Category: publications

2024 Eldredge Prize awarded to Megan A. Smetzer

Congratulations to Megan A. Smetzer! The Smithsonian American Art Museum is excited to announce that the 36th Annual Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art has been awarded to Dr. Smetzer for her book “Painful Beauty: Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience” (University of Washington Press, 2021).

The annual Eldredge Prize is presented to the author of a recent book-length publication that enriches our understanding of art history of the United States. The winner is chosen by a jury of three distinguished scholars on the basis of the work’s originality, quality of research and writing, clarity of method, and significance for the field.

This year’s jurors were Karen Mary Davalos of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Amy M. Mooney of Columbia College Chicago, and Laura Kina of the Art School of DePaul University.

In conjunction with the award, Smetzer will present the annual Eldredge Prize Lecture on March 13, 2025. Details and more information will be available online at americanart.si.edu/events.

For more information about the Eldredge Prize, please see the press release: https://americanart.si.edu/press/2024/10/megan-smetzer-awarded-36th-annual-eldredge-prize-painful-beauty-tlingit-women.

Publications Coordinator (FT, contract—The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (San Marino, CA) — apply now

Job Description: Job Description

About the Role

The Publications Coordinator helps the Publications Department create books and catalogues that document The Huntington’s exhibitions and collections. Reporting to the Manager of Book Publishing and working closely with the volume editors on each book project, the Coordinator assists the Manager of Book Publishing with assembling content for the books, including obtaining images, securing the permission to reproduce them, and coordinating and tracking author manuscripts. The Coordinator also makes sure that manuscripts move efficiently and accurately through the stages of copyediting, design, print, and distribution. They will also serve as publication coordinator for a companion volume to The Huntington’s exhibitions and programming for the occasion of the United States’s semi-quincentennial in 2026.

S/he/they demonstrates a background of working directly with people from diverse racial, ethnic, geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, using a welcoming, inclusive, and accessible approach.

This is a limited-term position expected to last through approximately January 2026.

More info here.

Call for Nominations: Eldredge Prize at Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is now accepting nominations for the 2024 Charles C. Eldredge Prize. The prize is awarded annually by the museum for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art. A cash award of $3,000 is made to the author of a recent book-length publication that provides new insight into works of art, the artists who made them, or aspects of history and theory that enrich our understanding of America’s artistic heritage. The Eldredge Prize seeks to recognize originality and thoroughness of research, excellence of writing, clarity of method, and significance for professional or public audiences. It is especially meant to honor those authors who deepen or focus debates in the field, or who broaden the discipline by reaching beyond traditional boundaries.

Single-author books devoted to any aspect of the visual arts of the United States and published in the three previous calendar years (2021, 2022, 2023) are eligible. To nominate a book, send a one-page letter explaining the work’s significance to the field of American art history and discussing the quality of the author’s scholarship and methodology. Nominations by authors or publishers for their own books will not be considered. The deadline for nominations is January 15, 2024. Please send to: Eldredge@si.edu. Further information about the prize may be found at americanart.si.edu/research/awards/eldredge.

CFP: Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Studies: 

Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

deadline for submission: August 15, 2024

full name(s)/name of organization:

Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard co-editors/Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email(s): wcastenell@wlu.edu; ahazar1@saic.edu

This special issue will explore how Blackness was constructed and problematized by a hegemonic global structure across national boundaries during the long nineteenth century. The issue will pay particular attention to emerging concepts of Black identities during this period.  Critically, majority narratives have driven these constructions, propagating mediated histories that subjugate Black people, yet the full impact of these narratives has not been thoroughly explored and needs additional interrogation. Essays might consider topics related to images, texts, other forms of media, and more. Possible topics could include expressions of Black autonomy in white supremacist cultures; colonialism/decolonization; trauma studies; slavery/emancipation; Black soldiers; Black artists/photographers/writers; the development and expression of stereotypes; the practice of lynching; the transatlantic migration and the Black diaspora; and other relevant subjects. Nineteenth Century Studies publishes studies of nineteenth-century world cultures in all humanistic fields, including literature, art history, history, musicology, and the history of science and the social sciences. It is an interdisciplinary journal issued annually by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. One exciting aspect of Nineteenth Century Studies is that the journal encourages authors to enhance their contributions with pertinent artwork.

Please submit manuscripts for scholarly essays of 6,000-10,000 words, pedagogical essays of 2,000-4,000 words, or book reviews of 600-1000 words formatted in Chicago Manual Style to guest editors Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard at wcastenell@wlu.edu and ahazar1@saic.edu. Additionally, we welcome suggestions of books for review relevant to the theme of this special issue. Please send your suggestions to the editors. Early expressions of interest and proposals of topics are also welcome. The initial deadline for submission of full manuscripts will be August 15, 2024, but earlier submissions are encouraged.

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: Toward Equity in Publishing/American Art

Call for Applications: Toward Equity in Publishing
Deadline: May 1, 2023

Toward Equity in Publishing is a professional development program provided by the peer-reviewed journal American Art, which is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and University of Chicago Press. The program works toward ameliorating the inequitable conditions that precede and impede publication by providing developmental editing and workshops to demystify academic publishing. Eligibility is limited to untenured faculty, junior museum staff, independent scholars, and unpublished graduate students.

With the continued generosity of the Dedalus Foundation, who has just extended their support for an additional two years, all participants will now receive a $1,000 stipend to offset participation costs such as family care, missed wages, or research expenses.

For more information and application instructions, please visit americanart.si.edu/research/toward-equity-publishing.

Call for Nominations: 2023 Charles C. Eldredge Prize

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is now accepting nominations for the 2023 Charles C. Eldredge Prize. The prize is awarded annually by the museum for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art. A cash award of $3,000 is made to the author of a recent book-length publication that provides new insight into works of art, the artists who made them, or aspects of history and theory that enrich our understanding of America’s artistic heritage. The Eldredge Prize seeks to recognize originality and thoroughness of research, excellence of writing, clarity of method, and significance for professional or public audiences. It is especially meant to honor those authors who deepen or focus debates in the field, or who broaden the discipline by reaching beyond traditional boundaries.
Single-author books devoted to any aspect of the visual arts of the United States and published in the three previous calendar years (2020, 2021, 2022) are eligible. To nominate a book, send a one-page letter explaining the work’s significance to the field of American art history and discussing the quality of the author’s scholarship and methodology. Nominations by authors or publishers for their own books will not be considered. The deadline for nominations is January 15, 2023. Please send to: Eldredge@si.edu. Further information about the prize may be found at americanart.si.edu/research/awards/eldredge.

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.

CFA: Toward Equity in Publishing

Call for Applications: Toward Equity in Publishing
Deadline: September 15, 2022

Toward Equity in Publishing is a professional development program provided by the peer-reviewed journal American Art, which is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and University of Chicago Press. The program, supported by the Dedalus Foundation, will work toward ameliorating the inequitable conditions that precede and impede publication by providing developmental editing and workshops to demystify academic publishing. Eligibility is limited to, untenured faculty, junior museum staff, independent scholars, and unpublished graduate students.

For more information and application instructions, please visit americanart.si.edu/research/toward-equity-publishing.

Seeking Advisors
American Art seeks senior scholars for the Toward Equity in Publishing advisory committee. Please send letter of interest and CV to AmericanArtJournal@si.edu.