In their 1910 essay ‘Poetic Principles’, Nikolai and David Burliuk describe poetry as ‘sensible’, arguing that the word ‘changes its qualities according to whether it is handwritten, printed or thought’. Jacques Derrida widens this claim in Of Grammatology (1967), writing that one of the ‘fundamental problems’ when coming to terms with signification is the deployment of ‘diverse forms of graphic substances (material: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable)’, as well as different kinds of styli. How do the material properties of writing feed back into its semantic sense, differing when engraved in stone or tattooed on skin? Are inscriptions in paintings — which are sometimes indecipherable, as in the case of Alexander Nagel’s ‘pseudoscripts’ (2011) — fundamentally different from text in film, the subject of Mikhail Iampolski’s The Memory of Tiresias (1998)? The recent material, object-oriented, and affective approaches to criticism have all sounded the death knell for the linguistic turn’s methodological dominance. While theorists such as Vicki Kirby (2011, 1997) and Stacy Alaimo (2010) have analysed how bodies are inscribed and encoded, less attention has been devoted to the agential and emotional potential of inscription itself. Beyond bibliographic considerations of material culture, how does a body of text impact biological bodies? And how do literature, film, and the visual arts reimagine the boundaries between these two kinds of corpora?

Juliet Fleming begins her Cultural Graphology (2016) with the claim that ‘we do not know what writing is’. We might add to this and observe that we do not know where writing is — and where it is not. A 2014 article in the Journal of Zoology describes how polar bear footprints facilitate chemical communication by means of unique ‘marking strategies’. In L’Incandescent (2003), Michel Serres argues that ice cores extracted from Greenland glaciers are a kind of inorganic writing, similar to what Jussi Parikka calls ‘geological media’ (2015). This special issue of Humanities takes an expanded sense of inscription as its starting point, inviting a variety of approaches. I particularly welcome articles that consider: nonhuman writing, filmic and painterly text, new accounts of gesture and ornament, the history of the alphabet, and how metaphors of information storage play out on different scales (genetic, geological, historical). Following work by Johanna Drucker (2014), I am also invested in media research that — to quote N. Katherine Hayles (1999) — reflects on the ‘entanglement of signal and materiality in bodies and books’.

Deadline for submission of 200-300 word abstracts: 1 February 2018

Notification of provisional acceptance (pending peer review): 15 February 2018

Deadline for submission of full essays: 15 August 2018

This two-day multidisciplinary conference will explore the medium of collage across an unprecedentedly broad chronological range, considering its production and consumption over a period of more than three hundred years. While research on paper collage plays a key role in histories of modern art, particularly of the 1920s and 1930s, its longer history and diverse range of manifestations are often overlooked within art historical scholarship. Though important work is being done on collage at both the level of the individual work and the medium more broadly, this has often overlooked collage’s multitudinous forms and assorted temporal variants. This conference accordingly aims to tackle this oversight by thinking about collage across history, medium, and discipline. Employing an inclusive definition of the term, the conference invites papers discussing a variety of material, literary, and musical forms of collage, including traditional papier collé alongside practices such as writing, making music and commonplacing, and the production of composite objects such as grangerized texts, decoupage, quilts, shellwork, scrapbooks, assemblage, and photomontage.

In so doing, the conference will situate histories of modernist collage in relation to a much broader range of cultural practices, allowing for productive parallels to be drawn between the cultural productions of periods that are often subject to rigid chronological divisions. Reciprocally, the conference will encourage a consideration of collage made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against key concepts and methodologies from the study of modernism and postmodernism, such as the objet trouvé or assemblage. From papier collé to the digital age, the conference will highlight collage’s rich history and crucial role in cultural production over the last three hundred years.

We invite contributions from scholars working in the fields of art history, history, music, material culture studies, and literature. We also welcome and encourage papers from practitioners working in any medium whose practice is influenced by collage, assemblage, and/or montage. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Collage as medium
• Collage, assemblage, montage: terminologies and categories
• Defining/redefining collage
• Making/viewing collage
• Collage and identity
• Collage and intention: chance, agency, intentionality
• Collage and the modern/pre-modern/postmodern
• Collage in art historical writing/literary criticism
• Object biographies
• Collage as political tool
• Collage in space
• Collage in the digital age
• Collage and collaboration
• Processes: collecting, collating, compiling, combining
• Collage in/as music
• Writing/reading collage
• Collage and geography

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, and biographies of no more than 100 words, to Cole Collins and Freya Gowrley at collage.assemblage.montage@gmail.com by 1 December 2017.

