2018 Byzantine Studies Conference, 4-7 Oct 2018, San Antonio

2018 Byzantine Studies Conference/BSC
Thursday, October 4, 2018 to Sunday, October 7, 2018

The University of Texas at San Antonio/The Historic Menger Hotel, San Antonio

Conference Website: https://www.bsc2018.com/
Preliminary Program: https://www.bsc2018.com/schedule/

The Byzantine Studies Association of North America welcomes interested colleagues and students to attend the 2018 Byzantine Studies Conference in San Antonio, Texas, October 4-7, 2018.  Papers from a wide range of disciplines will be presented, including those connecting Byzantium and neighboring Christian Medieval traditions with Islamic art, architecture, and culture. 

Please consider joining us!

Upcoming exhibition in NYC: Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place, September 14, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place
September 14, 2018 – January 6, 2019

The Bard Graduate Center Gallery
18 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024

Tuesday, Friday–Sunday: 11 am–5 pm
Wednesday, Thursday: 11 am–8 pm

https://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/exhibitions/81/agents-of-faith-votive-objects

Faith is common to all human societies. By focusing on the material artifacts produced with the intention of being offered as acts of faith, Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place, on view at Bard Graduate Center in New York City from September 14, 2018 through January 6, 2019, will provide a perspective on why humans across the globe create these material objects.

Examining votive objects—often created to fulfill a vow or as a pledge and placed at a sacred space or site of communal memory—Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place will look at the things humans choose to offer in their votive transactions and will strive to uncover the most intimate moments in the lives of humans, revealing how our dreams and hopes, as well as our fears and anxieties, find form in votive offerings.

A portion of the exhibition will center on the creation of the votive object from its moment of inception through its construction and memorialization. The place of ephemeral objects, such as food and candles, will also be examined.

Encompassing exquisite works of art as well as those of humble origin crafted from modest material, more than 300 objects dating from 2000 BC to the twenty-first century will be on display. Powerful works from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, representing the majority of world religions, will expose the global nature of votive practices and the profoundly personal nature behind their creation.

Featured works include more than one hundred votive objects from the Bavarian National Museum in Munich, which are unique to the folklore of European culture; a rare ancient anatomical votive from the Louvre; one of the earliest dated votive panel paintings from the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, and loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Contemporary religious and secular objects will include rare votive paintings made by Mexican migrant workers from the Durand-Arias Collection and objects left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, such as army-issue woolen gloves, food rations, and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. 

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Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place is curated by Ittai Weinryb, Associate Professor, Bard Graduate Center, with Marianne Lamonaca, Chief Curator, and Caroline Hannah, Associate Curator, Bard Graduate Center Gallery.

A richly illustrated catalogue edited by Ittai Weinryb and published by Bard Graduate Center Gallery and Yale University Press will accompany the exhibition. Essays will explore a wide spectrum of themes, time periods, and cultures. In addition to Weinryb, authors include Sheila Blair, Suzanne Preston Blier, Jaś Elsner, Diana Fane, John Guy, Fredrika Jacobs, Mitchell Merback, David Morgan, Verity Platt, Mechtild Widrich, and Christopher S. Wood. It will be available in the Gallery and at store.bgc.bard.edu.

Upcoming exhibition in Chicago: Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, January 26, 2019 - July 21, 2019

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa

قوافل من ذهب، شذرات من التاريخ: فن، ثقافة، وتبادل عبر الصحراء الكبرى خلال القرون الوسطى

January 26, 2019 - July 21, 2019

Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time challenges the widely held bias of a timeless Africa that is cut off from the dynamics of world history. This will be the first major exhibition to take stock of the material culture of early trans-Saharan trade and to offer strong evidence of the central but little-recognized role Africa played in medieval history.  Among the diverse materials on view in the exhibition will be sculptures, jewelry, household and luxury objects, manuscripts, and architectural remnants. What unites these materials is their connections to routes of exchange across the Sahara Desert during the medieval period (eighth through 16th centuries).

