Category Archives: Conference

CFP – NASSR 2020 Conference at the University of Toronto – 6-9 August 2020

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Dear Members of the Romantic Illustration Network (RIN):

Greetings! You are invited to submit a paper proposal for the 28th Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The NASSR conference, which will take place at the University of Toronto, Ontario on August 6-9, 2020, will bring together 300-400 scholars to discuss literature, philosophy, politics, art, and culture c. 1770-1840.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://sites.utoronto.ca/wincs/nassr2020

Keynote Speakers:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University)
Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Re-envisioning Romanticism: looking back and looking forward 
  • Visions and the visionary: perception, prognostication, projection, speculation, the speculative
  • Ways of looking: reading, conceptualizing, observing, peeping, gazing, categorizing, examining, recognizing and misrecognizing
  • Visual culture, philosophy, and aesthetics: objects of sight, spectacle, the spectacular, the sublime and the beautiful
  • Reading methods and histories: careful, close, distant, surface; plagiarism, copyright law
  • Print culture in its social, theoretical, and physical aspects (e.g. text, design, structure, layout); manuscripts, letters, journals, scrapbooks, books, journals, newspapers
  • The seen and the unseen: noumena, phenomena, the spirit world, apparitions and appearances
  • Romantic iconoclasm and anti-representationalism; ocularcentrism and “the tyranny of the eye”
  • Visual communication: text, numbers, notation (e.g. musical), images, sign language, placards, banners, flags, gestures, hieroglyphs, emblems, insignia
  • Questions of form and representation 
  • Fashionable looking: costume, hair, makeup, manner, style, taste, places to see and be seen
  • Visualizing gender and sexuality: identity, performance, politics 
  • Visual and scenic arts: sculpture, painting, illustration, graphic satire, print shops, pornography, broadsheets, dioramas, panoramas, architectural and landscape design
  • Theatre and performing arts: set design, lighting, visual effects, costume, body movement, dance, pantomime, attitudes, tableaux vivants
  • Art collection and assessment: museums and curation, connoisseurship, formal and evaluative concerns (e.g. light, color, pattern, shape, scale, proportion)
  • Visualizing class: social hierarchies and signifiers (e.g. clothing, heraldry, pageantry), occupational and economic segregation
  • Instruments of looking: lenses, spectacles, quizzing glasses, spy glasses, Claude glasses, prisms, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, orreries, windows
  • Forms of illumination and darkness: lightning, electricity, candlelight, lamps, gas light, spotlights, limelight, torches, fireworks; shade, shadow, twilight, gloom, obscurity
  • Religious vision(s): prophecy, revelation, enthusiasm, sermons and hymns, public and private devotion, natural and revealed religion
  • The science of the eye: vision, optics, visual anatomy, medicine, pathology, disability, blindness
  • Data visualization (e.g. land, economy, population studies): mapping, cartography, geography, geolocation, charts, diagrams, categorization, numerical and pictorial statistics
  • Visualizing race: slavery, racism, racialization, minoritization 
  • Vision and ecopoetics: seeing nature (vistas, prospects, the picturesque); noticing and reading features of land, water, and sky; watching weather and recognizing climate; the animal gaze
  • Envisioning space and place: the local and the global, home and abroad, the peripheral and transperipheral
  • Envisioning (the ends of) empire: imperialism, colonialism, sites and sights of war; decolonization, indigenization
  • Political and military forecasting, strategy, optics, campaigns, battlegrounds, political theatre
  • Imagining the future of Romanticism; strategizing its work in the humanities, in the university, and in society

EMAIL CONTACT: nassr2020vision@gmail.com

POSTER: Please see attached and share widely.

**The deadline for general submissions is 24 January 2020.**

We look forward to receiving your proposals!

Sincerely Yours,
Terry F. Robinson (and on behalf of John Savarese and the NASSR 2020 conference committee)

CFP: ‘Poetry & Painting: Conversations’ – An Interdisciplinary Conference; University of Oxford, 23 March 2020

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CFP: ‘Poetry & Painting: Conversations’ – An Interdisciplinary Conference;

Faculty of English, University of Oxford, 23 March 2020.

