CALL FOR PAPERS

The Intermedial Eighteenth Century: Textual and Visual Arts, 1660-1832

16-17th September 2020, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Keynote lecture: Prof. Malcolm Baker (University of California Riverside) ‘The Agency and Role of Author Portraits within Changing Notions of Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain’

In conversation: Dr. Lucy Peltz (National Portrait Gallery) and Dr. David F. Taylor (University of Oxford) ‘Interdisciplinary Research across the Textual and Visual Arts’

This AHRC-funded conference will explore intersections between literary and visual culture of the long eighteenth-century. Recent scholarship has started to point to the distinctively ‘intermedial’ nature of Art, Architecture and Design at the turn of the eighteenth century, as “objects and environments... brought a variety of materials into intimate contact, or fused them together entirely” (Mark Hallett, 2016). This conference now seeks to explore how the intermedial nature of the visual Arts incorporated a notable engagement with the textual realm, and to look afresh at works, practitioners and spaces (often aligned with a single discipline) by exploring their multi-media associations. To achieve this, the conference will explore the ways in which different spaces, practices and individuals within the textual and visual Arts came to influence one another, creating dialogues and exchanges crucial to the works that emerged.

We invite papers that work across disciplinary boundaries to explore connections between image and text. This might be through the study of individual writers, artists and performers, through research into specific works (buildings, texts, performances or artworks), through attention to particular spaces (the theatre, the city, the provinces), through explorations of networks of practitioners and/or patrons, or through reflections on theoretical and methodological approaches to creative works. We welcome papers from academics and heritage professionals working in any related discipline including Architecture, Art History, Dance, Design, History, Literature and Theatre Studies.

Please submit 300-word abstracts for the following: Individual papers (20 mins); Objects in focus (10 min object-based presentations); Pre-formed panels (of three papers)

Abstracts, with a brief speaker biography (max 50 words), should be emailed by 30th April 2020 to claudine.vanhensbergen@northumbria.ac.uk

A number of bursaries for travel, accommodation or other incurred costs (including childcare) will be available for postgraduate and early career contributors. Please indicate in your abstract if you wish to be considered for a bursary.

The conference will be held across The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and The Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead. The conference is funded by the AHRC and is part of the Northumbria University project, ‘Learning through the Art Gallery: Art, Literature & Disciplinarity’, which is run in partnership with the Laing and the Shipley.Conference website: http://learningthroughtheartgallery.wordpress.com/conferences/ 

The conference is run in conjunction with the 18th-century Literature and Visual Culture Research Network: http://eighteenthcenturyliteratureandvisualculture.wordpress.com