Tate Britain: Looking at the View

Until 2 June 2013

This thematic display looks at continuities in the way artists have framed our vision of the landscape over the last 300 years. Coinciding with the re-opening of all Tate Britain’s galleries, the selection finds surprising coincidences and remarkable affinities in the way we look at the view, whether near or afar, high or low, from inside or out. Over seventy works by more than fifty artists are included, including familiar names such as J.M.W. Turner and Tracey Emin as well as lesser-known figures of British art history. The exhibition consists entirely of works from the Tate collection and is part of the BP British Art Displays.

Colloquium: Early Modern Approaches to the Imagination

University of Warwick, 17th July 2013

This one day interdisciplinary colloquium seeks to bring together scholars working on literature, history, and philosophy to examine early modern ideas about imagination in various, overlapping spheres. Cultural discourses shaping ideas about the imagination were extremely diverse in the early modern period. Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Galenic theories persisted in influencing concepts of the power of the imagination, often in relation to illness and health. Renaissance theory of rhetoric and poetry emphasised the power of the poet as maker to ‘figure-forth’ in language a ‘better’, less ‘brazen’ world than the one in which we live. From religious perspectives, materialist conceptions of the imagination were fiercely condemned by some, while for others an important aspect of religious imagination was concerned with the role of the senses in spiritual life. Recent research has focused on disorders of the imagination, and their close association with excesses of the passions, but this colloquium seeks to broaden understanding of early modern concepts of imagination through comparing how these, and other, discourses concerned with the imagination compare and intersect.

Call for Papers – The Thirteenth York Manuscripts Conference: Cathedral Libraries and Archives of Britain and Ireland

Conference hosted by the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York, 3-5 July 2014. Abstract Deadline, 1 July 2013.

The York Manuscripts Conference has been held biennially or triennially since 1986 and, with about 50 papers, is amongst the largest conferences in Europe dedicated to manuscript studies. The Thirteenth York Manuscripts Conference, to be held from 3-5 July 2014 will have as its topic the Cathedral Libraries and Archives of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Cathedral Libraries and Archives of Britain and Ireland comprise some of the most remarkable and least explored collections of medieval and early modern manuscripts. While predictably focused on theological, liturgical, and devotional books, they also contain many medical, scientific, and literary sources, as well as legal and administrative documents. In addition to the many collections that are still in situ, others are now being looked after elsewhere, or have been dispersed. The conference will include papers on medieval and early modern manuscripts which are or were once held by the cathedrals of Britian and Ireland, considering their varied contents, illumination, use, and provenance; paper topics might also explore the formation, development, and dissolution of the libraries themselves; connections between different collections; their location and cataloguing within the cathedrals; or the distinction between cathedral libraries and cathedral archives in a historical perspective. Papers which shed light on lesser known treasures and collections will be especially welcome. We invite papers from researchers in the fields of religion, history, art history, musicology, history of science, literature, codicology, conservation, and other cognate disciplines. Papers delivered at the conference may be considered for inclusion in a volume of selected essays.

Exhibition – Close to the Heart: British Miniatures

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, until 5 May 2013

17th- to 19th-Century British Miniatures from UK Private Collections. Small masterpieces of British portraiture from two celebrated UK private collections – including a tiny portrait mounted on a finger-ring, of 18th-century British actor impresario David Garrick – are displayed in this exhibition, some for the first time ever. The exhibits range in date from about 1600 to 1850, and include exquisite examples by such leading names in the field as Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac and Peter Oliver, George Engleheart, Richard Cosway, John Smart and Sir William Ross. Together they will provide one of the finest displays of miniatures to be seen anywhere in the UK outside London. This exhibition is curated by Robert Wenley, and has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Bonhams.

Call for Papers – Legacy: Mythology and Authenticity in the Humanities

De Montfort University: A postgraduate conference 28th June 2013. Proposal Deadline April 16th

This conference focuses on the influence of cultural ‘legacies’ within current humanities research.  By highlighting the work of postgraduates and early career researchers, this interdisciplinary conference will examine the various ways in which ‘legacies’ are created, restructured, perpetuated and even rejected.  It will also question whether newer disciplines respond to cultural mythologies by establishing their own ‘legacy’ as a means of achieving academic authentication. The recent confirmed identity of Richard the III, Faber’s choice of cover illustration for its anniversary issue of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the recent film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit are just a few of the numerous examples that demonstrate how cultural legacies evolve within academic research and the public forum. These inherited cultural legacies are continually being redefined, rebranded and reevaluated, creating a cyclical pattern that challenges the ways in which we approach and define them.  This brings into question the social and political significance of ‘legacy’ and its relevance within the humanities, both as a research theme and as a lens by which to view the progression of our respective disciplines. The conference will conclude with a roundtable discussion with Professor Dominic Shellard the Vice-Chancellor of De Montfort University, Dr Will Buckingham of the School of Humanities at De Montfort University, and Mr Sam Causer of the Leicester School of Architecture.

Conference: Poetics and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Oxford Centre for Early Modern Studies 5th Annual Conference: Thursday 23 May 2013, 10-6pm. T. S. Eliot Theatre, Merton College.

