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