Associate Curator Position - Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art Department at Rutgers University

Please contact Louanne Greenwald (lg900@zimmerli.rutgers.edu) with any inquiries.

An Associate Curator position in the Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art Department at Rutgers is open.

All applicants MUST apply via the link or their application WILL not be considered. This is a university policy.

Posting number: 24ST0284

Close date: 03/07/2024

Posting Link: https://jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/220439

CFP: "Towards Decolonizing Eastern European and Eurasian Art and Material Culture: From the 1800s to the present"

Deadline: November 1, 2022

The world had changed forever after February 24, 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. Before this invasion, it de facto occupied Belarus in 2021 and later used its territory as a launch pad for shelling Ukraine. Currently, all other neighboring countries are expressing their concerns about the future intentions of Russia, which allegedly claims that its borders be reinstated to the former Russian empire or the USSR. The urgency to reassess Russian and Slavic studies is imperative in this outrageous geopolitical situation. The evidence that we should decolonize many subfields, including art and material culture in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, is only growing. 

These political events received immediate attention in the cultural sphere. It triggered the re-examination of identities that were intentionally altered by the Russian imperial and Soviet official narratives. Still, the Russian and Soviet cultural hegemonies created myths concerning the colonized territories, including Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Poland, Finland, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Arguably, this colonial cultural order started in the 18th century when Peter I defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War (1707-1721) and founded a new capital on the Swedish lands and when Catherine II annexed Crimea in 1783. It continued when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned and the Russian empire acquired new western territories and thus changed the political map of Europe. The centrality of the Russian empire was consolidated in the 19th century when imperial Russia settled its dominance in its western provinces and colonized the Caucasus and Central Asia. Revised colonial narratives persisted in the 20th century when the Soviet Union imposed its cultural policies based on the dominance of the “title nation” of Russians over other ethnicities and with the Russian language as lingua franca and Russocentrism as a core cultural discourse. 

 

This volume hopes to re-examine and deconstruct the imperialist history that laid the foundation of Russia’s aggressive geopolitics. We seek contributions to a volume of essays centered on the decolonization of the visual arts and material culture to deconstruct the hierarchies of arts and visual cultures created by the Russian empire and the USSR. In the context of Eastern Europe, post-colonial studies often add the account of the “colonized” without a thorough investigation of hegemony and resistance through time and place. The former provinces of the Russian empire and the republics of the USSR do not fully respond to this approach as Svitlana Biedarieva and Vitaly Chernetsky propose. Therefore there is an urgent need to develop an approach that explains Russia’s colonialist narratives and the cultural resistance expressed by the oppositional voices. We hope to start developing the methodology of  decolonization that answers to Walter Mingolo and Madina Tlostanova’s call to build the “epistemology of exteriority.” We envision this volume as an attempt to find new approaches that inform Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies and reassess the existing framework.

 

The proposed volume asks questions related to the emergence of Russian centrality in the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. However, we are more concerned with re-examining of both the hegemony of Russian culture and the inferiority of cultures that previously constituted both the Russian empire and the USSR. How did visual representations and material culture resist or conform the hegemonic narratives? How were these official colonial accounts created and what spheres did they aim at and why? How did these unequal narratives co-exist and relate to one another?   

 

We hope to receive submissions targeting different geographical regions, including Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic states, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the multiethnic Russian Federation. The case studies that focus on 19th and 20th-centuries and post-Soviet resistance against colonization are especially welcome. We are particularly interested in the following topics but welcome submissions that deal with other aspects of visual and material culture and decentering of cultural heritage: 

 

• Official art, art education and the tension between dominant and colonized voices; 
• Rethinking the histories of collecting and museums through decolonization and the ideas of the restitution; 
• World Fairs as an opportunity for acquiring voice for the colonized ethnic groups and their cultures;
• Photography and print media: the interrelationship between word and image in caricatures, posters, and book illustrations as messages of colonialism and resistance; 
• Dress and textiles as bearers of ethnic identity within the official colonial and imperialist cultures;
• Gendered narratives of decolonization in visual culture and collecting; 
• Arts and crafts movements in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and their revival in post-Soviet period;
• Appropriation of ethnic crafts and symbols into Soviet design and mass production; 
• Architecture as a decolonizing tool. 

 

The abstract should clearly state the author’s argument, outline, and briefly describe the research methodology, and identify the aims of the work. Please provide a short proposed bibliography with your abstract.  

 

Formal invitation to contribute to the volume will be emailed by December 31, 2022. The first drafts of the chapters will be expected by May 31, 2023. The final contributions should be 6,000-8,000 words in length. 

