History of Art PhD Conference 2021 – Call for Papers

Sensorial Fixations: Orality, Aurality, Opticality, and Hapticity

Call for papers

History of Art Annual PhD Conference
Friday 19 March 2021
via Zoom

PhD Conference 2021 - poster

Conference poster, featuring ‘Sense no evil’ by Hilde Skjølberg, digital photograph, 2008, https://flic.kr/p/4PUQiB, reproduced under licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Call for Papers

Although we often think of Art History as a predominantly visual discipline, other senses and organs that are linked to sensorial experience(s) appear insistently in the field: from oral transmission of narratives in antiquity to current activism; from religious and mythological images of biting and eating alongside aural traditions of reading aloud to contemporary representations of kissing, speaking, and singing; from medieval martyrs’ reliquaries to the communication of the sound of nature in eighteenth-century landscape painting; from the translation of two-dimensional artworks into theatrical performances to the creation of virtual reality technologies. Indeed, the plural capabilities of the mouth, ears, eyes (and their formal similarities to other orifices), as well as skin and touch have provided artists with an inspiration for creating new politics, new aesthetics, new erotics, and new ethics.

The events of 2020 have further indexed the importance of orality, aurality, hapticity, and visibility in articulating and driving socio-political debates surrounding accessible healthcare, racial injustice, personal freedom, intimacy, and historical accountability.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the mouth has become a symbol of interpersonal care, lethal contagion, and masking. The public health policy of wearing a mask or being seen to wear a mask has led some, anti-maskers in particular, to argue that covering one’s mouth elides civil liberties. In addition, the importance of touch and touching has been renegotiated due to the virus, having an ineffable impact on socio-erotic intimacy.

The multiple, world-wide, protests and marches in the wake of George Floyd’s racially-motivated murder on 25 May 2020, moreover, underscore the cruciality of listening to and centring non-white people and their voices and experiences, and of speaking up against systemic racism, police brutality, and advocating the abolition of policing and reform of carceral systems. We invite papers which centre Black Indigenous People of Colour (BIPoC), their subjectivity, creativity, love, sexuality, joy, and self-expression.

This conference seeks 15/20-minute-long papers that explore art’s relation to or, rather, fixation with sensorial organs and their different functions. We are keen to receive papers on works and themes that may focus, for instance, on:

  • The different abilities or marked impossibility of the mouth to speak, eat, chew, breathe, sing, smile, give erotic pleasure, laugh, etc.;
  • The capabilities of the ear to listen to music, natural and artificial sounds, speech, etc;
  • The presence or absence of signification, signing, sign language, and physically-manifested communication in art;
  • The sensory faculties of the body, considering disability, disfigurement, accessibility, embodiment, and the haptic;
  • Problematizing or considering who has a right to sensory-based pleasure and/or fixation and the relationship between racist, ableist, gender-violent, fatphobic, ageist, homophobic, and transphobic discourses which over- and/or underdetermine the sensate body;
  • Aural, oral, ocular, haptic, and optical sexual pleasure(s) and fetishes including representations at the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, gender, gender expression, age, kink, BDSM;
  • The experience of ocular pleasure, embodied, and experiential ocular viewing, and disruptions of ocular fixation and its primacy.

The conference is open to researchers working on any historical period and on any medium.

Please submit a 300-word abstract to history-of-art@york.ac.uk with the subject-line ‘PhD Conference 2021’ by 5.00 p.m. GMT on Friday 5 February 2021.

This conference is a forum for ideas; please feel welcome to submit works in progress and unpolished papers that relate to the theme of the conference. We are also inviting members of the Department to submit their own artistic creations that relate to this theme in the form of painting, poetry, performance art etc., to showcase their work(s) at the conference. Please submit these with the subject-line “PhD Conference 2021-Artwork proposal.”

Since the conference will be held on Zoom, speakers are not required to travel to York to participate. However, for organisational purposes, we would be grateful if you could detail the time-zone you will be in during the conference on your application.

We look forward to reading your abstracts!

– Cristina, Greg, Kat, Leah, Susie

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