Call for Applications: Seminar ‘The Art Historical Image in the Digital Age’, 26 June-7 July 2023, Florence. Deadline 2 January 2023

The Art Historical Image in the Digital Age, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (KHI), June 26–July 7, 2023

The Art Historical Image in the Digital Age is a two-week summer seminar that will explore ways that digital materials have transformed research practices in the field in both conceptual and practical ways. What constitutes image data? What are the principles, conventions, and structures by which archives, museums, libraries, conservation labs, and scholars classify, organize, and use this data as it moves from single reproductions to digital repositories to our own personal research workspaces and eventually to publications? What are some of the continuities and discontinuities between analogue and digital formats? What are some of the new relationships between image-based and object-based research facilitated by digital materials and computational methods? What kinds of opportunities might this interrogation present to think strategically about the development of a more global, inclusive art history? Participants in this seminar will engage with these questions by considering the art historical image and its complex material and digital ecosystems.

The seminar will be hosted by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (KHI), home to one of the most important art historical photo archives in Europe. The seminar will familiarize participants with key concepts related to photography and imaging in art historical research, image data and its integral role in the digital humanities, and equip them with the basic skills necessary to organize and manage digital images for their research. Organized visits to the photo archives of the KHI, Villa I Tatti, and other institutions (including a group excursion to Rome) will introduce participants first-hand to current methods and practices of image data management used by institutions and repositories. These visits will familiarize participants with analogue institutional holdings, and provide opportunities for discussion with photo archivists and the technical teams working on digitization and image data. The seminar will also include discussion of readings and current digital projects across a variety of periods and fields as a way to connect participants’ own work to the expanding constellation of historiographical and methodological issues around digital art history.

The course is ideal for graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars seeking an introduction to digital practices and methods to enrich and advance their scholarship and/or for integration into their teaching and curricula in a discussion-based context. Participants should be working on projects in European art from antiquity to the early nineteenth century and/or global traditions represented in European image and photographic archives. Participants will be selected on the basis of their ability to formulate compelling research questions around the conjunction of art history and digital imaging technologies. 

The seminar will be led by Emily Pugh, Principal Research Specialist for Digital Art History, Getty Research Institute, and David Ogawa, Associate Professor of Art History, Union College.

This seminar has been funded by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. This funding enables us to offer participants lodging in Florence for the duration of the seminar, transportation for site visits, and transportation and lodging for the excursion to Rome. Participants will be responsible for their own airfare/transportation to Florence, meals, and daily expenses; there will be no cost to participate.

Applications are due January 2, 2023.

CFP: In Sickness and in Health: Medieval Healing and the Community. Tenth Annual Medieval Studies Colloquium, 21 April 2023, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Deadline: 10 January 2023

Please join the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the Tenth Annual Medieval Studies Colloquium: “In Sickness and in Health: Medieval Healing and the Community.”

The colloquium will take place Friday, April 21st, 2023, in-person at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a keynote address by Dr. Erin Sweany (English, Western Michigan University).

The Tenth Annual GAMS Colloquium is sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies, Department of Art History, Department of History, Department of English, Department of French & Italian, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +. For accessibility accommodations, please contact: gams@rso.wisc.edu.

The Graduate Association of Medieval Studies at UW–Madison invites abstracts from graduate and undergraduate students on topics relating to sickness, health, and community (broadly defined). Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to gams@rso.wisc.edu by January 10th, 2023.

For further information visit the conference website.

New Publication: ‘Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor’ by Bridget Whearty

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. This case study-rich book demystifies digitization, revealing what it’s like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet. 

Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today’s revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies.

Bridget Whearty is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University and a former Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies.

Contents:

Introduction: “Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor”


1. “Scriptorium 2.0”


2. “Value and Visibility: Copying San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111”


3. “Digital Incunables: Copying Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ca. 1997–2017”


4.  “Interoperable Metadata and Failing toward the Future”


Coda: “Glitch”


Appendix: “Doing Digital Codicology: A Manifesto.”

Buy this book from Stanford University Press

CFP: Renaissance Architecture and Theory Scholars Annual Conference 2023, 24 March 2023, Edinburgh / Online. Deadline: 13 January 2023

The next conference of the Renaissance Architecture and Theory Scholars (RATS) will take place on Friday, 24 March 2023 from 8:30 to 17:30 UK time at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, in hybrid format. 

The conference co-convenors seek proposals for 20-minute papers on topics in the history of Renaissance architecture and theory, broadly defined. We welcome research on all chronologies of Renaissance architectural culture, including its reception in other periods, as well as all geographies implicated in Renaissance architectural culture. We are open to emerging research as well as work that is nearing publication. We encourage any postgraduate student or early career researcher who would like to present original research to submit a paper proposal.

Because the conference will occur in hybrid format, anyone with an internet connection can present research or participate as an audience member from anywhere in the world. A key goal of the upcoming meeting is to expand accessibility to RATS and widen participation among scholars who may not have previously enjoyed the benefits of the RATS community. To that end, the upcoming meeting will also include time for a group discussion on future plans for RATS.