 

Please submit an abstract of the proposed paper of up to 500 words and a short CV by November 1, 2022 to Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary) hanna.chuchvaha@ucalgary.ca and Alla Myzelev (SUNY Geneseo) myzelev@geneseo.edu

CFP: Experiment

 Deadline: December 1, 2022

Dear Colleagues, 

Please see below the call for proposals for the 31st issue of the journal Experiment, which will be dedicated to the theme of the otherworldly in art.

At the turn of the 20th century, Russian and Western intellectuals were much taken by the mystical, the enigmatic, and the transcendental, not least, Helen Blavatsky with her Theosophical quest and Rudolf Steiner with his elaboration of Anthroposophy— the latter, according to Nikolai Berdiaev, being "one of the most interesting tendencies... attracting cultivated people such as Viacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Belyi."  By the early 1880s Russian translations of occult authors, such as Louis Jacolliot, Charles Richet, and Frank Podmore were already appearing, Russian writers like Aleksandr Butlerov with his “Stat’i po mediumizmu" and Aleksandr Aksakov with his Animizm i spiritizm following rapidly . Esoteric periodicals  Rebus, Izida, and Vestnik Teosofii also mushroomed, coinciding with new interpretations of Orthodoxy as well as scientific investigations into the human psyche and the nervous system. In particular, mental illness, as another state of consciousness, formed a cardinal subject of both scholarly and artistic inquiry, a tendency which left a deep imprint on writers such as Leonid Andreev, Anton Chekhov, and Vsevolod Garshin.

 

It was the visual arts, however, which enhanced this spiritual voyage, Bely’s abstract paintings being a case in point. Indeed, the notion of art as a powerful tool for healing and transmuting "reality" and for escaping to "other worlds" preoccupied many accomplished artists of the time, not least, Wassily Kandinsky, Nicholas Roerich, and Mikhail Vrubel’ — whose explorations often intersected with concepts such as the Pythagorean music of the spheres, synesthesia, divination, and telepathy. This intense relationship between Russian Modernism and the higher plane constitutes the central theme of issue No. 31 of the journal Experiment (Fall, 2025) — which welcomes answers, albeit tentative, to the following questions:

 

·  What are the techniques which artists used to explore the unknown? 

·  What drove individual artists towards the "Other" and whence — and whither — did they escape? 

·  How did the pursuit of the spiritual change the creation and reception of art? 

·  In conjuring with the fourth dimension, how did artists elicit the unseen?

·  Which esoteric societies and systems (Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy) were essential to the development of Russian Modernism?

·  Were Russian esoteric societies national or transnational?

·  How did artists treat Demonism, astrology, and Spiritualism?

·  What, for artists such as Vasilii Denisov, Nikolai Kalmakov, and Roerich was the "Other"?

·  Was Russian Modernism in itself an altered state of consciousness?

 

The length of the article is around 4000-5000 words, and the abstract deadline is December 1, 2022.  Experiment, an annual journal devoted to Russian culture, focuses on the movements of the early twentieth century. For more information, please see https://brill.com/view/journals/expt/expt-overview.xml.  

Olga Seliazniova and Ksenia Radchenko

(Guest editors)

Summer Program: univie: summer school for European Cultural Studies

Deadline: June 15, 2021

univie: summer school for European Cultural Studies - Art & History

July 17 - July 30, 2021

The summer school courses provide an introduction into European Cultural Studies. The view of Europe from the outside is mostly dominated by economic issues. But Europe is very much defined by its history and culture. Two key aspects of this preoccupation with the European area will be offered in the summer courses.

The two-week program offers two academic courses taught online. One course deals with history, politics, and everyday life in this area and the second course approaches Europe from the artistic side and examines and analyzes the visual culture in Europe. 

The courses are held by distinguished scholars with international teaching experience. The interdisciplinary lectures will lead to an understanding of European art and history.

The online courses encourage interactive participation. These courses with international participants offer the possibility to discuss European art and history with students from all over the world. 

A welcome session will introduce the participants to the summer school and give them the opportunity to meet informally with the staff and each other. The summer program also includes online excursions. Social online gatherings as well as group work in breakout rooms will encourage intercultural and social exchange between the students. Participants thus broaden their horizon, meet colleagues from different fields of study, and make new friends.

Summer school online program fees are € 675 for one academic online course, or € 1,150 for two academic online courses. The fee includes registration, orientation material, welcome session, introductory course, one or two academic online courses, teaching material, online excursions, and one free transcript.

External students have to pay the Austrian students' union fee of € 20.20 to be admitted to the University of Vienna. 

Having seen the academic program of your university, we believe that the courses offered at the univie: winter school for Cultural Historical Studies would complement your university’s course offerings perfectly.

More information about the univie: summer school for European Cultural Studies can be found at our website at https://shs.univie.ac.at/summer-school/european-cultural-studies-online-program/

The application deadline is June 15, 2021.  For further information or special requests, please contact the Program Coordinator, at sommerhochschule@univie.ac.at. It will be our pleasure to be of assistance and to answer any questions you might have.