The conference is supported by Edinburgh College of Art’s Dada and Surrealist Research Group with the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advance Studies in the Humanities.

Although one of the world's greatest cultural crossroads, the Baltic Sea has often been overlooked by scholars as a site of cultural exchange in favor of exploring national and regional identities. Since the 1990s, the concept of a Baltic Sea Region encompassing the sea and its surrounding land has fostered transnational thinking about the region, transcending Cold War binaries of 'East' and 'West' in an effort to view the area more holistically. Still, common terminology such as 'Scandinavia' and 'the Baltic States', suggests these cultures are mutually exclusive, or, as the case with 'Central and Eastern Europe', ambiguously monolithic.

While historians have been examining the Baltic Sea Region — present-day Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden — as an important center of cross-cultural interaction, the area's visual and material culture, one of the most important avenues of exchange, is often reduced to illustrative examples of historical phenomena. Art historical narratives continue to be tethered to national and ethnocentric approaches, a bias this conference seeks to complicate.

This project (three conferences – Greifswald 2017, Berlin 2018, and Tallinn 2019 – and an anticipated edited volume) emerges from these twin desires: to study the Baltic Sea Region as a cultural crossroads, and to depart from isolated, national/regional narratives. By foregrounding visual and material exchanges and the ideological or pragmatic factors that motivated them, we seek to establish common ground for viewing the Baltic Sea as a nexus of intertwined, fluctuating individuals and cultures always in conversation. We invite papers that engage material/visual culture as conceptual lenses through which to reevaluate the history, meaning, and significance of the Baltic Sea Region.

The 2018 conference focuses on the period 1750-1850. We invite proposals on any relevant topic; possibilities include:

- art education: students/professors at foreign academies
- itinerant artists/craftsmen
- foreign artists at royal courts
- art commerce – agents, dealers, collectors, advisors
- visual and material culture of race, slavery, colonialism, imperialism. Enlightenment theories regarding the 'noble savage'
- relationship between art and science, constructions of 'visual epistemologies'
- impact of print media/books
- artists' travel


Proposals must include (in English):
a) an abstract of maximum 150 words summarizing your argument;
b) academic resume; and
c) full contact information including e-mail.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by discussion. The language of the conference is English. Contributions should be sent to Michelle Facos (mfacos@indiana.edu) and Bart Pushaw (bcpushaw@gmail.com) by 1 December 2017.

Notification of acceptance will be by 15 December. This conference is sponsored by Indiana University-Bloomington, and will be held at IU's Berlin Gateway in Kreuzberg.

The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library was established in 1903. A revised scope has been established for the journal: some of the highlighted areas will be of interest to members of this list. Submissions to this peer-reviewed journal are invited.

Scope of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

The John Rylands Library in Manchester houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library’s special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects.

Areas of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

· Manuscript and archive studies
· Textual transmission and bibliographical studies
· The histories of printing and publishing
· The transmission and reception of the Bible
· The history of religion, with particular regard to evangelical Christianity and the Dissenting and Nonconformist traditions
· Visual culture, including manuscript illumination and the printed image
· Social and cultural history, and the history of medicine

The editors also invite the submission of descriptive articles or shorter notices pertinent to items in the Library collections and those held in other institutions of the University of Manchester. Further information can be found in the Library’s Guide to Special Collections (http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/search-resources/guide-to-special-collections/).

Like their manuscript forebears and counterparts, early-modern printed books incorporated ornamentation such as decorative head and tailpieces, ornate borders and initial letters. They also often included woodcut and later engraved illustrations. These elements formed an essential part of the aesthetics of the book and helped frame meaning for their readers. As well as offering cultural insight, this seam of evidence also offers a formidable scholarly tool to assist in the identification of anonymous imprints and to help in the dating of works. Yet – with only a few notable exceptions – these graphic components, and those who crafted them, have remained under-researched. To better understand this world, and its development, a cross-disciplinary conference will be held in Dublin in May 2018 to reflect on the broad themes of typography, illustration, and ornamentation in early-modern Spain, Portugal and the New World between 1450 and 1800.

