“First Annual UCR Art History Graduate Conference, Saturday, May 12, 2012
‘Traversing Borders’: Call for Papers
Academic scholarship rarely fits neatly into the confines of a single disciplinary label. Many academic studies cross between disciplinary, regional and temporal borders. For example, Italian Renaissance studies examine a geographic region made up of independent city-states that were not, at the time, considered a single region. Anthropologists in Latin America and Asia consider cultures that are inextricably linked with other cultures by trade over hundreds of years. Many musicians cite painters as sources of inspiration, and painters are in turn, influenced by performance theory. When considering the influence of medicine, anatomy and nature on artists, the divide between the humanities and sciences is also blurred. It is the multiplicity of these academic categories that we wish to celebrate with “Traversing Borders.”
Graduate students in any discipline are invited to submit abstracts for “Traversing Borders,” the first Annual UCR Art History Graduate Student Conference, on May 12, 2012. The conference provides a forum for graduate students to question borders and boundaries—to delineate, critique, move through or reconfigure their role in the analysis of art and art history. Contributions engaging any medium (armor, dance, sculpture, print media, photography, architecture, film, painting, performance, etc.), time period, race/ethnicity, gender and region are welcome.
Papers may consider the notion of boundaries and borders in relation to artistic production, historiography, methodology or reception. How does art create, embody and respond to borders? How do artists transgress and navigate racial, political, economic or gendered boundaries? How are boundaries imbued with an ideology marking objects as appropriate to the study of art history? What role do boundaries play in the scholar’s project? What is the role of borders in maintaining ideologies, economies and politics? Do borders always locate difference?
Keynote speaker announcement is forthcoming. The conference will be held at the California Museum of Photography in Downtown Riverside, at the UCR ARTSblock.
Please submit an abstract of 300 words or less and a current curriculum vitae by 5:00PM on March 8, 2012. Applicants will be notified of decisions by March 15, 2012.
Submissions should be e-mailed to Traversing.Borders@gmail.com.”