CFP: Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe

 Deadline: March 8, 2021

Special Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, Spring 2022

The Haunted Medium: Moving Images in the Russian Empire

Ed. by Oksana Chefranova, Natascha Drubek, and Rachel Morley

Send proposals by 8 March 2021

This peer-reviewed issue aims to expand the discourse on pre-revolutionary moving images from the “kingdom of shadows,” as evoked by Maksim Gorkii in 1896, to an empire of spectres. Gorkii’s powerful metaphor emphasised the immaterial traces that fin-de-siècle culture imprinted on film. The more capacious notion of empire, as a territory both geographical and imaginary, includes other kinds of traces: the numerous diverse presences of early cinema’s forgotten contributors, lost and incomplete films, fragments of archives, and more. The concept of the spectre also emerges as an interdisciplinary method of attending to critical issues surrounding early image production. The spectre both gives life, and even corporeality, to historical ghosts, while also actively communicating across disciplinary boundaries and between the past and the present states of cinema.

Since the 1989 screening of early Russian films at the eighth Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone and the publication by the British Film Institute of the accompanying catalogue Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919, early Russian cinema has become an established field within Russian cinema studies. There exists a significant and varied body of academic work on this period of filmmaking, addressing such topics as the cultural background and reception of cinema in Russia, cinema architecture, the specificities of the early Russian acting style, technical and expressive developments in cinematic language, socio-historical analyses of what the films reveal about late-imperial Russian life, accounts of the roles of various professionals (directors, camera operators, actors and actresses, set designers, screenwriters, writers for the cinema press), and feminist and Freudian readings of individual films. The list of archival rediscoveries continues to grow beyond the best-known names of Evgenii Bauer and Iakov Protazanov, and scholars have also begun to reconstruct lost and incomplete films. Pre-revolutionary cinema has remained largely within the domain of Russian cinema studies, however, lacking a notable influence outside this specialised area.

With all this in mind, this special issue of Apparatus sets out to revisit the early period of cinema in this region from a wide-ranging interdisciplinary and comparative perspective that embraces film history, film theory and media studies. Our aim is to inspire new writing on the early period of moving images in the Russian Empire that exceeds the cinematic and the local, and advances for this area of study a new cross-disciplinary and cross-national reach.

The scope of this special issue is therefore broad – temporally, geographically, methodologically and theoretically. We aim to exceed the limitations of the established period of 1907–1918, by inviting contributions that explore the array of moving images of the ‘long nineteenth century’ and deal with moving images made and shown across all the territories of the Russian Empire, such as Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region, Belorussia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia among others. We seek also to address gaps in our knowledge about the early industry, by bringing to light the contributions of lesser-known people involved in moving images in the Russian Empire, and of those working in less-studied roles. We hope to foreground early cinema's almost forgotten participants, those suppressed by Soviet film history, those overlooked by their contemporaries, and those whose stories have not yet been extracted from the archives: the inventors and pioneers who contributed to the cinema culture of the Russian Empire, which was generated by diverse influences and produced by protagonists from numerous cultural and religious backgrounds. We also particularly encourage papers that apply new theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, ecocritical perspectives, media theory, and archival studies. And we would also welcome proposals that adopt a comparative focus and seek to bring early Russian cinema into dialogue with work in early film studies generally. There have been numerous developments in this area during the past three decades – new approaches to the moving image, such as media archaeology, ecocritical studies of film’s engagement with the environment, and a focus on non-theatrical exhibition, for example – with which scholarship on early Russian cinema has yet to engage systematically.

The proposed title of this special issue – The Haunted Medium: Moving Images in the Russian Empire – suggests additional areas of interest. Its allusion to the motif of haunting has many possible interpretations. It speaks, for example, to the ways in which early moving images were haunted by censors, by the snobbery of those suspicious of technical media, by the incomprehension of those confused by the ambiguities of stasis and motion, and by the prurience of those uncomfortable with the decadent imaginary of death and decay, the tragic “Russian endings,” and the pornographic exploitation of the medium. Thus haunting, and being haunted, emerge as metaphors for the ambivalent reception of the new spectacle as an uncanny medium and for the attempt to grasp the magical, as well as the potential political, power of cinema as a mass medium.

The notion of the ‘medium’ is evocative. It suggests a conceptual anxiety across film and media studies in which the term is understood not simply as a channel for the transmission of information between two or more environments, but also as a distinct socio-psychological setting or environment that facilitates certain types of interaction, while constraining others. The notion of the medium – as something that literally ‘stands in-between’ – invites us to investigate how the ghosts of the past meet the phantoms of the future and to examine the ways in which early cinema resonates with the contemporary state of the cinematic medium. In this themed issue, we hope to reveal a resonance between the beginnings of the haunted medium of film, which coincided with the final decades of a crumbling empire, and the haunting media of the digital and post-digital eras.

