Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

Afterwards: Art as Iterative Practice in the Roman Empire

Wednesday, February 12, 2014 - Saturday, February 15, 2014

Location:
Chicago, Ill
United States

College Art Association 2014, Chicago

Organizers:  Diana Ng, University of Michigan-Dearborn dmng@umd.umich.edu; Molly Swetnam-Burland, The College of William and Mary, mswetnam@wm.edu

Often, scholarship of ancient Roman art and architecture focuses upon an artwork or monument’s first creation or construction. But what happens when we explore the histories of buildings, sculptures, or paintings as diachronic and disruptive, and examine their rich and varied afterlives? We encourage papers treating the social use of spaces for ephemeral activities, as well as papers addressing modifications to and re-use of individual artworks. How did Roman buildings come to function differently over time to accommodate new political and social realities? How did durable monuments serve as settings for the display of transitory materials, such as decrees or religious dedications? How did the reworking of sculpture create new relationships between subject and viewer? We invite papers investigating the economic and legal exigencies—such as the impact of cost and the responsibility of maintenance—of secondary interventions in the lives of Roman objects and buildings.

Please send abstracts to Diana Ng or Molly Swetnam-Burland.  CAA individual membership is required of all speakers.  For more information, see the CAA call for papers at http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf

Website: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Mapping the Mediterranean: Space, Memory, and the Long Road to Modernity”

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

11-12 October 2013

Keynote Panel: “The Present and Future of Mediterranean Studies”

Yasser Ellhariry, Dartmouth College

Gail Holst-Warhaft, Cornell University

Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz

Karla Mallette, University of Michigan (chair)

The Mediterranean served as a site of transit, exchange, and interaction for well over two millennia, demonstrating tendencies towards both unification and dispersion. With the onset of modernity, however, linguistic, ethnic, and national boundaries solidified across the region. Language, history, memory, and space itself were literally reshaped by the tools of archaeology, architecture, tourism, mass print, national education, and transportation.

In recent years, scholarship has begun to excavate past connections and exchanges that belie our modern conception of the region, mapping out a diverse – yet united – series of Mediterranean identities centered on the connecting sea.

Mediterranean Topographies, the University of Michigan’s Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mediterranean Studies, is pleased to announce its second conference for graduate students and young faculty. Our symposium attempts to bring this new model – one that is deeply transnational and cross-cultural, yet situated primarily within the ancient, pre- and early-modern periods – into meaningful dialogue with modernity. We will engage the space of the Mediterranean through the cityscape, as seen through the lenses of literature, history, anthropology, cultural studies, architecture, and urban planning. Areas of focus will include (but not be restricted to):

* cartography and spatiality, city planning and historical narrative, architecture and collective memory;

* ideologies of the urban, relationships between city and peripheries (hinterlands, islands, deserts etc.);

* mobility, emigration, immigration, class-stratification, ghettoization, tourism;

* material history, consumption, trade, manufacturing, commodification, fashion;

* remembering the city, memoir, nostalgia;

* gendering and queering the city;

* (de)/(re)colonizing the city;

* and, in general, the destruction, re-construction, and re-imagining of the Mediterranean city space after the spread of nationalism.

Using these foci, we will explore the multiple Mediterraneans that have been built up and torn down since the onset of modernity. In short, this symposium will attempt to address the ways in which pre- and early-modern interconnectivities – both real and imagined – were destroyed, kept alive, or modulated over the long passage into modernity. Although our focus will be upon transitions stretching from the early modern to modernity (c. 1500 to today), we nonetheless encourage work that treats these same issues of urban transformation in the ancient world, especially within a diachronic, comparative framework. We also encourage contributions that focus on methodological debates and innovations for mapping and studying Mediterranean cities.

We seek to bring together work in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. We invite abstracts ranging from 200-250 words that relate to or expand upon the topics suggested above. Submissions are especially encouraged from disciplines such as literature, the history of art, history, anthropology, sociology, architecture and urbanism, gender and women’s studies, queer studies, African studies, and religious studies. Along with your abstract please suggest the category or categories to which you feel your submission is best suited. Please provide your institutional affiliation and mailing address, as well as telephone number. Indicate whether a/v equipment will be needed.