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time addresses the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe during the critical epoch of the eighth through 16th centuries, when West African gold fueled a global economy and was the impetus for the movement of things, people and ideas across the Sahara Desert to Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Because of the scarcity of surviving intact works from before the 16th century, the early history and material culture of Africa have rarely been the focus of major exhibitions.

More than 100 assembled artworks and archeological fragments will help audiences discover the far-reaching impact of historic trans-Saharan exchange and the overlooked role of West Africa at the forefront of these developments. Using objects as points of entry and inquiry, Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time will interweave the art history, archaeology, history and comparative literature of trans-Saharan trade, situating it within a broad geographical and historical context.

https://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/view/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/caravans-of-gold,-fragments-in-time-art,-culture,-and-medieval-trans-saharan-trade.html

Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art

Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art

The American Council of Learned Societies invites applications for fellowships to support research and/or writing by early career scholars, made possible by the generous support of the Getty Foundation. These fellowships provide an academic year of support for scholars from around the world for a project that will make a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of art and its history.

In the 2018-19 competition, ACLS will award 10 fellowships, each with a stipend of $60,000 plus up to $5,000 for research and travel costs. Awards also will include a one-week residence at the Getty Research Institute following the fellowship period.

Applications are welcome from scholars worldwide without restriction as to citizenship, country of residency, location of proposed work, or employment.

• Applicants must have a PhD that was conferred between September 1, 2013 and December 31, 2017.
• Applicants who earned their PhDs in and/or are currently employed in any humanistic field may apply, so long as they demonstrate that their research draws substantially on the materials, methods, and/or findings of art history.
• Applications must be completed in English by the applicant.
  
  Deadline: October 24, 2018, 9 pm EDT

More information on Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art is available at https://www.acls.org/programs/getty/. Applications must be submitted through the online system at https://ofa.acls.org.

fellowships@acls.org

Upcoming NYC exhibition: From the Desert to the City: The Journey of Late Ancient Textiles

From the Desert to the City:
The Journey of Late Ancient Textiles

September 13–December 13, 2018

The Godwin-Ternbach Museum
405 Klapper Hall
Queens College, CUNY Campus
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Flushing, NY 11367

The exhibition From the Desert to the City: The Journey of Late Ancient Textiles highlights textiles from Late Antique Egypt placed in multiple contexts—original use in 3rd-7th century, modern archaeological rediscovery and influence in the early 20th century, and contemporary reception and inspiration—all with an effort to connect today’s audiences with our communal ancient past.

The exhibition, curated by Warren Woodfin in collaboration with museum directors Elizabeth Hoy and Brita Helgesen, centers on the recent gift of eighty-five textile pieces from the Rose Choron collection to the GTM.

The first part of the exhibition sets the stage for the original use of these textiles, placing them in context with other household and religious objects, all of which provide comparisons for motifs and themes that dominate the textiles: myth, the natural world, and health and prosperity. With a major loan from the Brooklyn Museum, the GTM is displaying two large-scale mosaics of birds and fish, carved architectural stonework, and figural sculptures, the likes of which are rarely, if ever, seen in Queens, let alone for free!

The second part of the exhibition addresses the archaeological discovery of “Coptic” textiles in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Here, comparative works highlight the impact of the rediscovery of these textiles on modern art from the visual to theatrical, including the drawings by Henri Matisse and stagings of Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs.

The third and final section will juxtapose the Late Antique textiles with contemporary works inspired by them. From the Desert to the City will include work by Brooklyn artist Gail Rothschild who has created large-scale paintings directly inspired by the fragmentary condition of the Choron textiles. Figurative works in crochet by Queens-based Caroline Wells Chandler propel stylized late antique figures into bold, humorous, 21st century technicolor. By tracing the reception of the textile arts of the Late Ancient world into the 21st century, the exhibition will attest to their continued vitality as sources of creative inspiration as well as scholarly insight.

