Call for Proposals: Conference Seminar at ACIS 2020 National Meeting

Wednesday, September 11, 2019 - 15:30

Call for Proposals for Conference Seminar at ACIS 2020 National Meeting
University of St. Thomas, Houston TX,  April 1-4, 2020
Visual Culture Approaches to Irish Studies: Bridging Methods and Fields
 
Organizers:
Úna Ní Bhroiméil (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick),
Michael de Nie (University of West Georgia),
Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin),
Mary Trotter (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
 
We invite you to submit to our proposal to create a visual studies seminar at the ACIS National Meeting, Spring 2020.
 
Many ACIS members working with diverse visual culture methodologies see our research as triangulated by our topics in Irish history/culture and our scholarly training as historians, art historians, critics, social scientists and artists.  We hope this seminar will help to create a transdisciplinary network for ACIS scholars using visual studies/visual culture approaches to their research, fostering a dialogue across our diverse fields of study.
 
We welcome papers on any Irish Studies topic using a visual studies/visual culture frame of research. We will select from the submitted proposals 12 participants for the seminar.  We wish to include graduate students, early career scholars, scholars new to visual studies and senior scholars to participate. Each participant will be asked to prepare and share a 12-page (c. 3000 words) paper by March 1, 2020 to the organizers. The organizers will break the participants into sub-groups of 3 persons, and subgroups will exchange papers for comments and suggestions before the conference. During the seminar, each participant will give an 8-minute presentation/overview of their paper, and participate in roundtable and general discussion. The seminar will consist of two panel sessions, and all seminarians will participate in both sessions. The seminar will also be open to all who wish to participate in the discussion.
 
Some overarching issues which may arise in this seminar include:

  • What are some common codes or categories for understanding visual culture in an Irish Studies context across such fields as political history, art history, performance studies, folklore/anthropology, and archeology?
  • By exploring aspects of perceptions and receptions, optics, aesthetics, and economies of the visual, can we develop new insights into if/how vision and visuality have distinct characteristics in Irish Studies?
  • How might ideology be embedded in the visual? 
  • How do Irish visual studies intersect with scholarship on materiality, performativity, textuality, museum and archival studies?
  • How has digitization of the archive, and the proliferation of online image collections, changed the ways we work with and read the visual in Irish Studies? 
  • What research and/or pedagogical practices can we share with one another across disciplines?

If you are interested in applying to this proposed seminar, please send an abstract of approximately 300 words Michael de Nie (mdenie@westga.edu) by October 10, 2019.  Please note: you need to send your seminar proposal directory to Michael de Nie: do not send your seminar proposal to the ACIS conference organizers. All submitters will be informed if they have been included in the seminar proposal at least two weeks before the official conference proposal deadline.