You know how

I feel about painters. I sometimes think poetry

only describes.

Frank O’Hara, ‘John Button Birthday’ (1957)

The supposed similarity between poetry and painting was famously characterized in Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica’ by the dictum ‘ut pictura poesis’ (‘as is painting, so is poetry’). Yet in 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing influentially argued for the limits that condition these different art forms — how could a visual scream ever be rendered linguistically?

The intense and ambivalent relationship between the so-called “sister arts” of poetry and painting has long been a subject of critical enquiry. The multiple tensions and affinities shared by these expressive forms are fruitful topics of a discussion that is currently enjoying a revival both within and beyond academia.

Co-organisers Drs Jasmine Jagger and Jack Parlett invite you to share your thoughts on this relationship for a one-day conference in Oxford. This symposium seeks to ignite and develop critical and trans-historical conversations about the interplay between the sister arts. Contributors may consider, but need not be limited to:

  • Ekphrasis and ekphrastic writing
  • Illustration and other “composite” modes
  • Co- and inter-disciplinarity
  • Gender politics
  • Narrative, time and temporality
  • Tone, texture, and style
  • Questions of form
  • Issues of historicity
  • Interrelations between poetry, painting and other forms (e.g. photography and film)
  • Theories of the visual and the gaze
  • Interpretation and revisionism
  • Colour, mood, affect, and play

 

Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers, to be delivered as part of panels of three. Individual proposals (of 250 words), and panel proposals (of up to 700 words), for three papers that interact under a common theme, are warmly accepted. Creative responses are also welcome.

The conference’s plenary speakers have been confirmed as Professor T. J. Clark and Dr Kathryn Murphy. Please send proposals to jack.parlett@univ.ox.ac.uk and jasmine.jagger@ell.ox.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 30 November 2019. The one-day conference will take place on 23 March 2020 at the Faculty of English, Oxford. For more information, please visit www.poetryandpainting.co.uk. We welcome you to disseminate this CFP widely. This conference is organised in association with the Faculty of English, Oxford.

CfP: Illustration Studies: New Approaches, New Directions

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Illustration Studies: New Approaches, New Directions

The Sixth ILLUSTR4TIO Conference

London, U.K.

22-24 April 2020

 

Plenary Speakers

Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London)

Julia Thomas (Cardiff University)

Co-organisers: Christina Ionescu (Mount Allison University, Canada) and Ann Lewis (Birkbeck, University of London)

Illustration Studies has, in recent years, emerged as a new and vibrant discipline with its own journals, book series, conferences, websites, and research networks. The renewed interest and dynamic research in this field of study follows a period of long neglect by scholars, resulting from the uncertain cross-medial status of illustration and its position between disciplines. Indeed, the frontiers of this discipline remain nebulous and its terminology, key issues, and critical methods are in need of re-evaluation. By its very nature, illustration opens up a number of fundamental questions regarding the relation between text and image, the illustrated book and visual culture, artistry and reproduction.

Is illustration by definition text-inspired and connected to a material book? Can its images also be considered within a uniquely visual field of reference and how does this affect its signifying potential? Should one consider illustration as a form of adaptation? Do theorists, scholars, practitioners, and educators share the same view of illustration? Does the art of illustration deserve more scholarly recognition across disciplines than its utilitarian and commercial products (and how has this changed over time)? Embedded in a context of production and connected to a text to a variable degree, illustration is a medium with its own conventions, traditions, and signifying practices that currently requires in-depth and interdisciplinary reconsideration as an object of study. A re-evaluation of illustration as a medium and of Illustration Studies as a discipline must also take into account new directions in the training that illustrators-to-be receive. All of these questions can be understood historically – so the idea of ‘New Directions’ can be addressed in respect of the contemporary state of Illustration Studies – but also in terms of significant shifts in the way that illustration has been understood and approached in other periods.

