Call for Papers: Various Sessions @Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, May 11 – 14, 2017
Deadline: Sep 15, 2016
Reminder:
– The Stones Cry Out: Modes of Citation in Medieval Architecture
– Light and Darkness in Medieval Art, 1200-1450. ICMA sponsored
session
Other Sessions:
Obscured by the Alps: Medieval Italian Architecture and the
European Canon
Organizer: Erik Gustafson (edg218@nyu.edu)
The traditional canon of European architecture has been well established through both formal-stylistic aesthetics and periodized criteria, rooted ultimately in Hegelian notions of the underlying spirit of an age and Modern nationalist identities. Viewed from northern Europe, the canon’s trajectory moves fluidly from the halcyon
days of Greece and Rome to the stunted but ambitious Early Christian and Byzantine era, developing into the solidly reliable Romanesque
until the revolution of the transcendent Gothic is decapitated by the Renaissance counter-revolution and its florescent Baroque iteration, to
be overshadowed by the enlightened and reasoned Neoclassical age,
leading to the search for identity of the 19th century Historicist
styles and the return to the classically pure clarity of Modernism.
The contributions of the Italian peninsula are periodic, and are
generally defined within the canon by returns to classicism. In recent
decades, architectural historians have begun to challenge the Italian
canon, expanding its geographic scope from the old Rome-Florence-Venice
vector while also undermining chronological waypoints such as the
Medieval-Renaissance divide. The canon, however, remains infrangible,
still underwritten by the formalist priorities established at its
inception.
This session seeks to examine the utility of the European canon in
assessing the historical significance of Italian medieval architecture.
Is there more to Italian architectural history than recurrent bouts of
classicism? How can Italian architecture be understood positively
within the European context, rather than in opposition or subjection to
the canonical narratives? Possible avenues of inquiry might include
exploring the historiographical lacunae of the canon, considering
alternative criteria for structuring new canonical narratives,
examining socio-cultural phenomena otherwise elided by the canon, or
investigating other historically contingent trends which reflect
different scholarly treatments of Italy and the north. Medieval
architectural history has been “rethought” several times in the past
decade, bringing “new approaches” to old questions. Shifting the
discussion, this session seeks papers that ask broad new questions
about medieval architecture’s place in the history of European culture,
grounding such investigations in local Italian contexts. While Italy
has long been obscured by the Alps, this session seeks to begin new
conversations about medieval architecture driven by Italian challenges
to canonical understandings.
How to Submit: Please submit a paper proposal to the organizer, Erik Gustafson
(edg218@nyu.edu)
Deadline: September 15, 2016
Please include the following materials in your application:
1) A one-page abstract
2) Completed Participant Information Form available at the website of
the Medieval Congress:
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions
3) A one-page CV
The Matter of Ornament
Organizer: Ashley Jones, University of Florida
Ornament has long occupied a troubled position in the history of
western art. Subject to rising and falling fashions, it has been beset
from all sides. Derided as feminine and dismissed as superficial,
ornament has been defined against both classical and modern
austerities. Medieval ornament, like so much of medieval art, has acted
as foil in the grand narratives of the rise and fall of figuration and
abstraction. But broader trends in the history of art and material
culture have, in recent years, highlighted the role medieval objects,
with their simultaneously heightened physicality and spirituality, can
play in illuminating profound questions of the nature of matter and
representation. This panel seeks to add ornament – arguably a
fundamental mode of premodern abstraction – to that equation. It
invites papers drawn from both material and textual traditions that
investigate the intersections of materiality, representationality, and
ornamentality in medieval material culture. Possible topics include but
are not limited to questions of the way in which matter gives rise to
ornament; the way in which matter, such as sacred relics, is made
legible through ornamentation; and the ways in which medieval ornament
evokes both the matter of nature and the matter of the cosmos.
How to Submit: Paper proposals should consist of the following:
– Abstract of proposed paper (no more than 350 words)
– Completed Participant Information Form – available on the conference
website here:
https://wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/u434/2016/medieval-pif-2017.pdf
– CV with contact information.
ALL PROPOSALS AND INQUIRIES SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO:
Ashley Jones (ajones@arts.ufl.edu)
The Schematization of time
This session proposes to investigate visual strategies used in
time-reckoning and calendar constructions. Medieval illustrations of
scientific works, computus treatises (including Bede’s De temporum
ratione), historical chronicles, almanacs and moral and theological
tracts, display a vast spectrum of images dealing with the natural and
divine causes of time phenomena, their manifestations, their various
effects on the world and their universal significations. These images
testify to a wide range of subjects and interests, from cosmological
and astronomical explanations, to practical considerations regarding
liturgy, astrology, medicine, divination, prognostication, to history
and geography, to practical and speculative mathematics, and to
symbolic devices working as visual exegesis of the creation. Given the
rich corpus of source material, how might the visualization of time
through schematization and volvelles help us understand the role of
time in medieval life and culture? How did schemata and diagrams
represent specific strategies of knowledge transmission through
geometrical relationships, color systems, and numerical and spatial
representations? Although modern medieval studies witness an increasing
interest in schemata and diagrams, the omnipresence and diversity of
visual reflexions on time in the Middle Ages contrasts with the small
number of case studies dedicated to the subject.
This session welcomes papers focused on, but not limited to: the
visualization of relationships between time, space and matter; the
schmatization of time in medical theory and practice; the depiction of
liturgical time; the correlation between time-reckoning and celestial
phenomena, either astronomical or astrological; the calculation of past
and future dates through images concerning chronology and eschatology.
How to Apply: The panel features 15-20 minutes papers. Please send an abstract (150
to 350 words), a short CV and completed Participant Information Form to
Arthur Hénaff (arthur.henaff@etu.ephe.fr) and Sarah Griffin
(sarah.griffin@kellogg.ox.ac.uk) by September 15, 2016
Medieval Art Research 