Call for Papers for a Workshop:

 
The Ambient Interior in the United States During the Long Nineteenth Century
sponsored by Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

Saturday, February 16, 2019, 1-6PM
School of Visual Arts, New York
 
 

In preparation for a summer 2020 special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, the journal’s editors are organizing a workshop that explores the content and context of actual and represented interiors in the United States during the long nineteenth century. Emphasizing environmental and sensorial interpretations over exclusively visual analyses, we invite papers that address how ambiance, atmosphere, and spatial conditions affect meaning and enframe reception. Paper topics might concentrate on public or private interiors, including artists’ studios, domestic spaces, religious sites, social clubs, or workplaces. How do interiors act as multisensory environments, unifying the visual, the auditory, the haptic, or the olfactory? In what ways do interiors elicit emotion, evoking feelings from comfort to confusion? How do relationships between objects within an interior create meaning? How does moving an object, a collection, or an entire room to a new location alter the understanding of the interior and its contents? Ultimately, this workshop will generate new scholarship on the understudied topic of the nineteenth-century interior in the United States.

Each selected presenter will give a 25-minute paper followed by 15 minutes of group discussion. The papers from the workshop will be revised for publication in a summer 2020 special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide funded in part by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Selected participants will be encouraged (and assisted as needed by journal editors and technologists) to create presentations with audio and moving image components, thereby directly capturing the multisensory qualities of the interiors.

Examples of ways in which participants might incorporate digital components include 3-D modeling; animated GIFs; images with zoom to point features for focusing on details; slide shows; and music/sound components:

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/lemmey-on-from-skeleton-to-skin-the-making-of-the-greek-slave

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn16/taube-on-william-merritt-chase-cosmopolitan-eclecticism

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/droth-on-mapping-the-greek-slave

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/barringer-on-the-greek-slave-sings
 

Deadline for proposals: Friday, October 26, 2018.

Please submit as PDFs: a 500-word proposal with ideas for digital components and a short, 2-page CV for all authors and contributors to Isabel Taube, Executive Editor, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, taubeisa[at]gmail.com.