Papers are invited from both established and younger researchers which might shed light on any aspect of the conference theme, or which help situate the Iberian experience within a broader European or global context. Papers on manuscript or printed books are welcome.

The conference will coincide with the launch of the latest phase of Iberian Books http://iberian.ucd.ie covering the period 1651-1700. It will also see the launch of Ornamento, an online repository of ornaments and illustrations.

Proposals can be submitted to Professor Sandy Wilkinson, sandy.wilkinson@ucd.ie by Friday 15 December 2017

University of Warsaw and the National Museum in Warsaw, June 28 - 29, 2018
Deadline: Jan 15, 2018

Multiplied and Modified. Reception of the Printed Image in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
International conference, University of Warsaw and the National Museum in Warsaw

Conference: 28-29 June 2018
Deadline: 15 January 2018

Keynote speakers:
Jean Michel Massing (University of Cambridge)
Suzanne Karr Schmidt (The Newberry, Chicago)

The production of printed image consists of a multiplication of a particular design, whereas the consumption and reception of single impressions often involve various modifications. Multiple, but virtually identical woodcuts or engravings reproduce and thus disseminate the original composition, while at the same time they have lives of their own. They have been placed in various contexts, coloured, trimmed, framed, pasted into books and onto other objects. The place of prints in both visual and material culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a continuously growing field in recent scholarship. However, these studies usually focus on the most prominent centres of production situated in Italy, the Low Countries, France and the Empire. The principal aim of the conference Multiplied and Modified. Reception of the Printed Image in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries is to contribute to the research on the beginning and early development of the graphic arts from the perspective of the beholder, while broadening geographically the field of inquiry, i.e. by shifting the emphasis to the regions of Central Europe, the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, Dalmatia, as well as considering the reception of the European prints on other continents.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Practices of consumption of printed images (owners and beholders, reasons for their interest in printed images; collecting and connoisseurship; printed images in public spaces and in households)
- Printed images in the early modern iconography and contemporary written sources
- Print market, copyright and censorship; printed images in confessional disputes
- Reproductive function of printed images and modifications, adaptations and transformations of original designs, matrices and single impressions
- Printmaking and bookmaking (role of illustrations in printed books as compared with handwritten illuminated codices; illustrated books and broadsheets, written commentaries to woodcuts and engravings)
We invite proposals from scholars of all disciplines working on the history of print culture.

Papers should be twenty minutes in length and will be followed by a ten-minute Q&A session.
Please e-mail an abstract of no more than 300 words to Magdalena Herman (multipliedandmodified@uw.edu.pl) by January 15, 2018.

Along with your abstract please include your name, institution, paper title and a brief biography of no more than 200 words. Successful applicants will be notified by February 19, 2018. Please indicate whether you would be interested in further developing your paper for a publication.

Series editor: Dr. Allison Levy, http://www.allisonlevy.com/
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, www.aup.nl

A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.

Visit our website or Facebook page. For more information, or to submit a proposal, please contact Erika Gaffney, Senior Acquisitions Editor, at Erika.Gaffney@arc-humanities.org. Or, visit https://www.facebook.com/VMCseries/?ref=br_rs or http://en.aup.nl/series/visual-and-material-culture-1300-1700.

Please submit full essays of 6,000-7,500 words in Times New Roman 12 pt. font, with MLA citation style, to the guest-editor James W. McManus (jmcmanus@csuchico.edu) by December 31, 2017. Queries or proposed topics are welcomed and can be sent for feedback prior to that date.

This special issue will present new scholarship addressing diverse responses to and reactions against Dada and Surrealism in various regions across America during the period bookended by the two world wars. America became a foster home to both movements that were born in Europe and migrated to America. Transatlantic aliens, each gave shape to dialogical/dialectical exchanges between art and contemporary American culture. Expanding their presence across the continent, both movements, uprooted from their native cultures, found themselves absorbing and in turn being reshaped by the host culture, itself reflecting the diversity of regional characteristics.

Escaping the terrors of the Great War, the Dadaists came first, taking root in New York from 1915 with the arrival of the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and Edgard Varèse. Surrealism, which made its initial appearance in Paris in 1924, by the early 1930s began to insert itself into American culture through the influence of important figures like “Chick” Austin, Julien Levy, Alfred Barr, and Grace McCann Morley. By the late 1930s and early 1940s the destructive forces of World War II pushed artists, writers, and intellectuals out of Europe, scattering the likes of Maya Deren, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Hannah Arendt, Jacqueline Lamba, Laurence Vail, Max Ernst, and Darius Milhaud across the American continent.