As with a number of past exhibitions at the GTM, Queens College’s students are contributing to the research and writing for the exhibition and accompanying catalogue. This was facilitated through an Art History graduate seminar taught in Spring 2018 by Warren Woodfin.

The full color catalogue will feature essays by Jennifer Ball, Glenn Goldberg, Brita Helgesen, Elizabeth Hoy, Thelma Thomas, and Warren Woodfin, along with contributions from Queens College graduate students in Art History.

Exhibition in Montreal: Resplendent Illuminations: Books of Hours from the 13th to the 16th Century in Quebec Collections, 5 Sept 2018 - 6 Jan 2019

Resplendent Illuminations:
Books of Hours from the 13th to the 16th Century in Quebec Collections

From September 5, 2018 to January 6, 2019
Musée des beaux-arts, Montréal

This is the very first exhibition at the MMFA dedicated to the books of hours in medieval and Renaissance art offering a chance to discover an overlooked heritage through a remarkable selection of illuminations and bound manuscripts preserved in Quebec, dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Books of hours were created for lay people and were popularized by the Christian faithful. These manuscripts were, for the most part, personalized and illuminated with miniature paintings―or illuminations―illustrating the life of Christ, the saints or the Virgin Mary. They incorporated a calendar of holy and religious feasts, passages from the gospels and prayers. The result of significant academic research, this exhibition comprises more than 50 artifacts (leaves, complete manuscripts, prints), which offer a closer look of these treasures gathered from seven collections.

An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Université du Québec à Montréal and McGill University.

New on View: Gallery of Medieval and Byzantine Art, Yale University Art Gallery

A selection of important medieval and Byzantine paintings, sculpture, and functional objects is now on view in the Mimi Gates Study Gallery, on the first floor of the Old Yale Art Gallery building.

The new display features artworks in all media ranging in date from the end of the first millennium to the late 16th century, most of which have not been exhibited for 30 years or more. Byzantine-period highlights include a spectacular silver processional cross with gold ornament and niello inlay, possibly from as early as the 10th century, and two icons from the 15th and 16th centuries—one a disassembled, five-panel folding tabernacle—that have only recently been recognized for their authorship and significance.

Also on view is Tino di Camaino’s Three Princesses relief, which is among the Gallery’s masterpieces of medieval sculpture, and incorporates Cosmatesque glass inlay in its background; it is juxtaposed with a recently acquired large marble Cosmatesque panel from Rome. Four newly conserved, large-scale, wooden figural sculptures from Flanders, France, and Spain join better-known carvings in marble, limestone, and alabaster, as well as small functional objects in a variety of media. Illuminated manuscripts include a full page from a distinguished, early 14th-century Bolognese antiphonary and one of the museum’s earliest cutout initials, a rare surviving example of 12th-century painting.

https://artgallery.yale.edu/

CFP: New Directions in Carolingian and Ottonian Art History: Assessing the Field, due 15 Sept, ICMS Kalamazoo

New Directions in Carolingian and Ottonian Art History: Assessing the Field

54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, Michigan
May 9-12, 2019

Session Organizers: Joseph Salvatore Ackley (University of Arkansas) and Eliza Garrison (Middlebury College)

Long marginalized in the anglophone tradition of medieval art history, the study of Carolingian and Ottonian art has recently generated, over the last two decades, a striking chain of pathbreaking studies that have shaped and inflected the discipline in decisive ways. If earlier studies of Carolingian and Ottonian material were devoted to questions of dating, attribution, and the localization of workshops, more recent inquiries have considered questions of gender, representation, materiality, religious reform, temporality, and the role of the artist. As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Adam Cohen’s pioneering The Uta Codex: Art, Philosophy, and Reform in Eleventh-Century Germany, which appeared in 2000, the session organizers seek papers from historians of Carolingian and Ottonian art and architecture that display a broad range of innovative methodological approaches to artworks created in all media. Papers that attend to issues of historiography - a particularly charged and complicated conversation for these monuments - and to artworks created and built at the edges of the Carolingian and Ottonian empires are especially welcome.