Papers that propose a reassessment of illustration across different fields of research, that theorise interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches, or that chart new directions in Illustration Studies, are of particular interest to the conference organisers. Avenues for reflection include, but are not limited to, fresh perspectives on:

  • key concepts in the theory and practice of illustration (including its changing relation to notions of intermediality, intervisual paradigms, and adaptation);
  • the evolving place of illustration (in the history of the book, in the history of art, in the study of visual culture, in literary studies, and/or in the digital humanities);
  • the question of illustration in different genres and media;
  • the changing relation of text and image in illustration: issues of hierarchy, fidelity, intertextuality and intericonicity;
  • the impact of new technologies (contemporary and in the past) on the practice and reception of different forms of illustration;
  • practical applications: e.g. illustration as a means of branding and consumer studies, pedagogical uses of illustration, or the professional training of the illustrator today;
  • illustration in the global context, in different national cultures, or as a cross-cultural force.

In keeping with Illustr4tio’s aim to animate a dialogue between practitioners and critics, proposals are invited from illustrators, authors, printmakers, publishers, curators, collectors, and researchers. Papers can be presented in English or French. Proposals (500 words), accompanied by a bio-bibliographical note (100-150 words), should be sent to Christina Ionescu (cionescu@mta.ca) and Ann Lewis (a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk) by March 15, 2019. (An early decision can be made upon request to support applications for conference travel.) The publication of a selection of revised papers is envisaged.

Scientific Committee:

Sophie Aymes (Université de Bourgogne)

Nathalie Collé (Université de Lorraine)

Brigitte Friant-Kessler (Université de Valenciennes)

Christina Ionescu (Mount Allison University)

Maxime Leroy (Université de Haute Alsace)

Ann Lewis (Birkbeck, University of London)

Call for Papers: ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’ Christina Rossetti and the Illustrated Poetry Book

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Organised between the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth–Century Studies and Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, this two-day symposium will include an opportunity to tour the exhibition ‘Christina Rosetti: Vision and Verse’ at Watts Gallery and a launch of the new digital edition of Goblin Market edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Anthony Harrison.

Keynote
Professor Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Ryerson University) and Professor Antony H. Harrison (North Carolina State University): ‘Visualizing Christina Rossetti’s Poetry in Print, Pigment, and Pixel’

Christina Rossetti’s (1830-1894) poetry has inspired visual artists since it first began to be published in the 1840s. Artists who made designs to accompany her poetry in illustrated books include her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick Sandys, Arthur Hughes, Laurence Housman and later Florence Harrison, Lucien Pissarro and Charles Ricketts. Those who engraved these designs include the prolific Dalziel Brothers firm and Joseph Swain.

This Autumn Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village will hold the exhibition ‘Christina Rossetti: Vision and Verse’, which is accompanied by a new publication Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art (edited by Dr Susan Owens and Dr Nicholas Tromans, Yale University Press). To coincide with the exhibition, this two-day symposium will bring together established and emerging scholars in the field to examine Rossetti’s work in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century illustrated poetry book. How did poets collaborate with publishers and artists in the production of illustrated poetry books? What role does ornament play in the formation of meaning? How did women poets work with illustrators and publishers?

We welcome proposals for papers and will be particularly interested in the following topics:
• The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrated Poetry Book
• The Illustrated Decadent Book
• The Illustrated Poetry Book in the Digital Age
• In the engravers’ workshop: The Dalziel Brothers and the Illustrated Poetry Book
• Ornament, Colour, and Lines: the Visual Culture of Poetry
• Poetry as Collaboration
• Women Poets and Women Illustrators
• Christina Rossetti as a visual artist
• Christina Rossetti and the Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition
• Christina Rossetti, Illustrated.

Abstracts of 350 words and biographies of no more than 100 words should be sent to Tessa Kilgarriff at assistantcurator@wattsgallery.org.uk by Monday 1 October 2018. Papers should be 20 minutes in length.

