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 – Modern British History since 1750

Conference on Modern British History: Society, Culture, Politics and Religion since 1750. University of Edinburgh, 10-11 June 2013. Proposals due by 6 May 2013

Following the success of the conferences held at Strathclyde (2007-2009), at St Andrews in 2010, at Dundee in 2011, and at Stirling in 2012, the Modern British History Network will host a seventh major Conference on Modern British History at New College, University of Edinburgh, on 10-11 June 2013. The event is particularly aimed at members of the Scottish universities and the northern English universities although all historians are very welcome. Previous conferences have attracted delegates from across the UK and from overseas. Proposals for papers or registration to attend the event are now invited from researchers working on all aspects of modern British history. The conference aims to represent work covering the whole period since the late eighteenth century with topics in social, cultural, political and religious history. Proposals should be submitted by 6 May 2013 to Dr Juliette Pattinson (juliette.pattinson@strath.ac.uk). Over two days there will be three main papers from senior academics and short papers by other academics and postgraduates, who are equally welcome to speak.

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.

Call for Papers: Collaborators – The Role of Collectors, Critics and Curators in Artistic Practice c. 1780-1914

Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, c.1863–5. Photo c. V&A

Conference: 26 June 2013, Humanities Research Centre, University of York; Call for Papers Deadline: Friday 26th April

In May 1884 the art critic Marion Harry Spielmann wrote in defence of the often criticised profession of art criticism: “The critic – (I am not now referring to the mere notice writer of daily journalism) – spends his life in devotion not only to art but to artists: and, so far as public recognition is concerned, he reaps his reward in sneers and ‘chaff’: sneers from painters, thoughtless and irresponsible, like Mr Whistler; indifference from others less splenetic and querulous.” Spielmann, a prolific author, editor and arts administrator, was an advocate for and close friend of numerous contemporary artists. Along with the collectors and curators whom he frequently worked with and wrote about, he was an active and influential participant in contemporary art practice in late-Victorian London.

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

 

Call for Papers – Adam’s Dream: Imaginative Incarnations in the Long Eighteenth Century

Graduate Conference at the English Faculty, University of Cambridge, 13th-14th April 2013. Proposals deadline 15th March

The annual Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies Graduate Conference, hosted by the University of Cambridge English Faculty, will take place over the weekend of the 13th-14th April 2013. The conference’s theme is ‘Adam’s Dream: Imaginative Incarnations in the Long Eighteenth Century’, and will consist of six panels, chaired by Cambridge faculty lecturers, with graduate students delivering papers. Michael O’Neill (University of Durham) will serve as external respondent. The conference’s theme is drawn from Keats’s allusion to ‘Adam’s Dream’ - ’He awoke and found it truth’ – which captures a major concern for eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetics and literature.

Call for Papers – Encounters, Affinities, Legacies: The Eighteenth Century in the Present Day

University of York, 28^th – 29^th June 2013, Proposals Due 19th April

As the field of eighteenth century studies continues to boom within the academy, the eighteenth century – invoked around names like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Adam Smith – is becoming an increasingly frequent interlocutor in contemporary debates in the international media about society, democracy, human rights, and the economy.  Whilst social and political commentators are reading our present in dialogue with our eighteenth-century past, cultural appetites for the eighteenth century on page, stage, and screen continue to grow: powerful suggestions that intertwined discourses like (E)nlightenment and modernity, central to so much eighteenth- and twentieth-century thought, remain vital to the social, political and cultural construction of our contemporary moment.  This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the complex webs of interconnection between the long eighteenth century and the ‘long’ twentieth century, from 1900 to the present.