Tag: Atlantic World

CFP: Landscapes of Slavery, Landscapes of Freedom: The African diaspora and the American built environment

Harvard Graduate School of Design

November 5-7, 2021

Histories of the Atlantic world have focused both on the adaptation of ideas from the Old Continent to the new and on the material and cultural exchanges occurring throughout the centuries. To complement this scholarship, studies have been conducted on the slave trade between West Africa, mainland North America and the Caribbean, which formed the base of plantation economy and helped build the fortunes of many landowners in the colonial and antebellum period of the republic. Recent scholarship has acknowledged the violence of the archive of white records of slavery that have silenced the voices of the enslaved, and this work has sought to recover the experiences and vantage points of slavery’s victims.

This forum will address a more specific set of questions that have to do not only with the unique contribution the forced labor of the African diaspora and Afro-descendants brought to the plantation economy, but also with the potential exchange of knowledge about gardening and cultivation practices across the Atlantic, both from West Africa and between the Caribbean and mainland North America. On occasion the cultivation of specific staple crops such as rice depended upon the expertise of the enslaved. More generally, many of those forced to labor on their masters’ plantations simultaneously worked on small plots of land within their quarters, enabling them to exercise limited agency with regard to the extent and type of crop cultivation for their own use and consumption. When slavery legally ended, the exploitation of black labor continued, although over time black land-ownership increased and perhaps involved different approaches to land use than was common among white small-holders. Reconstructing these histories and those of the environments Africans built and cultivated for others and for themselves is challenging, as there is only a limited archival record that contains few enslaved voices.

This conference seeks to engage with the work of archaeologists, ethnobotanists, cultural geographers, anthropologists, and of experts in African American Studies and oral history in order to form a more complete picture of the African contribution to the shaping of the North American landscape.

Proposals for unpublished papers are welcome from scholars in any field. Topics might include (but are not limited to) such subjects as:

• the relationship between place-making and slave labor in North America and its cultural, social and economic underpinnings.

• the adaptation of imported African horticultural and agricultural knowledge in the Caribbean and North America.

• the exchange of knowledge related to agricultural and gardening practices between the Caribbean and the North American mainland.

• Atlantic World foodways.

• crop cultivation and food growing practices on plantation sites indebted to forced labor.

• the ways in which slavery and forced labor made intensive cultivation and production possible.

• the place-making of former slaves in both rural and urban environments.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words are to be headed with the applicant’s name, title of the paper, professional affiliation, and contact information. A two-page CV should also be included in the submission. Please send proposals by March 15, 2021 to: Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Email: rfabiani@gsd.harvard.edu

Authors of accepted proposals will be required to submit the complete text of their papers by June 15, and carry out potential revisions by August 30, 2021, after which the symposium chair will circulate them among the speakers. Publication of the essays presented at the conference is anticipated.

JOB: Asst/Assoc Prof, American Art @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invites applications for an art historian with an emphasis in American art. This is a full-time, tenure-track or tenured faculty position, at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor in the history of American Art, including the history of architecture and/or design in any period from the colonial era to the present. We especially welcome applicants whose research addresses issues of race, indigeneity, ecology, (post)colonialism, and visual culture in the Atlantic world.

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will teach a 2/2 teaching load (two courses each in the fall and spring semesters) that includes courses in American Art and/or Architecture, as well as existing introductory courses with large enrollment such as the Introduction to Art and Visual Culture. The candidate will play an active role in curricular efforts in art history, developing and delivering curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate students. Successful candidates are expected to teach effectively at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, establish and maintain an active and independent research program, and provide service to the Art History program, the School, the College and the University.

Context
The Art History Program consists of seven full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty members, plus adjuncts and many affiliated faculty. Degrees offered include the BA and BFA, as well as the M.A. and Ph.D. Art History graduate courses also support graduate minors in Museum Studies and Medieval Studies. Additional information about the program and faculty areas can be found at www.art.illinois.edu/content/graduate/programs/art-history-phd.

The school offers undergraduate and/or graduate degrees in Art Education, Art History, Crafts, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, New Media, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture. The future of design at Illinois also includes a new facility intended for outreach, education, and experimentation in design for students in fields within and outside the arts.

