Friday, December 25, 2015

Thursday, December 17, 2015

CFP: Masculinity and the Metropolis (Canterbury, 22 - 23 Apr 2016)

University of Kent, Canterbury, April 22 - 23, 2016
Deadline: Dec 20, 2015

This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the University of Kent,
takes as its starting point the range of complex and contradictory
engagements between masculinity and the developing metropolis since the
beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout this period the
metropolis maintained a paradoxical status as a place of liberation and
possibility, but simultaneously as one of alienation, sin, and
oppression. What do responses to the modern city in visual art, film,
and literature tell us about masculinity as it both asserts itself and
registers its own anxieties, and subsequent representations of the
city? In what ways do these contrasting positive and negative
conditions, which encouraged complex responses, fit within the
framework of masculinity?

In the wake of industrialization artistic reactions to modern urbanity
were spurred on by the rapid growth of cities and the transition from
rural to metropolitan living. This caused socio-cultural changes and a
diverse range of masculinities to develop within the metropolis in
terms of race, class, and sexualities. How has masculinity been
visualized with the construction of this modern cityscape and ideas of
the urban? And later in the 20th Century, how did artists registering
with ideas of deindustrialization or feminist and queer art forms
affect or approach theories of masculinity and the urban? Can we
construct an overarching lineage on this relationship? As one starting
point, the so-called “crisis of masculinity”, and the way it is
represented in various media, can be connected in interesting ways to
the rise of the metropolis. This conference will bring together
scholars from varying fields in order to begin a dialogue regarding the
way theories of masculinity and the metropolis have developed in
tandem, charting their evolution from the beginning of the 20th Century
to the present day. Scholars with diverse interests and approaches to
this broad subject are welcome with papers concerning various media
within the 20th and 21st centuries.

Examples of subjects invited for submission include, but are in no way
limited to:
•    Representations of the male and masculinity in metropolitan
society within literature, film, and fine art. Contributions from
theatre, and music are also welcome.
•    Male as artist or witness to the evolving physical cityscape
•    Modern and contemporary responses to 19th Century representations
of industrialisation and the urban / de-industrialization and the
changing nature of the urban and the masculine
•    The metropolis as a milieu of capitalist oppression, and how this
can be related to masculinity
•    Urban photography and the metropolitan male identity
•    Masculine national identities within the cityscape
•    Masculinity and the nocturnal city
•    The modern or contemporary flâneur
•    Cityscape planning and the organization of male spaces
•    Destruction of the city and the crisis of masculinity
•    The male Superhero
•    Masculinities and sexualities within the metropolis
•    Depictions of the urban male and race
•    The relationship of masculinity to musical sub-cultures / the
protest song and music as social commentary
•    Feminist, gay, and / or trans artistic reactions to masculinity
and the urban
•    Masculinity and dramatic performance within the metropolis

Keynote Speakers
Dr. Deborah Longworth, University of Birmingham
Dr. Hamilton Carroll, University of Leeds
Dr. Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck, University of London

Submission process
We invite submissions of short abstracts (300 words) accompanied by a
brief biography (100 words). The time slot for presentations is 20
minutes with a 10 minute session for questions at the end of each panel.

Please send your abstract as an attachment (.pdf or .doc) to:
The subject of the email should contain the words: “Masculinity and
the Metropolis submission”
The body of the email should include author(s) name, affiliation,
abstract title and the email address you would like us to use to
communicate with you.
Deadline for submissions: 20 December 2015.
Notification of acceptance/non-acceptance: 26 January 2016.

Registration:
Postgraduate students / University of Kent Staff and Students: £10
Other researchers: £20

CFP: Rethinking Pictures: A Transatlantic Dialogue (Paris, 19- 20 May 16)

Deadline: Jan 25, 2016

On the occasion of the launch of Picturing, the first volume of the
Terra Foundation Essays, a new publication series exploring themes of
critical importance to the history of arts and visual culture of the
United States, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris, and the
Terra Foundation for American Art are jointly organizing a conference
that will further the transatlantic dialogue about what pictures are
and what they do.

Since the 1980s, theories of visual studies in Anglo-American
scholarship and of Bildwissenschaft in German art history have expanded
the field of potential subjects for study, building an extensive body
of literature and introducing innovative methodologies and approaches. 
Developed nearly contemporaneously, these theories about the nature and
reception of images have run parallel to one another. While on the
Anglophone side visual studies have branched out to a wide range of
media following a socio-critical impetus, Bildwissenschaft finds
origins in Aby Warburg’s methods and (among other approaches) is
notably nourished by a hermeneutic perspective.

Over the last decade on both sides of the Atlantic, new avenues of
inquiry have questioned the purely visual nature of images to consider
them as objects that possess agency or vitality in and of themselves.
Pictures are now understood as inviting complex experience in which the
entire body, not only the eye, is solicited, and as invoking multiple
temporalities, by collapsing past and present. Attention is called to
the materials that constitute the object world and the ways in which
their circulation creates social relationships that become part of
their meaning over time. In alignment with object-centered approaches
in anthropology, material culture, media studies, and philosophy,
recent theories of the visual have raised questions of affect,
subjectivity, and medium in Anglo-American scholarship, while
socio-historical considerations have gained particular ground in the
German literature. As renewed attention to the art work’s “materiality”
shifts the terms of investigation, this conference invites speakers to
reflect on the differences and convergences between the intellectual
traditions of visual studies and Bildwissenschaft. Are there ways to
think about pictures anew by bringing these models more closely
together?  Does the move away from visuality towards the material offer
possibilities for overcoming early differences between these two
approaches?

We seek proposals for 20-minute talks introducing new ideas and
propositions. We especially welcome submissions from early- and
mid-career scholars. Presentations are encouraged to focus on specific
objects and historical conditions in order to anchor theoretical
questions. While binary considerations of comparative methodologies and
the scope of national traditions will certainly arise, the discussion
will be plural and interdisciplinary, inviting reflections on the
various forms of study of the visual arts in Europe, the United States,
and beyond.

Please submit abstracts no longer than 500 words in English along with
a CV, to rethinkingpictures@gmail.com by January 25, 2016. The
symposium will cover travel and lodging. Selected participants will be
notified by February 15, 2016.