Announce

Early Modern Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed book series of Brepols Publishers that explores the complexities of the early modern world. Early modernity is broadly conceived as the period from around 1300 to 1700. With our international editorial board, we welcome monographs and edited volumes that shed new light on and adopt new approaches to the histories and cultural products of this period.

The thematic scope allows works in this series to investigate trends and events in cultural, intellectual, social, political, and economic history which are indicative both of change and continuity with the past. The series thus covers issues ranging from (but not limited to) gender, identity, society, emotions, space, material culture, religion, and politics and their intersections. We accommodate books rich in illustrations and are particularly interested in studies in art and architectural history.

For submission guidelines, please see our website: www.crrs.ca/pub/emcs

For further inquiries, please contact Dr. Joanna Ludwikowska, Chief Editor: crrs.emcs@vicu.utoronto.ca

Source: RSA

Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southampton, UK

Editorial Board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press (AUP)

Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean. The series welcomes proposals from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions written in English that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. We consider proposals for monographs or essay collections, but in the case of the latter, we consider proposals for a complete volume only. We are not able to place individual chapters.

Contact AUP acquisitions editor Erika Gaffney with questions about the series: Erika.gaffney@arc-humanities.org

Source: RSA

April 26–27, 2019

Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College in the University of Toronto

During the sixteenth and seventeenth century princes and the nobility found tomb sculpture an effective means of refashioning their identity and promoting their interests in a rapidly changing society. Enormous funds were spent on these monuments, often well before the occupants’ death or by their heirs, for whom the sepulchers became a generalized marker of family status. Epitaphs were also fashioned of words, penned in ink and published as well as engraved in stone. Poetical tributes and eulogies to rulers gave them another type of public persona.

For this conference we wish to focus on the agency of these creations in the social and political arena of Northern Europe and Iberia. Previous discussions have concentrated on the culture of death and remembrance. Although these concepts are integral to any consideration of tombs and epitaphs, we want to concentrate here on their broader cultural significance. We are interested in the ways tombs and epitaphs helped establish a viable image for leading families and facilitated participation in important networks. In which ways did tombs and epitaphs take part in the debates fostered by the Reformation and the Catholic response? How was inquiry into different religions reflected in tomb sculpture? And how did notions of presence inflect the design of and response to these monuments?

In which ways did these works extoll virtues of conquest and triumph? How did monuments to military heroes, noble and commoner, evolve in this period? How did gender alter the equation? How did the tombs of the upper bourgeoisie and professional classes relate to the monuments of the nobility? How did the choice of materials effect the perception of these objects? And how did carved monuments related to memorial representations in other media such as painting and prints? Networks of artists, writers, academies, patrons, and their agents soon formed, and knowledge of renowned monuments spread throughout Europe, via travel and by reproductive drawings and prints. What formal languages were adopted by the elite and their artists and what sort of communication was there between the different regions of Europe? Were there particular sculptors or writers who developed enduring paradigms?

We welcome papers of 20 minutes devoted to these and related issues. Please send an abstract of 200-300 words and a brief cv by March 31, 2018 to Ethan Matt Kavaler (University of Toronto) at matt.kavaler@utoronto.ca and to Birgit Ulrike Münch (University of Bonn) at bmuench@uni-bonn.de. Participants selected will be notified by June 2018.

Source: RSA

A symposium hosted by the graduate students of the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

November 2–3, 2018

Keynote: Dr. Jacqueline Jung

http://haagradsymposium.pitt.edu/

The goal of this conference is to promote interdisciplinary discussions about the power invested in monuments and how individual attachments to them are persistently and profoundly mediated by shared group identities. This symposium takes objects as concrete manifestations of collective identities and will foster productive, in-depth discussions about the shared stakes of monuments. Conversations will unfold across premodern, early modern, modern, and contemporary topics, thematically linking research that might otherwise be isolated by disciplinary or historical divides.

Visual objects can serve as vital tools of social cohesion, whether through construction, destruction, modification, or translocation; monuments link shared concerns that persist across time and geographic location, from the disassembly and installation of the Elgin Marbles in London to anti-monumentality in Gu Wenda's Forest of Stone Steles. We welcome proposals that attend to the diverse roles of visual culture as monuments to or within collectivities. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Construction
  • Civic or religious monuments or built environments
  • Imposed identities
  • Antimonuments
• Destruction
  • Censorship and erasure
  • Iconoclasm
• Modification or Relocation
  • Restoration campaigns and responses to these actions
  • Subaltern appropriation or utilization of public monuments
  • Artistic practices that subvert or challenge existing monuments
• Theoretical Concerns
  • Alternate definitions of monument
  • Issues of monumentality

Contact Info: To propose a 20-minute presentation, please send an abstract of up to 300 words and a CV to pittgradsymposium@gmail.com by midnight, March 30, 2018. Invitations to participate will issued by mid-April.

Source: RSA

17–18 September 2018, New College, Oxford

Organisers: Emma Claussen, Thomas Goodwin, Luca Zenobi

Keynote speakers: Emily Butterworth (King's College, London) & Alejandra Dubcovsky (University of California, Riverside)

‘Fake news’ is nothing new. Early modern scholarship has long since done away with the idea that the invention of print led to an unambiguously positive revolution in the circulation of information. Attention has been drawn to the way the press – along with improvements in transport, roads and postal services – facilitated the spread of rumours and falsehood. On the other hand, scholars working on utopian writing and the invention of new fictional forms have pointed to the provocative blurring of fact and fiction in early modern philosophy and literature.

Drawing together scholars working across regional, linguistic and disciplinary specialisms, this conference seeks to call into question the idea of ‘fake news’ as a uniquely modern phenomenon while bringing fresh perspectives to classic debates on the evolution of news networks, the development of fictional forms and the origin of the public sphere in the early modern world. Possible topics might include:

• Theories and attitudes concerning truth and falsehood
• Genres such as the novel, the pasquinade and the canard
• Multimedia practices of disinformation (images, texts, voices)
• Authorities, censorship and the manipulation of information
• Movement, networks and the circulation of disinformation
• Fictions of gender, race and sexuality in disinformation
• Global news, imagined travels, utopias
• Libel, slander and the law

Prospective speakers are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers (max 300 words) along with a brief bio (max 150 words) to oxdisinfo@gmail.com by Friday 20 April 2018. Interdisciplinary approaches, and papers that address non-European topics, are especially welcome. There will be bursaries available to contribute towards travel and accommodation costs for PhDs and ECRs who cannot obtain institutional support. For more information, please visit our website, oxdisinfo.wordpress.com, or use the Twitter hashtag #OxDisinfo.

Source: RSA