In the early modern period, poetry was central to every aspect of learned culture: it was the object of study of lawyers, medics, scientists, and theologians, not just literary critics. How did those disciplines understand poetry? To what kinds of unique knowledge did they believe poetry could grant access? And what role can poetry play for specialists in the history of those fields today? This conference should appeal to graduate students and scholars working across the disciplines of early modern studies, who are keen to contribute to a vital debate about the ways in which poetry can be studied within an interdisciplinary context.

This conference will bring together an international group of leading literary critics, scholars of modern languages, orientalists, and historians to explore these questions in many different languages and social and national contexts, drawing on a huge range of published and unpublished sources. The conference and its themes will be introduced by David Norbrook, Merton Professor of English and director of Oxford’s Centre for Early Modern Studies. Speakers will include: Colin Burrow (All Souls College, Oxford) on imitation; Luc Deitz (National Library of Luxembourg), editor of the Poetics of Julius-Caesar Scaliger, will speak on the place of poetics within learned disciplines; Perrine Galand-Hallyn (École Normale Supérieure), co-editor of the most comprehensive account of European poetics, Poétiques de la Renaissance (Droz, 2001), on the connections between poetry and the law;Ralph Häfner (University of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), author of Götter im Exil (2003), on the ways Johann Albert Fabricius used poetry to reconstruct the early history of the universe; Kristine Haugen (California Institute of Technology), author of Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (2011) on seventeenth-century poetry and music; and Jan Loop (Warburg Institute/University of Kent), leading expert on Europe’s encounters with the Arabic world and director of the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies, on the rise of aesthetic appreciation of Arabic poetry in Europe; Nigel Smith (Princeton University) on his new comparative study of the relationship between the rise of vernacular literature and state formation in early modern Europe. Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford) will draw together the themes of the day by chairing a round-table discussion. The whole day will allow generous amounts of time for detailed questions and debate for each paper.

Call for Papers – Identity Construction and Meaning

AAH Call for Papers for Student Summer Symposium 2013, University of Oxford, 20-21 June 2013. Proposals deadline, 1st April.

The concept of ‘identity’ is prolific within the visual arts and in many ways its pertaining issues have shaped the discipline of art history. The biographical approach to reading artists’ work privileged by Vasari in his Lives (1550) has had a lasting influence. The portrait remains an effective medium through which to narrate the historical and contemporary identity of particular institutions and nations, and the art market continues to rely upon authentic attribution. Yet this art history of names remains problematic and by no means comprehensively represents either the discipline of art history or the plural notions of identity that have come to influence it.

During the twentieth century, subjectivity was critiqued and revised: psychoanalysis destabilized the concept of a consistent and whole subject, positioning the self as an illusion of stability and a site of fragmentation; Barthes and Foucault challenged notions of authorship, arguing instead that the reader-viewer be considered in the creation and interpretation of a work. More recently, gender and postcolonial theory has cast light on notions of identity understood as performance and as Otherness, and new technologies, such as the Internet, have altered relations between international communities and provided new platforms for constructing identity.

New Research Project: ‘Art Writing Writing Art’

‘Art Writing Writing Art’  is a new research group that has been set up by 5 History of Art PGRs  at the University of Bristol. It has been established with an aim to provide a place of convergence for researchers interested in the actively shifting and overlapping intersections between art, writing and art history. It hopes to support, consolidate and expand research through peer discussion and exploration. The group has set up a blog as a repository for events, talks, conferences and exhibitions (etc) that might be of interest to all sorts of people thinking around the area. In addition the project is organising a range of events over the coming year. More information can be found here: http://artwritingwritingart.tumblr.com

 

Conference: Gifts and Perquisites

Knole, Kent, 9.30-4.30 pm, 15 April 2013

Conveners: Janet Dickinson, Ed Town and Olivia Fryman. This interdisciplinary conference will address the customs of gift giving and perquisites during the medieval and early modern periods. Gifts and perquisites played a central role in networks of patronage and political negotiations and affirmed social bonds. They were also one of the most common means whereby royal furnishings were disseminated into courtier collections. This conference will be held at Knole, the Kent home of the Sackville family, which is cared for and managed by the National Trust. The collections at Knole include an unrivalled set of royal furnishings that were acquired as perquisites during the seventeenth century by Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex and Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset. The conference will include a tour of the house and its collections.

Call for Papers – Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, 26-28 September 2013 - Proposals due by 15 April 2013

Organized by the Max Planck Research Group Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things, directed by Eva-Maria Troelenberg. Scholars normally consider the institution of the museum to have arisen in Europe. Historians have traced its origin back to the collections of the Renaissance princes and the ‘cabinets of curiosity’, the ‘Kunstkammern’ and ‘Wunderkammern’, literally art chambers and wonder chambers, of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Western Europe. From their initial establishment until today, museums have become increasingly elaborate institutions, the purpose of which is not simply to exhibit collections of beautiful artefacts, but also to become a social agency able to interact with a different kind of public. In particular, in recent years, it seems as though ‘the museum’ has become a geographically universal or ‘global’ institution. At the same time, museum discourses are almost inevitably entangled with political questions, implying definitions of cultural values and privileges of interpretation.