The Association of Print Scholars invites applications from graduate students and early-career scholars to participate in the upcoming “Objects of Study: Paper, Ink, and the Material Turn” symposium, to be held in Philadelphia from March 30th to April 1st, 2017. APS will provide funding to offset travel and lodging costs so that a scholar can participate in the symposium’s three closed workshop sessions, which will be interspersed with public panels. Workshops will feature hands-on demonstrations of papermaking processes, close study of works in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and technical sessions in the PMA’s paper conservation lab. We invite applications from scholars of works on paper, broadly defined and from any temporal or regional focus, whose work engages or challenges issues of materiality. Emerging scholars who are currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program, or who received their Ph.D. within the last five years, are welcome to apply.

Please send a short statement of interest (300 words maximum) that details how and why participating in the symposium and its workshop sessions will contribute to your current work, along with a CV to info@printscholars.org by January 31. Please contact info@printscholars.org with any questions about applying.

About the Symposium
For more information and to register, please visit http://www.objectsofstudy.com/.

To begin addressing the symposium’s driving questions, participants will present “materialist” case studies of 20 minutes in length, and then to devote at least 5 additional minutes to explicitly addressing how “materiality” operates in their work. What are the analytic goals of a materially focused account? Where and how does such an inquiry begin? And, finally, how do those aims and methods relate to the field’s broader material turn? Talks may engage these questions in relationship to works on paper across time, and from any geographic origin.

Confirmed speakers include:
· Nancy Ash, Philadelphia Museum of Art
· Cathleen A. Baker, University of Michigan Library
· Julie Nelson Davis, University of Pennsylvania
· Michael Gaudio, University of Minnesota
· Barbara Heritage, Rare Book School at the University of Virginia
· Daniel Heyman, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
· Christopher Heuer, the Clark Institute of Art
· Shelley Langdale, Philadelphia Museum of Art
· Barbara Mundy, Fordham University
· Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University
· Elizabeth Savage, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of London
· Madeleine Viljoen, New York Public Library

Please contact Juliet Sperling at julietsp@sas.upenn.edu with any questions about the symposium.