Thursday, May 17, 2012 – 6:30pm
Istituto Italiano di Cultura – 496 Huron St., Toronto
Infoline: 416.921.3802 ext. 221
Free admission
RSVP by May 17.

For more information and to RSVP, go to:  http://www.iictoronto.esteri.it/IIC_Toronto/webform/SchedaEvento.aspx?id=657&citta=Toronto

QUADERNI DI STUDI INDO-MEDITERRANEI VI (2013), Le Tre Anella: Al crocevia spirituale tra Ebraismo, Cristianesimo e Islam

Dear Colleagues,

The Board of Editors of the interdisciplinary journal Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei is soliciting contributions to its sixth thematic volume, scheduled to appear in 2013. This issue will contain twelve to fifteen essays addressing the theme of the cultural and religious interactions between Hebraism, Christianity and Islam.

For more information, http://www2.lingue.unibo.it/studi%20indo-mediterranei/QSIM6CfP.pdf

Click here for more information.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Art and Its Afterlives aims to address the ways in which the work of art continues
to resonate after its creation. While much art history takes as its focus the initial
facture of the work of art, this one-day symposium explores what happens to
early modern art after the moment of its making. How did early modern works
continue to be created in their display, preservation, and reception from the
moment of their creation on? Papers will examine how art is shaped by its
afterlives – whether these collect, curate, cut up, cut out, copy or correct it – and
the ways in which art both persists and changes through time as a material
object, a field of generative meaning, and a subject of debate and interpretation.
Material, technical and social histories as well as theoretical approaches drawn
from the discipline of art history and other fields of the humanities are welcome.
Accounts from curatorial practice and the field of museology are also
encouraged.

The question of afterlife is an pertinent topic for art history in general, where the
work of art is uniquely tied to a particular assemblage of materials which
inevitably change with time, rendering fraught questions of preservation, the
presence or possibility of copies, the idea of original state, and how a work of art
is staged for a viewer. Less material but no less concrete, the interactions
between the work and the viewer, and between the work and the its assumed
referent are not stable but open to change. The question of afterlife is particularly
relevant for the early modern period, when emergent art markets and cultures of
collection allowed not only the circulation of artworks, but also their appropriation
and adaptation. Taking as its point of departure Bourdieu’s encouragement to
investigate ‘not only the material production of the work but also the production of
the value of the work’, this symposium privileges the afterlives of art and the
alternative histories they present.

Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:
• Histories of collection and display – acquisition and the accrual of value;
assignment of category or genre; travel and re-contextualization; political
appropriation and/or subversion
• Conservation and technical art history – preservation vs. restoration of
past state; hidden layers and the discovery of the underneath; changing
material support
• Reception and criticism –boundary between art and reception;
development of art historical practice; shifting contexts of viewership and
viewer negotiation
• Copy and imitation – changing perceptions of a master’s hand vs.
workshop; forging and faking; serial reproduction; changing conceptions of
emulation and originality; contemporary uses of early modern works and
spaces
• Destruction and embellishment – iconoclasm and the religious image;
revolution and vandalism; disassembly and remaking; framing and reframing
Art and Its Afterlives is the fourth symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern
Department. We invite proposals from scholars and postgraduates for papers
that explore the theme of art and its afterlives in all forms of visual and material
culture from the early modern period (c.1560-1848) including painting, sculpture,
architecture, decorative arts, performance, print media, graphic arts, and the
intersections between them.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words by 1 July 2012 to
laura.sanders@courtauld.ac.uk and francesca.whitlum-cooper@courtauld.ac.uk.

Further details will be posted when available on The Courtauld Institute of Art
website.

The show begins at 8 PM; Professor Katie Larson (Department of English, University of Toronto) will be giving a pre-show chat on both nights at 7:15 PM. For more information, including a link to online ticket ordering, click here

Global Commodities: The Material Culture of Early Modern Connections, 1400-1800 – 12-14 December 2012

This conference seeks to explore how our understanding of early modern global connections changes if we consider the role material culture played in shaping such connections. In what ways did material objects participate in the development of the multiple processes often referred to as ‘globalisation’? How did objects contribute to the construction of such notions as hybridism and cosmopolitanism? What was their role in trade and migration, gifts and diplomacy, encounters and conflict? What kind of geographies did they create in the early modern world? What was their cultural value vis-à-vis their economic value? In short, to explore the ways in which commodities and connections intersected in the early modern world.

