CFP: Princeton Art & Archaeology Graduate Symposium

Jessica Womack Announcement
Location
New Jersey, United States
Subject Fields
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Archaeology, Architecture and Architectural History, Fine Arts

The Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University is thrilled to announce a three-day graduate symposium, “(A)Synchrony: Recurrence, Reversal, and Resistance,” which will be held Thursday, March 26 to Saturday, March 28, 2020.

 

Certain figures, forms, images, methods, and techniques recur in both cultural production and scholarly discourses, often leading to socio-political, historical, or cultural reversals and/or illuminating resistance and dissent. How might exploring these phenomena allow us to broaden our investigations in the histories of art and culture? How do they manifest themselves as synchronies or asynchronies, understood as harmonizations or dissonances of social and artistic production across time, space, and bodies? Answering these questions may help us create analytic frameworks not bound by regions or nation-states, but that stretch across the world, expose the social construction of temporalities, and challenge periodization and other forms of fixed categorization.

 

This conceptual framework may help address vital issues in current debates across particular subfields and disciplines, such as: how we can reimagine the concept of Nachleben productively for our increasingly global discipline; how literary or visual histories have been reused or repurposed to mitigate or rebel against external power structures and cultural paradigms; or how some modern and contemporary artists throughout various diasporas create collective memories by referring to the experiences of their ancestors in their work.

 

Princeton’s Art and Archaeology Graduate Symposium will explore the ways in which recurrence, reversals, and resistance serve as powerful tools in cultural production across disciplines through the conceptual frameworks of synchrony and asynchrony. Submissions from all disciplines are welcomed to engage with these issues by way of, but not limited to, the following broader themes:

  • Cultural heritage used to underscore and legitimize a power shift;
  • Support for or resistance to the empire demonstrated through the appropriation and modification of imperial imagery by those outside of the metropole;
  • The fabrication of visual or material culture to envisage a desired or inaccessible past;
  • The inheritance, construction, and questioning of workshop lineages;
  • Repurposing “classical” or “traditional” imagery or inverting subject matter to destabilize geopolitical, social, and symbolic conventions;
  • Usage of visual tropes as tools to explore and articulate individual identity and positionality;
  • Revolutionary potentialities of retrospection for social and political critique;
  • Re-enactments or critiques of prior exhibitions, objects, or performances

Please submit a working title, an abstract of no more than 300 words, and a two page CV in a single PDF to gradsymp@princeton.edu by Friday, November 1, 2019. Symposium presentations should be no more than twenty minutes in length. Accepted participants will be notified by January 1, 2020, and limited travel funds are available.

Contact Email
gradsymp@princeton.edu