If you would like to present a paper in the conference, please send a title and an abstract of c. 250 words or less, as well as a brief, c. 150-word bio or CV of no more than 2 pages to RenArchandTheoryScholars@gmail.com by Friday, 13 January 2023 at 12 noon UK time.

Call for applications: Mary Jaharis Center Grants 2023-2024. Deadline 1 February 2023

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce its 2023–2024 grant competition. 

Mary Jaharis Center Co-Funding Grants promote Byzantine studies in North America. These grants provide co-funding to organize scholarly gatherings (e.g., workshops, seminars, small conferences) in North America that advance scholarship in Byzantine studies broadly conceived. We are particularly interested in supporting convenings that build diverse professional networks that cross the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines, propose creative approaches to fundamental topics in Byzantine studies, or explore new areas of research or methodologies.

Mary Jaharis Center Dissertation Grants are awarded to advanced graduate students working on Ph.D. dissertations in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived. These grants are meant to help defray the costs of research-related expenses, e.g., travel, photography/digital images, microfilm.

Mary Jaharis Center Project Grants support discrete and highly focused professional projects aimed at the conservation, preservation, and documentation of Byzantine archaeological sites and monuments dated from 300 CE to 1500 CE primarily in Greece and Turkey. Projects may be small stand-alone projects or discrete components of larger projects. Eligible projects might include archeological investigation, excavation, or survey; documentation, recovery, and analysis of at risk materials (e.g., architecture, mosaics, paintings in situ); and preservation (i.e., preventive measures, e.g., shelters, fences, walkways, water management) or conservation (i.e., physical hands-on treatments) of sites, buildings, or objects.

Mary Jaharis Center Publication Grants support book-length publications or major articles in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived. Grants are aimed at early career academics. Preference will be given to postdocs and assistant professors, though applications from non-tenure track faculty and associate and full professors will be considered. We encourage the submission of first-book projects.

The application deadline for all grants is February 1, 2023. For further information, please visit the Mary Jaharis Center website (https://maryjahariscenter.org/grants).

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center, with any questions.

CFP: EMSE 2023: Early Modern Sensory Encounters, Kellogg College, University of Oxford, 8-9 June 2023. Deadline: 15 January 2023

The University of Oxford and the Open University invite papers for our annual interdisciplinary Early Modern Sensory Experiences (EMSE) conference.

Interest in sensory experiences of the past has grown in recent years, with scholars engaging with both interdisciplinary and anthropological approaches in order to better understand historical lived experiences. This annual conference explores the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and/or olfactory elements of particular experiences across the globe between c.1400 and c.1700.

This year’s conference, ‘Sensory Encounters’, welcomes papers that consider sensory experiences as instances or reflections of cultural exchange and which discuss possible methodologies and approaches to this particular subject. Papers may engage with the following themes, amongst others:

  • Transcultural Sensory Experiences: how sensory experiences were integral to encounters and entanglements, with both productive and destructive results.
  • Senses and the City: how sensory experiences were encountered in the city, and how they may have contributed to cities as sites of cosmopolitanism.
  • Mobility and Circulation: How the movement of people, objects, practices and their associated sensorial experiences gave rise to the transfer of similar, or the development of new, sensory experiences. 
  • Subjectivity: How sensory experiences varied according to gender, social class, race or other perceptions of difference.

Papers are invited from scholars working in any discipline, including musicology, art history, cultural and/or social history, religious studies, and book history, on any geographic region between c.1400 and c.1700.

While we understand that scholars may naturally place emphasis on a particular sense or source as a reflection of their own disciplinary background, we encourage speakers to work across senses, sources and disciplines.

Speakers are encouraged to present work in progress and/or address methodological challenges faced in their research.

Please send a 150-word abstract along with a short biography to Leah Clark (leah.clark@conted.ox.ac.uk) and Helen Coffey (helen.coffey@open.ac.uk) by 15 January 2023.

The conference will take place at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, on 8-9 June 2023.

This will be a face-to-face conference. Speakers should therefore ensure that they can attend in person.

Please note that we will not be able to cover travel or accommodation costs for speakers.

Call for Papers: Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval & Renaissance Studies (SMRS), St. Louis University 12-14 June, 2023 (Deadline 31 December 2022)

The Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 12-14, 2023) is a convenient summer venue in North America for scholars to present papers, organize sessions, participate in roundtables, and engage in interdisciplinary discussion. The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and Renaissance studies.

The Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SMRS) invites proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions, and organizing at least two sessions in coordination with each other is highly recommended.

The plenary speakers for this year will be Uta-Renate Blumenthal, of the Catholic University of America, and Lia Markey, of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Submissions are currently open and the deadline for all proposals is December 31, 2022. Late submissions will be considered if space is available. Decisions will be made by the end of January and the final program will be published in March.

For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: https://www.smrs-slu.org/.

