. We especially welcome proposals focused on historically underrepresented objects or narratives, proposals from emerging scholars, and proposals that optimize the digital platform. Not only is the digital realm itself a place ripe for critical exploration through the theme, but it also supports innovative technological experiments and creative realizations of historic, contemporary, and imagined spaces.

This issue is co-edited by Elizabeth McGoey, Associate Curator of Arts of the Americas, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Jeanne Marie Teutonico, Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives and Publications at the Getty Conservation Institute.

Submit proposals here.

For more information on what we’re looking for, visit the journal website, here.

We aim to review proposals and notify the authors of accepted proposals within approximately one month of receipt. Full manuscript is due about two months after notification.

Post-doc in the humanities, and the social and natural sciences at University of Michigan, deadline Oct. 4, 2021

Info is here.

CFP: Beyond In/visibility: the Politics of Asian American Representation in American Art History (for CAA Annual Conference 2022) –submit by Aug. 30, 2021

CFP for CAA Annual Conference 2022

Beyond In/visibility: the Politics of Asian American Representation in American Art History (Association of Historians of American Art [AHAA] Panel Session)

What are the consequences of asking for greater Asian American visibility in art history?

We are reckoning anew with our discipline’s intellectual and material priorities which have enforced racial-class-gender hierarchies and American imperialist and exceptionalist ideologies. Across museums and universities, immediate solutions call for increased inclusion and representation of marginalized peoples into existing historical canons. What are the limits of these correctives for peoples who have been dehumanized through aestheticization and surveillance throughout American history, and endangered because of their hypervisibility in everyday life? Now over 50 years since the term “Asian American” emerged as a disciplinary and political category, we must reflect on ways to narrate the specificities of the Asian diaspora within American academies and museums beyond the binaries of visible/invisible, inclusion/exclusion.

This panel invites ongoing research, curatorial case studies, and experimental methodologies that engage with issues such as: How has “Asian [United States] American” been a useful and limiting category for research, curation, and museum interpretation? What are strategies to present the historical absence or loss of Asian American subjects in archives and permanent collections? Are there ways to identify unconventional presence through creative citation or display practices? How might Asian American art histories attend to moments of solidarity and failure with respect to Black, Latinx, Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities and objects? How can Asian American art histories counter existing disciplinary priorities to aestheticize, visibly represent, visually clarify, expose, access, and possess its subjects—for example, through opacity, obscuration, dis-orientation, mistranslation, protective veiling?

Please submit by August 20, 2021

CFP: “No Template: Art and the Technicity of Race” [MEDIA-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus] (updated deadline for submissions Jul. 31, 2020)

Media-N CFP – No Template: Art and the Technicity of Race

UPDATED Deadline for submission of abstracts: July 31, 2020

A decade ago, Beth Coleman and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun introduced the concept of race and/as technology.* Turning to Heidegger’s notion of techne as prosthesis or skill, Coleman and Chun imagine race itself as a technology that can be leveraged, a tool for navigating systems of power. This distances race from its mythological status as biological fact, creating a critical framework that returns historical agency to the individual and helps us understand how race and ethnicity function in the visual–and technological–world.

Recently, the concept has received renewed attention as the intersections between race and ethnicity and the technological have come to the fore in popular discourse, raised by issues ranging from representation in film to bias in facial recognition. Critical work by scholars such as Simone Browne and Lisa Nakamura and the Precarity Lab has also continued to interrogate the technicity of race and its relationship to other technologies, both historical and contemporary. Artistic research and practice on the subject, however, has often been either neglected or instrumentalized as illustrative of a larger debate.

This special issue of Media-N responds to the urgent need to examine the state of dialogue on race and/as technology in art practice, history, and criticism. It will feature a ten years on reflection on the concept by Beth Coleman, opening discussion onto the way this framework has shaped, and has been shaped by, art of the past and present.

We seek contributions that explore how art sheds light not only on the relationship between race, ethnicity, and the technological, but on race itself as, in the words of Coleman, “a disruptive technology that changes the terms of engagement with an all-too-familiar system of representation and power” (178). Issues to consider include, but are certainly not limited to:

The impact of the race and/as technology hermeneutic on artistic research and practice of the past decade.

The influence of visual technologies and aesthetic practice on discourses surrounding sociohistorical concepts like blackness and brownness.

The imaging of historical and/or contemporary flows of migration and diaspora.

International communication media and tensions between the global/local.

The use of visual technologies to negotiate power between citizens and the state.

Light and color bias in the material/processes/procedures of photography, film, and digital media.

