CFP: Visual Theology II, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, 22-22 September 2019

Visual Theology II:

Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: Sacre Conversazioni

St Michael and All Angels Chapel, Marlborough College

21- 22nd September 2019
https://www.visualtheology.org.uk

‘All great art is praise’ John Ruskin

This conference aims to celebrate the life and work of John Ruskin during his bicentenary. This two day event will create a space for theologically engaged conversations about Ruskin, religion and the arts. We seek to focus on Ruskin’s religious and aesthetic writings informed by his relationship with Christianity, as well as examine his influence on those within the Victorian art world, specifically the Pre-Raphaelites.

Whilst Ruskin can be said to be a major proponent of Victorian art writing, with religion underling his mode of approach to many areas of nineteenth century public life and thought, in the twenty-first century we have somewhat of a reversal: our interpretation of religion in the arts challenges the very competencies of disciplines such as art history. Resisting attempts to historically confine Ruskin’s religious aesthetics to the nineteenth century alone, this conference suggests that Ruskin’s voice offers clear and often prophetic insight into many facets of modern image interpretation. Ruskin’s formulations, albeit many faceted, provide not only a means of examining nineteenth century religious dialogues about accessing the divine, modes of prayer, and about public art and public spaces, but also offer a linguistic opportunity for us to take Ruskin into growing scholarship studies such as biblical reception, and into contemporary art practice that draws on the spirituality he invested in visual media.

Approaches are sought that analyse specific Ruskinian or Pre-Raphaelite pictorial representations as they relate to modes of Ruskinian religious art writing and / or theological engagement. We encourage critical questions of the Sacre Conversazioni held between Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites: how did they collectively or individually respond to and reshape religious imagery, what is the significance of their chosen media, what new covenants of image interpretation did they seek and successfully employ, and how critical and conversational were they? Furthermore, we seek to discuss the transference of religious symbols and threads of Catholicism from Italy to Britain, via Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who helped make Venice and Florence a ville toute anglaises. We also ask how best to curate Ruskin’s contribution to the nineteenth century, and in what sense we or other artists receive its Christian perspective as significant?

With this in mind, we anticipate a wide and varied body of visual and theological conversations about sacred art with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites at the core. Proposals might include, but are not limited to:

Divine Designs: art writing in relation to God, faith, and unbelief; seeking truth through representation and naturalism, as well as architecture; explorations of biblical symbols and the iconographic, e.g. Pre-Raphaelitism’s engagement with devotional art.

Responding to and Reshaping Religion: aesthetically confronting theological fluctuations; locating new representations of the faithful and the ‘faithless’; churchmanship and liturgical contexts for visual engagement.

Curating Ruskin, Curating Religion: negotiating desires to neutralise visual representations of the divine in public spaces; Ruskin from the perspective of ‘post-secular’ image practice and criticism; making Ruskin accessible and deconstructing his understanding of divinity for the next generation.

From the Sacred to the Secular: Visualising Discord: the visual record of discordant faith; identifying evocations of spirituality without a faith – e.g. the numinous light filled work of J.M.W. Turner; interpreting anxieties through symbology or biblical reception.

Media Hermeneutics: Ruskin on daguerreotypes, painting, stained glass, etc.; media positioning and their implied or explicit morality; pictorial naturalism and theologies of realism.

Institutional Theologies; exploring frameworks of institutional platforms such as state commissioning of religious art, church commissioning of stained glass, the acceleration of church building, and conscious formulation of national collections.

Conversing with Italy; locating the inheritance of European religious imagery amidst the Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite lexicon; extracting Catholic and / or Protestant liminality in symbology, architecture and fresco.

Deadline extension: AVSA 2016, "Victorian Margins", 7-9 July 2016 (17 Feb 2016)

Extended deadline: Call for papers: AVSA 2016, "Victorian Margins",  Ballarat, Victoria, 7-9 July 2016 (Abstracts now due 17 Feb 2016)
Keynote speaker:  Prof. Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

In 2016, AVSA will join the Australasian Historical Association conference in Ballarat from 5-8 July, with a stream of AVSA papers and Keynote scheduled on 7-8 July, and a program of local sightseeing on Sat 9 July.  This is a welcome opportunity to connect with Australasian colleagues in history with shared interests in the long 19th century, and for AVSA members to visit one of Australia's finest Victorian cities. The conference will be held in Ballarat's historical precinct.  Delegates may wish to allow time to explore local sites such as the Ballarat Mechanics' Institute's extensive library of 19th-century books, periodicals and newspapers.

