Wednesday, March 10, 2010

New journal: Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture

Visit Contemporaneity online: http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/




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http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Contemporaneity-Historical-Presence-in-Visual-Culture/299991115604?ref=nf



CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture aims to explore how the complexities of being in time find visual form. Crucial to this undertaking is accounting for how, from prehistory to the present, cultures around the world conceive of and construct their present and the concept of presentness visually. Through scholarly writings from a number of academic disciplines in the humanities, together with contributions from artists and filmmakers, Contemporaneity maps the diverse ways in which cultures use visual means to record, define, and interrogate their historical context and presence in time.


For our inaugural issue, we seek submissions from scholars, artists, and filmmakers. Possible topics or areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:


- The concept of the present across time and cultures

- Cultural exchange, temporal disjunction, historical coincidence

- The simultaneity of conflicting kinds of time

- The persistence of the past in the present

- Collecting, the archive, forgery

- Messianic time, circular time, the eternal return, the event,
everyday life, historical time, timelessness

- Teleology, apocalypse, the end of time, the end of art, the end
of history

- Tradition, decadence, renaissance, restoration, avant-garde,
modernization

- Phenomenology of time

- Nostalgia, melancholy, boredom

- Chronophobia and chronomania

- Making time visible, representing time through images and texts,
narrating

- The life of images and reception history

- Treating the present historically

- Historical delays and the acceleration of history

- Methodological problems concerning the writing of art history or
film history

- Periodization


The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2010. Manuscripts should be no more than 6,000 words in length and should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Contributions from artists and filmmakers may take many forms.

Please visit contemporaneity.pitt.edu for more information. To make a submission, click Register and create an Author profile to get started.

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture is a scholarly, peer-reviewed online publication edited by graduate students in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. It is hosted by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D(c)\Scribe Digital Publishing Program


--
Saskia Beranek
Member, Editorial Board, Contemporaneity Doctoral Candidate History of Art and Architecture University of Pittsburgh
104 Frick Fine Arts Building
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
srb43@pitt.edu

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Call for Papers: "Texts and Places"

TEXTS AND PLACES
October 9-10, 2010
Center for Urban and Global Studies
Trinity College, Hartford CT

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT / CALL FOR PAPERS

As part of the growing field of the history of media, including book history, this workshop will explore how the production and reception of the written word in all its forms is shaped by and in turn shapes particular places and their inhabitants.

The workshop will create intellectually coherent panels and discussion groups so that scholars from different fields can engage productively around a central theme or question. Participants will be asked to pre-circulate their papers so that each session can be devoted to an informed discussion of the subject.

Speakers and discussants will include Lisa Gitelman (NYU), Robert Gross (Univ. of Connecticut), John Kelly (Univ. of Chicago), Jonathan Rose (Drew Univ.), and Barbara Sicherman (Trinity College).

We invite proposals for papers that consider such questions as the following:
How does the cultural significance or meaning of texts (including but not limited to books, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, websites, or images) change in different global societies or cultures?
What role have texts played in defining local or global identities?
How do reading and writing affect different members of the same (urban, national, regional, ethnic, global) community?
Is there a relationship between the canonicity of texts and the sacredness of places?
How do texts create or transform real or imagined places?
How do texts create audiences, and what is the relationship of audiences to place?
What are the implications of seemingly placeless digital texts for the definitions of places?
Please send a brief abstract and cv to by March 31, 2010. Direct questions to the same address or to Jonathan Elukin, Christopher Hager, or Seth Sanders at: .

(reposted from SHARP-L)

Virtual Printing Press

A team of scholars led by Ian Gadd at Bath Spa University have constructed a virtual printing press in "Second Life." Videos are also available for those not able or not willing to take the plunge into "Second Life." (I am such a person so I can't report on what the full experience looks like.)

http://www.virtualprintingpress.com/