CALL FOR PROPOSALS

“A Matter of Time: Temporalities of Material Culture”
9th Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Conference
University of Rochester
April 5-7, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Ivan Gaskell, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts,
Design History, Material Culture

As cultural critics have noted over the past thirty years, we seem to be
living in an age of dematerialization. Increased information transfer
speed, the disintegration of boundaries between private and public, and the
commercialization of image networks have provoked anxiety regarding the
control of objects and images. Yet, taking a critical stance toward the
temporal thrust of this thinking—its teleology, its faith in progress—we
seek to historicize this anxiety as merely another renegotiation in a
continually evolving relation of time and matter. Has our relationship to
material objects ever been fixed?

While indebted to the work of material culture studies, we invite papers
from a wider range of topics of relevance and disciplines that address
questions of materiality and temporality. We understand the relationship
between material and time to develop in at least three distinct ways:
material in our time, material that generates temporalities, and material
that endures. Possible topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

· The relationship between technological and historical change
· Trends in preservation and the time of the archive
· The development of global heritage and the phenomenon of immaterial
culture
· Historical phenomenology
· The materiality of language
· The conditions of materiality in the digital age
· The legacies of historical materialism
· The durability of digital objects
· The historical conditions of contemporary visual culture
· Historical monuments and collective memory

Deadline:
We invite you to submit a 250-word abstract for 20 minute paper
presentations and CV via vcsconference@gmail.com by no later than February
15, 2013 (extended).

Select presenters will be invited to revise presentations into journal
articles for a special issue of InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of
Visual Culture. http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu

About the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University
of Rochester: http://www.rochester.edu/college/aah/vcs

CALL FOR PAPERS:

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

Conference: November 1-2, 2013

Poignant Prospects: Landscape and the Environment in American Visual Culture, 1750-1890

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society seeks paper proposals that explore how visual representations of both natural and built environments have changed over time, and how those changing narratives helped shape American attitudes toward nature and the environment. How has historical visual culture contributed to today’s environmental movement? We encourage proposals for papers that address the issue of landscape broadly defined as depicted in prints, photographs, political cartoons, book illustrations (including children’s literature), broadsides, ephemera and other forms of visual culture. We invite participation and dialog among scholars from a variety of disciplines including history, American studies, art history, literary studies, and environmental studies.

Keynote Speaker: Aaron Sachs (Cornell University). His most recent book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (2013) has just been published by Yale University Press.

Potential topics and themes include:

• The urban landscape
• The American West and other borderlands
• Exploration and science
• Streetscapes
• The commemorative landscape
• Parks and public spaces
• The ocean as a landscape
• Museum and other displays of natural history
• Transnational comparisons
• Regional identities
• Body/landscape
• Abundance and destruction in landscape imagery

Please send proposals for 20-minute presentations including a title and abstract (not to exceed 250 words) and a brief CV to Nan Wolverton, Director of CHAViC, to nwolverton@mwa.org by March 18, 2013.

Please also note the availability of short-term fellowships for the study of visual culture at the American Antiquarian Society. The application deadline for the 2013-14 fellowship cycle is January 15, 2013. Information of fellowships can be found at: www.americanantiquarian.org/acafellowship.htm

Nan Wolverton, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC)

American Antiquarian Society

185 Salisbury Street

Worcester, Massachusetts 01609

(508) 471-2119

nwolverton@mwa.org

www.americanantiquarian.org