Concordia University Library, Montréal (Québec), Canada, 13 October 2023 (in-person) 

This study day aims to gather researchers around the subject of the printed image since the 1880s. A significant milestone of this era was the widespread implementation of halftone printing, a photomechanical process that eventually enabled the reproduction of subtle hues and gradients in publications with large-scale print runs. 

With particular attention to material bibliography and production techniques, we seek to better understand how illustrations contribute to the formation of meaning and discourses within different contexts from illustrated newspapers to etiquette manuals, from scientific journals to children’s books. As literacy levels continued to rise throughout the twentieth century, this vast array of publications was directed at increasingly diverse communities of readers whose expectations and needs influenced the development of visual culture in print. In turn, the intimate relationships that played out between image and text significantly shaped people’s impressions of the world around them by collating all manner of leisurely, professional, and political information within the space of the page. 

Straddling the disciplines of literary studies, art history, bibliography, and library sciences, the field of illustrated print culture is a privileged inroad to social history. We are inspired by the foundational work of Richard Benson’s The Printed Picture (MoMA, 2008) as well as recent scholarly interest in vernacular media, such as Sarah Mirseyedi and Gerry Beegan’s important contributions on the development of photomechanical reproduction and the Thierry Gervais-edited volume The “Public” Life of Photographs (The MIT Press, 2016). Heeding the call of rare books specialist Roger Gaskell, who has identified the need to develop a “bibliography of images,” we invite contributions in French and English that address any aspect of mass-produced visual materials as well as the diverse industrial or manual processes that enabled their production. 

Proposals may consider topics such as: 

• The development, usage, or impact of various print processes. 
• The importance of the graphic arts, including layout and typography, in the study of visual culture. 
• The historical significance of a given book, magazine, or other kind of illustrated publication. 
• Mass-produced works that rely on printed pictorial sequences such as photobooks, comic strips, or photo-novels. 
• Posters, flyers, postcards and other kinds of ephemera. 
• The invisible intermediaries: designers, prepress specialists, printers, typographers, etc. 
• The evolving roles and statuses of author and illustrator/artist. 
• Readership and reception. 
• Distribution and publishing networks. 
• The study of variants in the context of printed pictorial material: seriality, different editions, and the (ir)relevance of the original image. 
• Approaches to the rapport between text and image in print and their resultant meaning. 
• The creation and mass-circulation of stereotypes or other visual tropes. 
• Theoretical or methodological approaches to multimedia artefacts: how to categorize, characterize and interpret hybrid print objects. 
• The institutional challenges faced by scholars, libraries, and archives alike in collecting, cataloguing, preserving, and making illustrated print culture accessible. 

Proposals for 20 minute papers can be sent to stephanie.hornstein@concordia.ca before 15 July 2023. They should include a title followed by an abstract (200 words max.) and a short biography (100 words max.). 

Contact Info: 

Organizing committee 

Stéphanie Hornstein, PhD candidate, Department of Art History, Concordia University and Concordia Library’s Researcher-in-Residence 2022-2023. 

Michel Hardy-Vallée, PhD (art history), Visiting scholar, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University. 

Contact Email: stephanie.hornstein@concordia.ca

URL: https://library.concordia.ca/about/news/#guid=https://library.concordia.ca/about/news/#i28_Apr_2023_11:44:00_EDT

Call for Papers

 “VISIBLE DESIGNS: The Arts of Race and Capitalism”

 Interdisciplinary Symposium
University of Chicago
October 12-13, 2023

Plenary Panelists: Ashlee Bird (University of Notre Dame), Aston Gonzalez (Salisbury University), Silas Munro (Vermont College of Fine Arts), Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton University)

We are seeking paper proposals for Visible Designs, a symposium that is bringing together researchers in History, Literature, American Studies, and allied fields (e.g., design studies, art history, others) who are studying the aesthetics of racial capitalism in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present day. Central to our discussion is design as a category for analyzing how people use race to make (and unmake) social lives in spaces of economic production, exchange, consumption, and waste. Our goal is to interrogate the centrality of visual and material culture to better understand how racialized capitalism functions, when it shifts over time, and where it manifests across a multitude of social sites in the American empire.

We welcome proposals for presentations from graduate students, earlier career scholars, and contingent faculty in all areas of the humanities, social science, and the design professions. The conference is organized to foster conversations between established scholars and emerging researchers. Our program will consist of four panels composed of invited faculty and emerging scholars; presenters will be matched with invited faculty according to broad methodological and thematic affinities. We encourage graduate students to propose presentations which reflect ongoing dissertation research. Presenters will be given funding to support travel and accommodations nearby the University of Chicago.

Sponsored by the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture and supported by the Terra Foundation of American Art, Visible Designs will mark the ten-year anniversary of “Invisible Designs: New Directions in the Study of Race in American Consumer Capitalism,” a conference held at the University of Chicago in October 2013. Whereas our first conference emphasized the “hidden” dimensions of racial discrimination and inequality in the consumer economy, our sequel probes the overt, spectacular, and artful ways that Americans have crafted racial identities, maintained systems of racial domination, and built anti-racist social movements.

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• The social lives of racialized commodities (iconography, furniture, cuisine, clothing, etc.)
• Racial divisions of labor in craft traditions and artisanal manufacture as well as newer industries of design, advertising, architecture, marketing, and social media
• The lived experience(s) of technologies, algorithms, and systems of racial inequality
• Concepts of work, value, matter, energy, and waste in racial discourses and critical race theory
• The narrative, graphic, and architectural forms that govern the archiving, writing, and curation of histories of racial capitalism
• The administration of race relations and/or racial conflict in cultural industries and institutions

We invite you to submit a 250-word abstract for 20-minute paper presentations, along with a one-page CV, to conference organizers Chris Dingwall (dingwall@wustl.edu) and Korey Garibaldi (Korey.G.Garibaldi.4@nd.edu) by no later than July 28, 2023. Successful applicants will be informed in early August.