To propose a paper, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, together with a completed Participant Information Form (https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions), to Joseph Salvatore Ackley (jackley@barnard.edu) and Eliza Garrison (egarriso@middlebury.edu) by September 15, 2018.

CFP: Transfer of Cultural Products: France and the Mediterranean Area in the 12th-13th c. (Part I and II) - Due 10 Sept; ICMS Kalamazoo

Call for papers
Kalamazoo May 9-12, 2019
Sessions cosponsored by the IMS-Paris and the CESCM Poitiers

Transfer of Cultural Products:
France and the Mediterranean Area in the 12th-13th c. (Part I and II)

The two sessions cosponsored by the IMS-Paris and the CESCM-Poitiers aim to explore the transfer of cultural products between France and the Mediterranean area during the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.

Following the theory of Michel Espagne proposed in the eighties, the notion of “cultural transfer” can be understood in broad sense, as a process of interaction, a dynamics of semantic transformations which results from the passage of a cultural object from one context to another. The transfer can concern material as well as immaterial data: objects, ideas, forms, methods, technologies etc. Within the relations between France and Mediterranean area (notably with the Islamic or the Byzantine world), what kind of transfer of cultural products can we observe? Which/who were the vectors and the “bridges” of these exchanges? Where were the places of mediation? Any object that falls into a new context takes on a new meaning. What processes are involved in the appropriation of an object, its adaptation, what resistance to its integration, what reinterpretation and re-signification? In which way did it transform its new context?

Art historic, archaeological, epigraphic, historic and literary approaches are welcome. Participants are invited to submit papers on the following topics (non-exhaustive list):
- Translation into French; translation from French
- Islamic or Byzantine material objects brought to France
- The role of the crusades in the transfer of objects, texts, or mentality
- The role of pilgrimage in cultural exchange
- The go-betweens who assist in keeping the chain of transmissions functioning
- Hybridity in art forms, music, texts created in a climate of cultural transference

Submission guidelines:
Proposals (title and abstract of 300 words) are due by September, 10th to Estelle Ingrand Varenne (estelle.ingrand.varenne@univ-poitiers.fr).
Proposals will be evaluated by IMS and CESCM's members.

The Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CESCM) in Poitiers is one of the main research institution in Europe for teaching and research in the field of medieval studies. Founded at the end of the 1950’s, it gathers scholars in different disciplines (history, art history, literature, linguistics, archeology, and musicology) and hosts several publications, among which is the journal Cahiers de civilisation médiévale (http://cescm.labo.univ-poitiers.fr).

The International Medieval Society-Paris (IMS) is a non-profit association that welcomes international scholars of the Middle Ages in France and promotes international exchange with French colleagues. It organizes an annual symposium in Paris at the end of June and several meetings with senior scholars and graduate students all along the academic year (http://www.ims-paris.org).

Call for Proposals: Encountering Medieval Iconography at Kalamazoo 2019 (due 15 Sept 2018)

Call for Proposals: Encountering Medieval Iconography at Kalamazoo 2019

Deadline: September 15 2018

Call for Proposals
54th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 9 to 12, 2019

A Roundtable
Encountering Medieval Iconography in the Twenty-First Century: Scholarship, Social Media, and Digital Methods

Organizers: M. Alessia Rossi and Jessica Savage (Index of Medieval Art, Princeton University)
Sponsored by the Index of Medieval Art, Princeton University

Stemming from the launch of the new database and enhancements of search technology and social media at the Index of Medieval Art, this roundtable addresses the many ways we encounter medieval iconography in the twenty-first century. We invite proposals from emerging scholars and a variety of professionals who are teaching with, blogging about, and cataloguing medieval iconography. This discussion will touch on the different ways we consume and create information with our research, shed light on original approaches, and discover common goals.