About the University of Illinois
The School of Art + Design is part of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, an internationally recognized research and educational institution. The University supports faculty as active researchers in the humanities, arts, sciences, engineering, and design through opportunities for funding and vital cross-disciplinary exchange in the campus’ many institutes, centers, and initiatives. These include the Campus Research Board, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and numerous other more specialized centers.

The arts also play a vital and recognized role in the university’s service mission as a state university, as evidenced by the historic examples of the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, Krannert Art Museum, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, each a respected international hub for innovative scholarship and public engagement.

The University actively pursues a commitment to diversity through growing support for its numerous area and ethnic studies programs. Faculty and students in the arts routinely collaborate with these areas in their research and programming; such efforts enjoy support for activities on campus and around the world.

Supported by the nation’s third largest research library and abundant technological resources, the University of Illinois provides a rich environment for collaboration and experimental ventures. Champaign-Urbana is located in East Central Illinois, within a short driving distance to Chicago, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. For more information, please visit www.illinois.edu for the university, www.faa.illinois.edu for the college, and www.art.illinois.edu for the school.
Qualifications
The successful candidate will bring an active research agenda and evidence of innovative teaching. The ability to collaborate with faculty outside of our department, including those from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and the new campus-wide Design Center is highly desirable. Applicants must have a terminal degree in art history (Ph.D.) at the time of appointment. Assistant Professor applicants must show clear promise of developing distinguished records of independent research and teaching. Associate Professor applicants should have evidence of a distinguished record of academic scholarship, and teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels that meets the qualifications for the ranks of Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The anticipated start date is August 16, 2018.

Salary is commensurate with experience.

To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 4, 2017. Please create your candidate profile at jobs.illinois.edu and upload the following:

1. A letter of application
2. Curriculum vitae
3. Scholarly writing sample
4. List of three professional references – online application will require names and contact information for three references.

Please submit items 1-4 combined into a single multi-page (letter size) PDF (NOT an Acrobat “PDF portfolio”). Use the naming convention of “lastname_firstname_docs.pdf”.

The committee may begin reviewing applications before then but no decision will be made until after the close date. All requested information must be submitted for your application to be considered. The University of Illinois conducts criminal background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer.

Please direct any inquiries to:
Associate Professor Terri Weissman,
School of Art + Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
408 East Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-0855 / tweissma@illinois.edu

The University of Illinois is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. For more information, visit go.illinois.edu/EEO. To learn more about the University’s commitment to diversity, please visit www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu.

JOB: Assistant Professor/Provost Fellow- Black Atlantic Art and Architecture @ UChicago

The Department of Art History at the University of Chicago seeks (an) art or architectural historian(s) of the Black Atlantic, specializing in any pertinent historical period and in any territory of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Iberia, and/or the more ramified Atlantic world. We are also interested in art or architectural historians working more broadly on race, (post)colonialism, and visual culture in the Atlantic world. The ability to work across fields and subfields is highly desirable, as we expect the successful candidate to collaborate with faculty within and beyond our department.

The Department of Art History values diversity. A goal of the search is to increase the diversity of the faculty in the Department of Art History and across the Humanities Division, and we therefore welcome applicants from groups historically underrepresented in academia, such as black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian or Alaskan Native.

Successful candidates will be appointed either as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, or as a Provost Fellow at the rank of Instructor with an initial two-year faculty appointment. This initial period is intended to serve in lieu of a postdoctoral appointment. Provost Fellows will teach one class/year, receive research support, and participate in programming designed to help support them in their transition to Assistant Professor. Provost Fellows will ordinarily be promoted to Assistant Professor at the end of their 2-year term. Candidates for Provost Fellow appointment must have no more than two years of postdoctoral experience. All candidates must have the Ph.D. in hand by the start of the appointment, 1 July 2018.

Complete application materials include cover letter (including discussion of research and teaching interests), CV, two scholarly writing samples, names and contact information for three professional references, and a statement describing the applicant’s prior and potential contributions to diversity in the context of academic research, teaching, and service. Applicants should send all materials in electronic format (MS Word or PDF) to Caroline Altekruse at caltekruse@uchicago.edu with subject heading “Black Atlantic Art and Architecture Search.” In addition, applicants must upload the CV and cover letter to the Academic Career Opportunities website at http://tinyurl.com/ya6e3sek. No applications received after 20 September 2017 will be accepted. University positions are contingent upon budgetary approval.