Postgraduate bursaries
Four postgraduate bursaries are available. Each bursary will cover registration for both days and up to £60 towards travel expenses. To apply for a bursary please send a two-page CV and a 300 word supporting statement in addition to your abstract and biography. In the 300 word statement, applicants should explain the reasons why they are seeking financial sponsorship and how attendance at Rossetti and the Illustrated Poetry Book conference will contribute to their research and professional development. All application materials should be sent to assistantcurator@wattsgallery.org.uk with ‘Rossetti bursary application’ under the subject line by Monday 1 October 2018. Any enquiries should be similarly addressed.

For more information, please click here.

Book and Illustration at the Turn of the Century in Britain + America

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BOOKS AND ILLUSTRATION AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA
A public symposium presented by the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies

Saturday, May 19, 2018 · 1:30 pm
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, DE
 
Free for Museum Members or with Museum admission

In conjunction with the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies’ (FABS) Tour of Delaware and the Delaware Bibliophiles, the Delaware Art Museum will hold “Books and Illustration at the Turn of the Century in Britain and America,” a symposium with three speakers. These talks will focus on illustration and book design—a strength of the collections of the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library. A tea reception will follow.

Please visit www.delart.org/event/books-and-illustration/ for details and registration.

Speakers:

–         “Ouida Illustrated: Commerce, Politics, and Representation in the Illustrated
Editions of Ouida’s Works”
Jesse R. Erickson, Postdoctoral Researcher in Special Collections and Digital
Humanities, University of Delaware

–        “Rediscovering an American Woman Illustrator, Alice Barber Stephens”
Martha H. Kennedy, Curator, Popular & Applied Graphic Art, Library of Congress

–        “Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market: 150 Years of Art & Illustration”
Casey Smith, Visiting Professor of English, West Chester University

This event is sponsored by the Delaware Art Museum’s Friends of the Helen Farr Sloan Library and by the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delware Library.

 

Blake Awakes: Reinvention, Revival and Rylands Collections

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Blake Awakes: Reinvention, Revival and Rylands Collections, 1 May, 1-5pm

The Christie Room, The John Rylands Library, Manchester
This workshop will explore some of the ways in which the artistic vision of William Blake has been reimagined and reinvented in British art and culture, with a special focus on material held at the John Rylands Library.
Hosted by the John Rylands Research Institute, the event builds on previous Blake projects at the John Rylands Library, including the exhibition Burning Bright: William Blake and the Art and Craft of the Book, which explored Blake’s own work as a commercial engraver, and his legacy in the world of the book in the century after his death.
This workshop spotlights other themes relating to Blake and his legacy in material held at the John Rylands Library as part of continuing efforts to unlock Blakean materials in the collections. Topics include Blake himself as a re-inventor in his designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1795-97); reinventing Blake’s Songs in editions of the poems held in Rylands collections; and Blake and counter-culture, represented in modern literary archives held at the Library.
The event is free to attend, and open to all. Booking is essential as places are limited.
This event is funded by the John Rylands Research Institute.
Programme
1-1.15: Introduction (Christie Room)
1.15-2.15: 3 x 15 minute papers + discussion (Christie Room)
  • Lusia Calé (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Disbound, Encircled, Unrolled: Physical and Metaphorical Materialities of the Book in Blake’s Night Thoughts’
  • Colin Trodd (University of Manchester), ‘Codifying Vision:James Smetham’s Monuments to William Blake’
  • Sarah Haggarty (University of Cambridge), ‘Blake’s namby-pamby? Responses in the Rylands Library to the childlikeness of Songs’
2.15-3.30: Collections Session (Bible Room) / Tea and Coffee Break (Christie Room)
The group will be split in half for refreshments and the collections session; the two groups will swap between the activities at 2.50. A virtual tour of William Blake’s Cottage and other materials will be available to view during the break.
3.30-4.45: 3 x 15 minute papers + discussion (Christie Room)
  • David Hopkins (University of Glasgow), ‘The Impact of Machines’: Blake, British Surrealism and the Machine’
  • Douglas Field (Blake & Counter-Culture), ‘Transatlantic Visions: William Blake, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Horovitz’
  • Jason Whittaker (University of Lincoln), ‘Here be Tygers: from composite art to sequential art’
4.45-5: Closing discussion (Christie Room)
 