We welcome in particular, but by no means exclusively, contributions on:

• specific commodities, luxuries and artistic objects, including traded goods, rarities, objects in cabinets of curiosities and their role in elite and non-elite consumption;

• the role of nodes (ports and ships, custom and auction houses, courts and cities) in the global exchange of goods;

• production for global markets/distant markets, with special reference to issues of design, customization and quality.

For more information:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/globalcommodities/finalconference

Leuven, 4 to 6 December 2013

On the 4th of December 2013, it will be 450 years since the Council of Trent (1545-1563) was solemnly brought to a close. This Council had an enormous impact on developments in religion and politics, not only in Europe but also beyond. An international conference, to be held in Leuven on the occasion of this anniversary, from the 4th to the 6th of December 2013, will first shed light on the Tridentine theology and perspective on pastoral care, as the consequence of both the internal struggle to bring about reform within the Catholic Church and the controversy with Protestant Reformation. Along the same lines, attention will be paid to initiatives subsequently taken by Rome in order to interpret and implement the Council, while at the same time giving shape to the Catholic identity, in confrontation with the Protestant confessions. Further, the conference focuses on three key questions: What kind of changes in the local religious life may be considered as the outcome of the Council? To what degree has the Council contributed, on a European level, to political polarization and confessionalisation? And finally, how were the Tridentine reforms implemented on a more global level, through mission and evangelization? In each of the abovementioned questions, special attention is given to the contribution of the religious orders, in addition to the interplay between the Catholic and the Protestant Reformation. It is the explicit aim of the conference to bring together junior and senior researchers from different disciplines and confessional backgrounds.

http://theo.kuleuven.be/en/research/research_units/ru_church/council_of_trent/

Reading Early Modern English Hands

Tuesdays and Thursdays from May 22-31

10 am – 12 pm

REED and Victoria College, University of Toronto

Fee: $100 for four two-hour classes (materials included)

Materials covered will include literary, administrative and legal documents of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries in a variety of hands; Anglo-Latin is included.

Workshops are taught by Professor Alexandra Johnston and Dr. Abigail Young.

A minimum of five registrants is necessary for the course to run; enrollment is capped at fifteen students.

Queries may be directed to crrs.vic@utoronto.ca

Download the registration form or the event flyer.

Reading Early Modern Italian Hands

Monday 4 June to Friday 8 June 2012

10 am – 12 pm

Victoria College, University of Toronto

Fee: $100 for five two-hour classes (materials included)

Materials covered will include literary, administrative and legal documents of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries in Italian and in a variety of hands.

Workshops are taught by Professor Konrad Eisenbichler (Renaissance Studies and Italian Studies, University of Toronto).

A minimum of five registrants is necessary for the course to run; enrollment is capped at fifteen students.

Queries may be directed to crrs.vic@utoronto.ca

Download the registration form or the event flyer.

533pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-2120-4 $37.00 (Outside Canada, please pay in US$)

Edited and Introduced by Bernadette Andrea.

Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix were among the groundbreaking “female wits” who debuted their original plays for the public stage in 1695–1696. Two of these plays contain explicitly Islamicate themes: Manley’s The Royal Mischief expands on The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia (1686) and Pix’s Ibrahim draws on Rycaut’s History of the Turkish Empire (1687). Continuing this interest, Manley’s Almyna (1706–1707) responds to the newly translated Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704-1717) and Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705) engages the history of Islamic Spain recounted in The Life of the Most Illustrious Monarch Almanzor (1693). These plays have been modernized and annotated in this edition, most for the first time. The edition also includes appendices with excerpts from historical sources and a select bibliography.

“This important edition of plays by Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix brings a welcome gendered perspective on the representations of Islam on the late seventeenth-century English stage. Bernadette Andrea is the scholar who has worked most extensively on this subject. The general introduction showcases her expertise, and serves as an excellent overview and context for the plays presented here. The introductions to Manley and Pix and to the individual plays provide a helpful history of scholarship and criticism; the supplementary texts included in the appendices are well chosen and help to contextualize the works.” – Mihoko Suzuki, Professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Humanities, University of Miami

To order this title with a 20% discount, use this flyer [PDF]. For more information, contact our publications coordinator.