Bias and violence in both the inputs and outputs of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Anxieties about race and visual truth sparked by technologies ranging from DNA testing to deepfakes.

Ethnicity and surveillance capitalism after 9/11–and/or the long tail of surveillance capitalism inaugurated under trans-Atlantic slavery and European colonialism.

Submissions addressing artistic practices from any time period or region are welcomed from scholars, critics, artists, designers, scientists, media-makers, and interdisciplinary researchers from across the humanities and sciences.

*See Beth Coleman, “Race as Technology,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (70) (May 1, 2009): 176-207; and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology, or How to Do Things to Race,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White, and Alondra Nelson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38-60.

=====
Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus (ISSN: 1942-017X) is a scholarly, invitational, and double blind peer-reviewed journal. The journal provides a forum for scholarly research, artworks and projects, and is open to submissions in the form of papers, reports, and reviews of exhibitions and books on new media art. Media-N is an English language journal, and all submissions must be received in English adhering to the standards set by the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

TIMELINE:
July 31, 2020: UPDATED Deadline for submission of abstracts.
August 1, 2020: Notification of accepted proposals and invitation to submit paper.
December 15, 2020: Projected deadline for submission of final papers.

ABSTRACT GUIDELINES:
Please send your proposal by email with the following information combined into a single document:
-Proposal title, and a 300-500 word abstract, plus 1-2 images if desired.
-Please include your name, email, and title/affiliation on abstract.
-A condensed CV (no longer than 3 pages).
NOTE: Materials should be submitted in English, as a Word document or PDF.
File should not exceed 5MB.

SEND INQUIRIES & SUBMISSIONS TO:
Megan Driscoll, Special Issue Guest Editor: md@megandriscoll.net 
Johanna Gosse, Executive Editor: johannagosse@gmail.com

CFP: “Towards a More Inclusive Digital Art History” (PANORAMA: JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN ART)

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art invites submission of 500-word proposals for feature articles focused on Digital Art History to be published as part of the new initiative, “Towards a More Inclusive Digital Art History,” which is supported by a major grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Panorama (journalpanorama.org) is the first peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication dedicated to American art and visual culture (broadly defined). The Journal encourages a broad range of perspectives and approaches within an interdisciplinary framework encompassing both local and global contexts and is published by the University of Minnesota Libraries.

The goal of “Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History” is twofold—to increase both inclusivity and access. First, in order to encourage a more comprehensive approach to the history of American art, we seek to publish digital art history scholarship that focuses on the contributions of constituencies that have historically been marginalized and/or under-researched, and to make this available worldwide, for free and with open access. Second, our priorities will be accessibility, manageability, and sustainability. To that end, we seek proposals, both collaborative and individual, from scholars with all levels of knowledge about the digital humanities and will prioritize supporting scholars who may have little or no institutional support for digital scholarship. We aim to provide a model for sustainable digital art history research that can be accessible to a wide range of scholars, including those who will need to learn digital humanities methods without institutionally provided technical assistance. We also encourage computational approaches to art-historical analysis that employ low-cost, open-source applications. In this way, the project will provide models for other scholars to emulate regardless of financial or institutional support. Finally, we plan to encourage the accessibility and sustainability of digital art history by doing something that is all-but unprecedented in the field: We will publish and preserve the datasets underlying scholars’ peer-reviewed research along with their articles and project narratives. This will enable other scholars to view and test the data on which the research is based and employ the data for their own teaching and research, thereby expanding the project’s reach.

Panorama invites submission of proposals for feature articles to be published as part of this new initiative, “Towards a More Inclusive Digital Art History.” Selected authors will be invited to participate in a Digital Humanities workshop in Washington, DC, in October 2020. This workshop will give participants the opportunity to develop their research projects with Panorama’s editorial team and experts in the field of digital publishing. The first article in this series will be published in 2021.

To submit a proposal, send your c.v. and an abstract of approximately 500 words that summarizes the topic of the proposed essay, how it represents scholarship on understudied areas of American art, and why it could benefit from a digital art historical approach. Authors do not need to identify precisely which digital methods they would like to use—this will be addressed at the workshop and determined in collaboration with Panorama editors. Instead, use the abstract to explain why the research questions addressed in the essay could benefit from—or even demand—a digital approach. The Terra Foundation has also provided some funding to support attendance at the Workshop, so please also let us know if you require assistance with accommodation and travel expenses.

Proposals should be sent to journalpanorama@gmail.com with the subject heading “Digital Art History CFP response” and are due April 15.

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