During these decades Dada and Surrealism had established a presence, through contributions from exiles/emigrés and their American counterparts. At times both movements were graciously accepted, as with Alfred Barr’s monumental 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. At others they were grudgingly rejected, demonstrated by Clement Greenberg’s acerbic condemnations of Surrealism’s worth.

We are seeking studies that consider ways that Dada and Surrealism pushed up against and/or added to the social and political environment in America during the period bracketed by the two world wars; taking form through a number of lenses – among them the visual arts, architecture, photography, film, advertising, theatre, collectors, dealers, small magazines, journals. writing, poetry, criticism and critical theory.

NOTE: The journal is now published online. This gives authors the opportunity to accompany their essays with visual and audio material drawn from a variety of platforms.

Authors are responsible for securing permission to use images, including any costs. Authors need to submit documentation of permission being received at the time of acceptance.

Give yourself another reason to celebrate the new year by getting your art published in the February print issue of Create! Magazine.

We connect our artists to a larger audience by featuring work in an archival limited edition print, our website, and social media platforms. Create! Magazine is a bimonthly digital and print independent publication for artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs. Our issues have been featured on Apartment Therapy, Stack Magazines, Study Breaks, Secrets of Green, and more.

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2018 GUEST CURATORS: THE TAX COLLECTION

The TAX Collection is a New York based multi-media platform for artists, galleries and creatives. The organization has been featured in Forbes, Vogue Italy, Nylon Korea and more.

Volume editors: Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing
Deadline for submitting a proposal (500 words) and brief bio: 1 December 2017
Notification of submission status: 15 December 2017
Anticipated submission of completed texts: 1 October 2018

Historians of Western medieval, Byzantine, and Islamic art are invited to contribute essays to a volume on the representation of precious metalwork in medieval manuscripts.

The makers of medieval manuscripts frequently placed special emphasis on the depiction of precious-metal objects, both sacred and secular, including chalices, reliquaries, crosses, tableware, and figural sculpture. Artists typically rendered these objects using gold, silver, and metal alloys, “medium-specific” materials that richly and pointedly contrasted with the surrounding color pigments. The visual characteristics of these depicted metal things—lustrous yet flat, almost anti-representational—could dazzle, but perhaps also disorient: they grab the eye while creating a fertile tension between the representation of an object and the presentation of a precious stuff, between the pictorial and the material. A gold-leaf chalice signals its referent both iconically, via its shape, and indexically, via its metal material—a semiotic duality unavailable to the remainder of the painted miniature—and such images might accrue additional complexities when intended to represent known real-world objects.

This volume of essays will take inventory of how manuscript illuminators chose to depict precious metalwork and how these depictions generated meaning. The prominent application of metal leaf is one of the most distinguishing features of medieval manuscript illumination (only those books thus decorated technically merit the designation “illuminated”), and yet, despite its hallmark status, it has rarely served as a central subject of scholarly scrutiny and critique. In addressing both the use of metal leaf and the representation of precious-metal objects (via metallic and non-metallic media alike), Illuminating Metalwork seeks to remedy this lacuna. This volume will enhance traditionally fruitful approaches to medieval manuscript illumination, such as those analyzing text/image dynamics, pictorial mimesis, or public vs. private reception, by considering issues of materiality, preciousness, and presence. By focusing on the representation of precious metalwork, these studies will introduce new paths of inquiry beyond the depiction of actual objects and incorporate analyses of the use and simulation of metallic preciousness more broadly.

We invite essays that represent the full temporal and geographic scope of medieval manuscript painting—from Late Antiquity into the early modern era, from the Latin West to the Byzantine and Islamic East—in order to foster trans-historical and cross-cultural analysis. Possible themes include: chronological/geographical specificities in the representation of metalwork in manuscript illuminations; depictions of precious-metal figural sculpture, including idols; artistic technique and technical analysis (e.g. pigment vs. leaf, and the alloys used therein); the semiotics of metal on parchment; the phenomenology of the encounter; and whether we can speak of “portraits” of particular objects and/or visual “inventories” of specific collections.

Please direct all inquiries and submissions to Joseph Ackley (jackley@barnard.edu) and/or Shannon Wearing (slwearing@gmail.com).