The Grapevine

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.

JOB: Deputy Director @ Hood Museum of Art

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College is seeking a Deputy Director. For more information, see https://searchjobs.dartmouth.edu/postings/63574

JOB: African Art and Visual Culture @ FIT

Open Rank (Assistant or Associate Professor)

https://fitnyc.interviewexchange.com/jobofferdetails.jsp?JOBID=148842

The History of Art Department seeks an historian of African Art and visual culture who will teach innovative historical surveys of ancient to contemporary African art, as well as develop more specialized courses.

The successful candidate will contribute to the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences minors, which include African American and Africana Studies and Middle East and North African Studies, and contribute to the department, School, and College and beyond the classroom through committee and college-wide service, engaging in scholarly activities through conference presentations and publications, and demonstrate professional accomplishments in the discipline. The successful candidate will demonstrate familiarity with best-teaching practices including pedagogical innovation, inclusive strategies, and teaching pedagogy that incorporates new technologies.

This faculty position will begin in Fall 2023. Review of applications will commence October 1, 2022 and continue until the position is filled. The salary and appointment rank will be based on education level and cumulative experience. Please note a background check is required for appointment to this position.

JOB ANNOUNCEMENT: Postdoctoral Research Associates at The Center (Washington, DC)—review of applications begins July 1, 2022

The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art, supports outstanding emerging scholars in the field to assist with advanced scholarly research projects and academic programs defined and supervised by the Center’s deans and residential professors.

The Center currently seeks to appoint two postdoctoral research associates. While the area of expertise is open, we are particularly interested in candidates with a specialty in African American, Latin American, LatinX, or Early Modern art, architecture, or visual culture. The research associates also support other activities of the Kress-Beinecke Professor, A. W. Mellon Professor, and Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, such as lectures, event planning, publications, and participation in professional meetings. They may also support the Center’s Howard University Undergraduate Fellowship.

The positions are full-time salaried appointments with two-year terms, with an option of renewal for a third year. Postdoctoral Research Associates are employees of the National Gallery of Art and have full use of the National Gallery Library, research facilities, and services. As members of the Center’s scholarly community, they are expected to participate in ongoing meetings and programs at the Center. They are also encouraged to pursue their own scholarly research.

Applicants must have received a PhD in art history or related discipline between September 1, 2018 and September 1, 2022.

Preference is given to applicants who have not already held a regular faculty appointment.

Applicants should send cover letter addressed to Steven Nelson, Dean; curriculum vitae; and names of 2 references, to casvaResearch@nga.gov. The Center does not require letters of recommendation. Review of applications begins July 1, 2022 and continues until the position is filled.

NOTES:
Salary: $55,000 per year

Additional Salary Information: The Center also provides research associates an allowance for travel and research, paid annual and sick leave benefits, eligibility for enrollment in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and one day per week paid telework to pursue one’s own research.

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.

JOB: Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in Brazil

 Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor 

Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, Brazil – in partnership with the University of Campinas (Unicamp), the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Applications are invited for a Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professorship for the second semester of 2023 (August to November 2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC USP) to teach a seminar course on African American art in the Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History of the University of Sao Paulo (Master’s and Doctorate levels).

The Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP, http://www.mac.usp.br) is a research and education public university museum, with a collection of national and international importance of 20th and 21st centuries art. From the 1,691 works received from the former Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM SP), MAC USP has more recently reached the mark of 10,000 works in its collections. MAC USP’s mission is to promote the study and dissemination of the collection as well as its conservation, protection, restoration, expansion and recognition as a Brazilian artistic heritage in Brazil and abroad. In addition, the Museum seeks to develop teaching, research and extension in the fields of Museology, History, Art Theory and Criticism and Education and Art in Museums, encouraging scientific and cultural exchange with similar institutions in Brazil and abroad and promoting contemporary artistic practice. Its curatorial activities are developed from critical reflection grounded in interdisciplinary research in history, theory and criticism of modern and contemporary art, which also defines its collecting policies. Since 2000, MAC USP is the main University department engaged in the Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History (see: http://www.pgeha2.webhostusp.sti.usp.br/index.php/en/). The Program has the academic MA and the PhD diplomas for students who are interested in specializing in it, and has an average of one hundred students a year, under supervision and in its seminar courses.

The Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor is a project MAC USP has undertaken with three other major institutions in the state of São Paulo in Brazil: the University of Campinas (Unicamp) and its Graduate Program in History of Art and Culture; the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and its Department of Art History; and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (the second largest collection of art of the state of São Paulo).