Call for Applicants: Juan Facundo Riano Essay Prize and ARTES-CEEH Scholarships (Deadline 31st January 2023)

Please consider applying for yourself, encourage friends/students to apply, and/or circulate via group/departmental email lists or social media. 

** TheJuan Facundo Riaño Essay Prizeis awarded to students and early career scholars for the best art-historical essay on a Spanish theme, kindly supported by the Office for Cultural & Scientific Affairs of the Spanish Embassy in London. Full details are available here

** ARTES also awards a number of scholarships to students working on any aspect of Spanish visual culture before 1900. The awards are made possible by the generous support of CEEH (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica), and further guidelines are below: 

Travel scholarships 

Final year undergraduates and postgraduate students registered for a full or part-time degree course at a UK university may apply for up to £1000 towards the costs of travel to Spain for research purposes (which may include field work, attendance at a conference, or other recognised forms of research). 

£3000 scholarship for PhD students at a UK university 

ARTES offers one scholarship each year to a student registered for a full- or part-time doctoral degree at a UK university. The scholarship is intended to contribute towards the costs of tuition, living and/or research, and therefore students with full funding are not eligible. 

£3000 scholarship for PhD students or post-doctoral scholars who wish to conduct research in the UK 

Doctoral students or those who received their doctorate less than four years before the application deadline may apply for this scholarship provided that they were or are registered for doctoral study at a university in Spain. 

Conference: ‘Trans-National Connections: Vernacular Architecture in Britain & Beyond’, 7th-8th January 2023 (Deadline 15 December 2022)

The Vernacular Architecture Group’s winter conference, normally open to members and their guests only, is this year open to all. 

The conference will explore ‘Trans-National Connections – Vernacular Architecture in Britain & Beyond’ and will be held at College Court, University of Leicester, on 7-8 January 2023. Vernacular architecture studies in the UK have often focused on local places and regions within the nations of England, Scotland and Wales. This conference aims to widen our horizons and look at the connections between architecture in Britain and patterns of building in Europe, Scandinavia and across the Atlantic. Speakers will address the theme of building traditions in Britain and their relationship to patterns elsewhere. Papers focusing on Sweden, Dutch houses, France, and the Channel Islands, sit alongside investigations into roof and wall construction in Britain and Europe, and ‘trans-national’ connections within Britain on the Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Scottish Borders, as well as around the Irish Sea, and in Shetland and the North Atlantic Isles.

We have a packed programme, with 16 talks over two days, including the keynote speech, ‘English’ Building & Landscape in the Northern Atlantic by Matthew Johnson  (Northwestern University), author of English houses 1300-1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life who will discuss ‘English’ Building & Landscape in the Northern Atlantic. 

The full brochure and booking form can be found on the VAG website at https://www.vag.org.uk. The closing date for bookings is 15 December 2022. 

Call for Papers: ‘Encounters: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Art’, 16th Annual IMAGO Conference, 2nd March 2023 (Deadline 1st January 2023)

Encounters between Christians, Muslims, and Jews were manifold in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. In recent decades scholarship has increasingly begun to acknowledge the significance of such encounters for the development of artistic production and visual culture in each of these societies. For example, a shared culture of luxury goods common to the elite of both Christian and Muslim principalities, and the rich dialogue between Jews and Christians pertaining to the production of illuminated manuscripts, have been comprehensively studied. The 16th Annual IMAGO conference consequently aspires to examine the impact of encounters between Jews, Muslims, and Christians on the visual culture and art of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. We hope that the resulting papers will not only shed new light on the artistic, social, religious, and political mechanisms involved in such encounters throughout this period, but will also produce fresh insights into the cultural and artistic outcomes of these encounters.

We invite papers in English from diverse points of view: case studies of iconographies resulting from such encounters; studies of the artistic responses to specific conditions of encounters and dialogues; comparative studies on the connections between the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic worlds, etc. Interdisciplinary studies and those engaging with the production, reception, and interpretation of art produced through such encounters are of particular interest. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Artists, artisans, and workshops
• Luxury goods, portable objects, and trade
• Manuscript illumination
• Visual elements in everyday life and the domestic sphere
• Visual agency in acculturation, mission, conversion,
interfaith debates, and polemics
• Images of Jews, Muslims, and Christians
• Use, reuse, misuse, and appropriation of objects
• Quotation, citation, and the migration of pictorial and
architectural motifs

The conference will take place on Thursday, March 2, 2023, at Bar-Ilan University.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Dr. Gil Fishhof (gfishhof@staff.haifa.ac.il) no later than January 1, 2023. Abstracts should include the applicant’s name, professional affiliation, contact details, and a short CV. Each paper should be limited to a 20-minute presentation, to
be followed by a discussion and questions. All applicants will be notified by January 20, 2023, regarding the acceptance of their proposal. For additional information or further inquiries, please contact Dr. Fishhof.

Organizing committee: Dr. Gil Fishhof, Dr. Zvi Orgad, Prof. Jochai Rosen, Ms. Mazi Kuzi, Ms. Masha Goldin