AVSA's Keynote Speaker will be Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA), on “Homosexual Blackmail in the 1890s,” drawing on research for his new study of Oscar Wilde’s two criminal trials.
Papers (20 minutes) or panel proposals (2-3 papers) are invited on the AVSA conference theme ‘Victorian Margins’ – some possible angles include:

• geographic margins (in the UK; in the Empire; elsewhere)
• marginalised groups (marginalised by ethnicity; class; sexuality; region; nationality)
• temporal margins (1830s; fin de siecle)
• marginalised forms of culture
• economic margins (profits and losses; costs and benefits)
• margins as gaps
• margins as liminal spaces
• marginal values
• marginalia
• margins and centres

The AVSA stream committee welcomes papers relating to Victorian Margins from any discipline in the humanities. Proposals consisting of an abstract (400 words), together with a brief author bio/note of affiliation (particularly for postgraduates) , should be submitted to Meg Tasker m.tasker@federation.edu.au by 17 February 2016.

Those who would like to have their papers considered for an issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies on the theme, please indicate this with your abstract and aim to have the paper in a suitable form for publication as well as oral delivery by the time of the conference.  Thanks!

The Australian History Association theme is ‘From Boom to Bust.’ AVSA members may offer papers on either theme, or neither, but all paper-givers must be financial members of either AVSA or AHA.  Registration details available early in 2016, and venues will be in Ballarat CBD.

Please note that this joint conference is being organised by the Collaborative Research Centre for Australian History at Federation University, with Dr Jolanta Nowak as Administrative Officer.  General enquiries to:  aha2016@federation.edu.au please.

CFP: NAVSA 2016, 'Social Victorians', Phoenix, AZ (2-5 November 2016) [Deadline 1 February 2016]

Social Victorians
November 2-5, 2016
Sheraton Phoenix Downtown Hotel, Phoenix, AZ


Keynote Speakers:
Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester,Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a panel commemorating the anniversary of Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians

The Conference Committee for the 2016 annual NAVSA conference invites proposals for papers and panels on the subject of Social Victorians.

What does it mean to speak of the social in the Victorian era? In what ways were the Victorians social, antisocial, or both at once? What definitions of sociability circulated during the period, and through which structures? What models of sociability vyed, prevailed, and emerged? Topics might include:

Social frameworks and models
Kinship, familial and personal relationships (e.g., friendship, courtship, marriage)
Religion and the social
Social class/economic class and the mingling of classes
Regional, national, and cosmopolitan concepts of sociability
Comparative, revisionary, and colonial forms of the social

Empire as a social or anti-social force
The social in “other” cultures
The transcultural social
Social traditions, rituals, events, displays, and gatherings

Holidays and birthdays
Illness, death, funerals, and practices of mourning and remembrance
International exhibitions as social and socializing sites
Problematic and contested concepts of the social

Antisocial behaviors (e.g., neglect, abuse)
The criminal, deviant, revolutionary, unladylike/unmanly, and un-English
Paranoia, agoraphobia, xenophobia, and social anxiety
Social networks and organizations

Archiving/digitizing as a social form
Academic, scientific, professional, social clubs, societies, organizations, political parties, and advocacy
Social discipline, control, and punishment

Familial models of empire (e.g., mother country)
Restrictions, modifications, and surveillance of the social (e.g., through government, policing, penal system)
Explicit directions for sociability (e.g., etiquette manuals, signs/notices, finishing schools)
Implicit social instruction (e.g., education, legal system, media)
Bans, erasures, gaps, and silences on alternate social forms
Non-human social relations, interactions, and exchange

Sociable objects (and the human)
Sociable non-human animals (exclusive and inclusive of human animals)
Social spaces (e.g., drawing rooms, ballrooms, parks, hotel lobbies, museums, galleries, exhibitions, lecture halls, advertising, the press)
Social ephemera (e.g., visiting cards, menus, invitations)
Art as a social form

Collaboration, editing, publishing, and marketing
Reading and writing practices
The socializing function of the arts, arts criticism, art displays, and spectating (e.g., exhibitions, performances)
Visual, aural, and literary depictions of socialization and marginalization

The deadline for paper and panel submissions is February 1, 2016. For individual papers, submit 250-word paper proposals, along with a one-page CV. For entire panels, submit the above for each paper, as well as a one-page summary of the panel.