The successful candidate must hold a doctorate. She/he/they must have:extensive knowledge of African American art with an emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries; a research background and/or research potential as an international authority within the specialty; and a level of international publication at a standard that will contribute to and enhance the profile national and international program of the Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History. It is necessary to give lectures, and classes at the graduate level.

The Seminar course is composed of 15 classes of 3 hours each, once a week, which will be taught between the months of August and November 2023. Once selected, the candidate will be asked to closely engage with scholars from the three universities involved who specialize in Brazilian and African diasporic art, and with local collections, to further discuss and develop the syllabus.

For application, send a curriculum vitae and a proposed syllabus on African American art with an emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries [Abstract, topics to be developed and bibliography (10 items)].

The selected candidate will receive a monthly gross salary of $5,000 USD (period August to November 2023). Airfare, accommodation in Brazil and travel insurance will be covered with funds from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The application starts on Monday, 16 May 2022 and the final deadline is midnight on Monday 15 August 2022. 

Contact Email: cursosmac@usp.br

In your application, please refer to Visiting Professor – Terra Foundation

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.

JOB: Collegiate Assistant Professor of Architectural History @ UChicago

The Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago is now accepting applications from historians of architecture or the built environment for a four-year, non-renewable, postgraduate appointment as a Collegiate Assistant Professor, who will teach in the Department of Art History. Collegiate Assistant Professors are members of the College Faculty whose primary responsibility is to teach in the Core Curriculum, the College’s general education program.

The position is open to those who will have completed all requirements for their PhD degree no later than August 31, 2022. Candidates must demonstrate excellence in original scholarship as well as in teaching. An ability to incorporate studio teaching into their courses is desirable but not obligatory.

In most years, Collegiate Assistant Professors will teach two undergraduate courses in each of three quarters, distributed across several areas of the Art History Core curriculum. A minimum of two courses per year will be in the team-taught “Introduction to Art and Architecture” (ARTH 10100). The remaining, small seminar-style, courses may include multiple sections of an introductory survey in the Collegiate Assistant Professor’s own field; of an introductory design studio for liberal arts students; or of a thematic discussion-based “Art in Context” course, designed to introduce students to art-historical thinking through a focused examination of a particular set of materials. (For more information about the types of courses offered, see https://arthistory.uchicago.edu/undergraduate/courses)

The Fellow will be a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (https://societyoffellows.uchicago.edu/). They will be eligible for one quarter of research leave, typically in the third year of residence, and may be eligible to apply for a second research leave in the Spring of the fourth and final year of appointment. The base salary will be determined according to the Collective Bargaining Agreement currently under renegotiation plus a benefits package and an annual professional development allowance of $5,000. For reference, the annual base salary for this rank in academic year 2020-21 was $72,307. Additional benefits, based on eligibility, include a publication allowance and a childcare allowance. The effective date for this appointment is September 1, 2022. This position is governed by a collective bargaining agreement.

Applicants must apply online at http://apply.interfolio.com/105661, and upload the following materials: a letter of application describing teaching and research interests and detailing progress towards the PhD, if not in hand; a current curriculum vitae; a description of the most recent major research project, preferably the dissertation, of not more than 2500 words; a proposal for an “Art in Context” course in the applicant’s field; and the names and contact information of three references whose recommendation letters may be solicited.

Application deadline is May 31, 2022. Only completed applications will be considered.

The position is contingent upon budgetary approval.

The position will be a member of the Service Employees International Union.

For more information about the Department of Art History, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu. Please contact arthistory@uchicago.edu with any questions about the position.

We seek a diverse pool of applicants who wish to join an academic community that places the highest value on rigorous inquiry and encourages diverse perspectives, experiences, groups of individuals, and ideas to inform and stimulate intellectual challenge, engagement, and exchange. The University’s Statements on Diversity are
at https://provost.uchicago.edu/statements-diversity.

The University of Chicago is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity/Disabled/Veterans Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, age, status as an individual with a disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, or other protected classes under the law. For additional information please see the University’s Notice of Nondiscrimination.

Job seekers in need of a reasonable accommodation to complete the application process should call 773-702-1032 or email equalopportunity@uchicago.edu with their request.

JOB: Assistant/Associate Professor- African American History/ Africana Studies (Tenure Track) @ Rhode Island College

See https://employment.ric.edu/postings/5992 for more details.

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/