 

CfP: Character to Caricature, 1660-1850

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Hogarth - Characters and Caricaturas

William Hogarth, Characters and Caricaturas (1743)

Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character (1998) emphasises the cultural capital of figures who are larger than life. ‘Character to Caricature’ aims to build upon Lynch’s transmedia conception to explore the wider narratological and satirical implications of character in the eighteenth century. This conference brings together those working on different conceptualisations of character in the period to ask questions such as: Why were character types so popular in the period? How did the ‘types’ transfer across genres and mediums of print? What can the differing ‘types’ and their interactions with one another tell us about attitudes in the period? We invite papers which look at any aspect of this topic, including: the creation of ‘stock-figures’ such as fops, nabobs, mollies, the Scot and the English John Bull; the use of characters types in dictating and shaping acceptable modes of conduct; the relationship between linguistic configurations of character and visual depictions of caricature; and the significance of character types in relation to the social and political climate of the period.

We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words, for 20 minute papers. We welcome proposals for panels as well as ideas for alternative format sessions.

Please email abstracts, along with a short bio to characterconference18@gmail.com by 18.05.2018

Illustration Studies Seminar – 8 December

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On Thursday, 8 December, Mary Shannon (Roehampton), Julia Thomas (Cardiff) and Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) will discuss their recent work on nineteenth-century illustration as part of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London.

Mary Shannon – ‘Illustration on London’s “Artists Street” 1800-1820’

Julia Thomas – ‘Reading Victorian illustration: word, image, digital’

Luisa Calè – ‘A Dream of Thiralatha: promiscuous book gatherings, and the wanderings of Blake’s separate plates’

The seminar begins at 17:30 and ends at 19:30, and will be held in Room G7, ground floor, Senate House. To book a (free) place, visit the IES website.

19th-Century Women Writers on the Old Masters

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Knowing ‘as much art as the cat’: 19th-Century Women Writers on the Old Masters

The Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies will host a major conference examining the role of English-speaking women as disseminators of knowledge about Old Master paintings and historic painting techniques during the Victorian era on Friday, 10 November at 10am in the Sainsbury Wing Lecture Theatre, National Gallery.

Aims and Scope:
John Ruskin infamously dismissed the art historian Anna Jameson as knowing ‘as much of art as the cat’. However, in recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in women like Jameson as influential interpreters of the visual arts and as writers of art history during the formative years of the discipline. This conference, which capitalises and expands upon this interest, will look afresh at the role of English-speaking women as disseminators of knowledge about Old Master paintings and historic painting techniques during the Victorian era.
While the National Gallery’s first Director, Charles Eastlake, and his male colleagues produced scholarly publications, including museum catalogues, aimed at professionals and connoisseurs, women in his circle and in the following generations typically had a wider reach. They could – and did – speak to specialists, but many chose to disseminate information in more creative and demotic ways. Mary Merrifield, for instance, wrote on historic painting techniques and also published articles about women’s fashion, in which she used the Old Masters as a sartorial guide, illustrating her points with pictures from the National Gallery’s collection.
Among the research questions the conference speakers will engage with are: What was the contribution of British women writers to the emerging discipline of art history, including canon formation, formal criticism and history of techniques and other genres such as exhibition guides and translations? Is there anything distinctive about women’s approach to these fields? A second set of issues we will address concerns women’s networks and relationships – between sexes, between generations, and with professional counterparts abroad  – as well as exploring women writers’ institutional affiliations. Finally, we hope to see new insights emerging at the conference about the reception of women writers’ published work in art history, not least in relation to its reach and audiences and its critical fortune.

London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar

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The Autumn programme of the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar features two sessions of interest to scholars of illustration:

 

3rd November: Historical Fiction

Dr Brian H Murray (King’s College London) and Prof. Rosemary Mitchell (Leeds Trinity)

 

8th December: Nineteenth-Century Illustration

Prof. Julia Thomas (Cardiff) and Dr Mary Shannon (Roehampton)

 

Information, including details of how to book, are available on the Institute of English Studies website.