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 at http://www.uchicago.edu/about/non_discrimination_statement/. Job seekers in need of a reasonable accommodation to complete the application process should call 773-702-0287 or email ACOppAdministrator@uchicago.edu with their request.

CFP: “Colonial Caribbean Visual Cultures” special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

Special Issue: “Colonial Caribbean Visual Cultures”

This multidisciplinary collection will examine the creation and circulation of colonial visual cultures from the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The era of Caribbean slavery placed the islands at the centre of the production and movement of goods, ideas, money and peoples, as well as cultural conflicts, exchanges and hybridities which created new challenges for artists, and new ways of looking. As a cornerstone of European imperial expansion the Caribbean had an enormous imaginative influence on Europe and the wider world. Tropical vistas and diverse peoples provided new visual subjects, and the art of the Caribbean participated in the circum-Atlantic movement of aesthetics, ideas and images: from mid-eighteenth-century georgic scenes which attempted to reconcile beauty with enslaved labour, to the colonial picturesque of the 1790s which rearticulated metropolitan landscape visions, to the unique botanical and zoological images which emerged from natural histories and travel narratives, and latterly to the early photography which marketed the West Indies to potential tourists. Significantly, the collection will position African-Caribbean, maroon, and indigenous material cultures at the centre of its exploration of how Caribbean visual cultures were related to the ways of seeing associated with modernity.

This collection invites contributors from history of art, literature, anthropology, history and geography and other disciplines to focus their attention on the specific dynamics of Caribbean visual cultures. What ways of seeing emerge under the conditions of slavery? How were images and objects produced, circulated and consumed in the colonial context? What were the relationships between text and image in pre-disciplinary forms such as the travel narrative? How did visual cultures operate across the heterogeneous cultures and geographies of the Caribbean islands? What were the relationships between colonial and metropolitan aesthetic images and practices? By focusing on the Caribbean islands and the circum-Atlantic production of imagery which they engendered, the essays in this volume will open up alternate genealogies and geographies for Caribbean art and ideas about the visual that are central to the emergence of colonial modernity.

Topics might include:

  • Circum-Atlantic aesthetics and the relationships between metropolitan and colonial visual forms;
  • Transnational contexts and intersections between empires;
  • Colonial ways of seeing and visual production under slavery;
  • Ways of disaggregating the ‘colonial gaze’;
  • Intersections between text and image;
  • Indigenous, slave and maroon cultures;
  • The visual representation of indentured labourers from Asia;
  • The impact of Caribbean visual cultures on those of Europe;
  • Natural history, science and medicine; travel narratives and other pre-disciplinary forms;
  • How objects shift through value systems, functions and contexts,
  • Ideas of vision in the context of colonial modernity.

Successful essays will be included in a special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a brief cv by 15 March 2017 to Emily Senior and Sarah Thomas: e.senior@bbk.ac.uk; sarah.thomas@bbk.ac.uk

Deadline for full scripts will be 15 November 2017

CFP: “Is there an African Atlantic?” @ MAHS Conference 2017

The Atlantic Ocean provides Africanist art historians a rich model of investigation and analysis. Connecting Africa to Europe and the Americas, the Atlantic maps the flows, circularities, and dislocations of African arts in and out of diaspora. But it also separates. In the hulls of slave ships, new worlds were both forged and lost, underscoring a separation that lives on as today even distinctly black Atlantic scholarship often includes little space for African ideas and worldviews. Responding to the inclusion of open panels dedicated separately to both African and African-American art, this thematic panel seeks contributions that take up African arts’ indeterminate space in the Atlantic world as both possibility and pitfall. Such case studies may include, but are not limited to, the role of African artworks in negotiating new identities and profound social changes wrought by the Atlantic world; the impact of diasporic arts on the African continent; African artistic responses to slavery and the slave trade; and efforts to re-center African epistemologies in diasporic contexts.

The 2017 Conference of the Midwest Art History Society will be held April 6-8 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Please submit a 250-word proposal and a 2-page CV to Matthew Rarey (mrarey@oberlin.edu) by Saturday, December 31, 2016.

You can access the full conference info and CFP at https://www.mahsonline.org/conference/