Participants in this roundtable will give short introductions (5-7 minutes) on issues relevant to their area of specialization and participate in a discussion on how they use online resources, such as image databases, to incorporate the study of medieval iconography into their teaching, research, and public outreach. Possible questions include: What makes an online collection “teaching-friendly” and accessible for student discovery? How does social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, make medieval image collections more visible? How do these platforms broaden interest in iconography and connect users to works of art? What are the aims and impact of organizations such as, the Index, the Getty, the INHA, the Warburg, and ICONCLASS, who are working with large stores of medieval art and architecture information? How can we envisage a wider network and discussion of professional practice within this specialized area?

Please send a 250-word abstract outlining your contribution to this roundtable and a completed Participant Information Form (available via the Congress Submissions website: https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) by September 15 to M. Alessia Rossi (marossi@princeton.edu) and Jessica Savage (jlsavage@princeton.edu). More information about the Congress can be found here: https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress.

 http://ima.princeton.edu/2018/07/16/call-for-proposals-the-index-at-kalamazoo-2019/

New Publication: Microarchitectures médiévales

New Publication: Microarchitectures médiévales

 Jean-Marie Guillouët and Ambre Vilain (eds.), Microarchitectures médiévales: L'échelle à l'épreuve de la matière, Paris, INHA/Picard, 2018, 240 p., ISBN 978-2-7084-1042-8.

This collective work aims the re-evaluation of the forms and concepts of architecture and artistic creation in the Middle Ages. During this period of profound political and religious restructuration, the metamorphosis of European societies has been reflected in an architectural language. The vocabulary of architecture then spread on all kinds of materials and supports, but also on different scales, thanks to numerous exchanges and transfers between buildings, monumental decorations and the usual or devotional objects. This phenomenon of "architecture" gradually blurs the boundaries between architecture, image, and artefact, renewing the modes of addressing the spectator as well as the symbolic repertoire of mystery, authority and interiority.

Microarchitectures médiévales, the first major publication on the subject since the pioneering work of François Bucher, explores the technical and rhetorical processes of medieval microarchitecture in its broadest sense. In addition to the study of artistic monuments such as Gothic cathedrals and their sculptures or the inscriptions of the Alhambra Palace, this last one treated for the first time under the angle of microarchitecture, the collected contributions focus on devotional objects, models and illuminated manuscripts. An important part of the book is devoted to little-known objects, such as episcopal sticks, city seals, or the chivote, these church-formed tabernacles used in Orthodox liturgy.

By re-establishing the dialectical link that articulates miniature and gigantism in medieval thought, the essays in this book renew in depth the thinking of modern and contemporary concepts of scale, value and sublime.

This bilingual and richly illustrated volume contains 15 papers (8 in French, 7 in English).

The authors: Sabine Berger, Paul Binski, Clément Blanc-Riehl, James Alexander Cameron, Sophie Cloart-Pawlak, Alexander Collins, Julian Gardner, Jean-Marie Guillouët, Javier Ibáñez Fernández, Ethan Matt Kavaler, Farah Makki, Anita Paolicchi, Anne-Orange Poilpré, Matthew James Sillence, Achim Timmermann, Frédéric Tixier, Ambre Vilain, Arturo Zaragozá Catalán.

The editors: Jean-Marie Guillouët is a specialist in flamboyant Gothic microarchitecture, artistic transfers in the Gothic period and the socio-cultural history of the technical gesture. He is a lecturer in art history at the University of Nantes.

Ambre Vilain is sigillographer and teaches medieval art history at the University of Nantes. Her thesis, Imago Urbis: Les sceaux de ville au Moyen Âge, has been published in June 2018 (INHA/CTHS).

http://www.inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/collections-imprimees/actes-de-colloques/microarchitectures-medievales.html

CFP: The Middle Ages: What Does it Have to Do with Me? Kalamazoo 2019

Please consider submitting an abstract to this session sponsored by The Material Collective at Kalamazoo 2019:

The Middle Ages: What Does it Have to Do with Me?