The presentation should be in English, twenty minutes in length (i.e., 10 double-spaced pages) and may address a topic from any relevant period(s) or discipline(s). Deadline for abstract submission: May 15, 2013.

Please direct questions and submissions to the Meditopos symposium co-chairs, Harry Kashdan and Will Stroebel, at kashdan@umich.edu and stroebel@umich.edu.

Theoretical Archaeology Group-USA
Chicago: May 9-11, 2013.

Session Proposals due January 1, 2013
Individual Paper submissions due March 1, 2013

http://tag2013.uchicago.edu/index.html

*** 2013 Theme: “Vision” ***

Inspired by the venue of Chicago, a forcefully planned city shaped by the vision of Daniel Burnham and his political allies that prides itself on the visual assets of its modernist architecture and public art collections, as well as its ability to forecast the economy through the futures market, the theme for this year is “Vision.”

The theme will form the basis of a conversation initiated by the plenary session but participants are urged to interpret it generously and sessions will not be limited by subject.  In its broadest sense, Vision represents a birds-eye view of where archaeology is headed, the vista that TAG attempts to provide through its now world-wide conferences.

Plenary speakers: Susan Alcock, Ruth Van Dyke, and Pamela Bannos.

*** Instructions for submitting a session or paper proposal ***

Session proposals can be submitted through the TAG-Chicago website from December 1, 2012 until January 1, 2013 (http://tag2013.uchicago.edu/reg.html). Session proposals must include a title and abstract (max 400 words), and indicate whether a 1.5 hour or 3 hour time slot is required. Organizers are free to make use of the time slot however they wish (i.e., scheduling discussants, Q&As, or round-table discussion in addition to paper presentations), but should briefly describe the format of the session in their abstract. More creative and non-traditional uses of the time frame are also welcome, but requests for additional AV equipment should be made by March 15, 2013.

Accepted sessions will be posted on the TAG-Chicago website after January 1, 2013, along with the email addresses of the organizers. Potential participants should send individual paper abstracts (max 300 words) directly to the session organizers, by email. Session organizers are responsible for selecting papers, and for sending the complete session roster along with all paper abstracts and titles to the TAG-Chicago committee by March 15, 2013.

Registration is required to submit a session proposal through the website. All participants (e.g., presenters, organizers and discussants) must be registered by March 15, 2013.

Organizers: Dept. of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Co-Hosts: Dept. of Anthropology, Northwestern University; Dept. of Anthropology, University of Illinois-Chicago; Department of Anthropology, The Field Museum
Contacts: For questions about conference registration and how to submit proposals, contact Mary Leighton (maryleighton@uchicago.edu).

“Religion in Pieces”
An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Brown University, Providence, RI
April 27-29th, 2012

The quest to determine the contours and contents of ancient religion has always been a largely constructivist endeavor, subject to the exigencies of preservation. How do we, in our respective fields, approach the problem of fragmentary evidence? How do we construct such elusive categories as “belief” or “ritual” or “praxis” from an insufficient, scattered, or occasionally inscrutable base of primary source materials?

The Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions seeks papers for a conference to be held at Brown University, April 27-29th 2012, on the topic, “Religion in Pieces.” In keeping with the society’s broad interests in religions of the Mediterranean basin over the great chronological expanse from prehistory to late antiquity, we seek contributions from scholars in the fields of Classics, Ancient History, Religious Studies, Archaeology, Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, and Art History. We are particularly interested in papers that present case studies in reconstructing religious practice from fragmentary evidence, or which problematize or lay out the methodological challenges inherent in constructing religion from a paucity of sources. Relevant subfields include (but are not limited to) papyrology, codicology, archaeology, and textual studies of fragmentary or poorly attested sources; especially welcome are transdisciplinary papers which synthesize a variety of textual, archaeological, and art historical and/or material culture sources.

We invite abstracts from 250-500 words, accompanied by a curriculum vitae, to socamr@gmail.com. Deadline for submission is midnight of January 28th, 2012. Participants will be contacted with an invitation to participate by the beginning of March, 2012.