What does medieval art, culture, and history have to do with my life; what is the point of knowing this stuff? Immersed in the study of the Middle Ages as we are, we may lose sight of the fact that for many people the material to which we are passionately devoted holds little to no interest. It is our hope that this roundtable discussion can produce some strategies for countering this disengagement.

As we consider how to expand access to and engagement with the field, we invite consideration of the roles identity can play in both academic and popular engagement with Medieval Studies. From its antiquarian origins to today, the field has been shaped by nationalist identities, impulses, and agendas. In more recent decades, scholarly attention to gender, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities has expanded and re-shaped the field and created opportunities for multiple identifications with the past. We also wish to question this paradigm: must engagement be structured by identity?

We welcome contributions treating all aspects of fostering access to and engagement with Medieval Studies both in the classroom and beyond. This includes consideration of the way we as scholars talk about Medieval Studies—where our voices are heard and what we can be heard to say. With humanities fields under constant threat, we may also wish to consider the various publics with whom we might profitably engage. Beyond undergraduate students are the parents, administrators, and legislators whose voices sway what does and does not get taught at colleges and universities; there are also the primary and secondary school students who may enter our classrooms someday in the future.

A discussion of public engagement is also an opportunity to reconsider the way we conceive of our field. Ongoing efforts to decolonize Medieval Studies are essential to the mission of making the field accessible to a more diverse public. This includes engaging colleagues to recognize the need for change as well as the need to support medievalists marginalized by race, LGBTQ identity, or employment status.

Topics for consideration may include but not be limited to: 
• Engaging students
• Engaging the public beyond the classroom
• Medieval Studies and modern identities
• Medieval Studies in the neoliberal academy
• Promoting access to Medieval Studies
• Role of public scholarship within the academy

Please submit abstracts of 300 words and PIF to Rachel Dressler, dressler@abany.edu, and Maeve Doyle, DOYLEMAE@EASTERNCT.EDU, by September 15, 2018.

CFP: Celebrating Reproductions in Plaster, Metal and Digitally (V&A conference)

Call For Papers

Celebrating Reproductions in Plaster, Metal and Digitally: Past, Present and Future:
A Conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum
17, 18 and 19 January 2019

In November 2018 the Victoria and Albert Museum is reopening the Cast Courts after their extensive renovations. Inaugurated in 1873, these magnificent spaces house a plethora of plaster casts and electrotypes reproducing medieval and renaissance monuments from all over Europe, as well as Trajan’s Column from the 2nd century AD. A new interpretation gallery running between the two galleries will interpret the Cast Courts as expressions of the Museum’s historic interest in copies – in particular plaster casting, photography and electrotyping – which has been re-appraised in recent years with the development of digital technologies.

In order to celebrate the re-opening of these great galleries the V&A is hosting a three day conference on Thursday 17, Friday 18 and Saturday 19 January 2019. Speakers are invited to submit proposals. Subjects to be covered will include the functions and fates of historic collections, the uses and nature of reproductions now and in the past - including photography and digital media, as well as plaster casts and electrotypes. The papers presented on Saturday 19 January will draw from the direct working experience of practitioners using conservation, analytical techniques or craft skills to further an understanding of the material, behaviour and deterioration processes of plaster casts and electrotypes.

Please submit a title and short summary of your proposal for sessions to be held on the first two days to Holly Trusted (m.trusted@vam.ac.uk) and/or Angus Patterson (a.patterson@vam.ac.uk). Proposals for the session on the third day should be submitted to Charlotte Hubbard (chubbard@vam.ac.uk) and/or Sarah Healey-Dilkes (s.healey@vam.ac.uk).

The deadline for the receipt of proposals is Monday 3 September 2018. For more information about the cast collection at the V&A please see: www.vam.ac.uk/collections/cast-collection