Finally, the use of the capacious term ‘moving images’ allows us to expand our focus beyond cinema to include other optical spectacles and visual media, such as lantern shows or the camera obscura.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• the beginnings of optical media in the Russian Empire and their relation to moving images
• moving and projected images that preceded cinema in the Russian Empire: the magic lantern, the camera obscura
• the pioneers and inventors of cinema in Russia before 1907
• photographers and their contribution to the beginnings of cinematography in the Russian Empire
• the Tsar’s family, aristocracy, and cinema
• production studies of early cinema in the Russian Empire
• cinematography and camera operators, including the role of foreign camera operators
• the film studio, the movie theatre, and other spaces of production and exhibition
• non-theatrical forms of exhibition
• film as a medium through which to explore the power of imagination
• the themes of animism and death
• the hauntology of early cinema in the Russian Empire: apparitions, hypnosis, spiritism, mediums, seances and their implications for the history of cinema and the development of cinema aesthetics
• ecologies of the image: cinema and the environment
• film and science
• cinema and the ‘other arts’
• the role of women in the film industry in the Russian Empire (as directors, screenwriters, editors, set designers, colourists, performers, producers, theatre owners, pianists, and so on)
• theories of media (from Russian Formalism to contemporary media philosophy) as tools for exploring early film comparative perspectives on the cinema of the Russian Empire within the context of global silent film
• the international distribution and reception of the cinema of the Russian Empire
• filmmakers’ early international contacts and their traces in film archives worldwide
• the archives of early Russian film as a medium of cultural memory and a tool of research
• curating early cinema produced in the Russian Empire as a cultural phenomenon.

The editors invite scholars at all stages of their career to submit paper proposals for this special issue.

Please send your proposals in English by 8 March 2021 (title, 400-word abstract, 5 references, 150-word bio, contact details, affiliation, if applicable) to: Oksana Chefranova (oksana.chefranova@yale.edu), Natascha Drubek (dr.nataschadrubek@gmail.com) and Rachel Morley (rachel.morley@ucl.ac.uk).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 8 April 2021. The articles (no more than 7500 words, including notes, plus 3–4 images) are due by 15 October 2021. For the article please use this template which you can also download in any format: https://bit.ly/2Mmm61N

 

CFP: Eighth Graduate Workshop of the Russian Art and Culture Group: The Problem of Religious Art in Modernity. Uses and Abuses of the Icon in Russia

Deadline: May 15, 2020 


Location: Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Cologne University
Dates: September 23–25, 2020 (exact dates tbd)

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote: “that species of art can never flourish again which—like the Divine Comedy, the paintings by Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, Gothic cathedrals—presupposes not only a cosmic but a metaphysical significance in the objects of art.” In his usual provocative manner, Nietzsche attracted attention to the problem of religious art in a secular modernity. This issue was already implicit in Kant’s notion of the viewer of the work of art as “indifferent to the real existence of the object of representation.”

The eighth graduate workshop of the Russian Art and Culture Group will consider the deep implications posed by the problem of religious art by examining the various ways in which the icon was adapted in modern Russia to serve different artistic, philosophical, and political agendas.

Suggested topics might include:

• the role of the medieval image in nineteenth-century Russian literature
• the role of the icon in the project of nation-building in late imperial Russia
• the avant-garde’s relation to religious art
• the Bolsheviks’ cultural policy on religious images

Other, related topics are also welcome.

We invite doctoral students, postgraduate researchers, and established academics to submit proposals for 20-minute presentations. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words along with a short biographical note of 100 words by May 15, 2020 to workshop@russian-art.net.

For further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers using the email address above. You will receive notification on the acceptance of paper proposals by the end of May 2020.

Participants will have to organize and cover their own travel and accommodation, but we offer a limited number of small travel subsidies for speakers from Russia or oversees.

Initial idea and organization: Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche, Jacobs University Bremen, Clemena Antonova, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and Ludmila Piters-Hofmann, Jacobs University Bremen.

CFP: Marxism(s) in Art Historiography

Deadline to Apply: July 12, 2019


Conference organized by: the Chair of Art History of Eastern Europe, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Vert.-Prof. Dr. Katja Bernhardt)

In cooperation with: the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture (Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn) and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO, University of Leipzig)

Date of the conference: 31st Jan. – 2nd Feb. 2020

Place of the conference: Humboldt-Universtiät zu Berlin



The historical and dialectical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a complex means of approaching the analysis of social processes that encouraged one to understand and analyse art as a moment integral to these processes. This approach presented an alternative worth taking seriously to art-historical models that had previously dominated discussion; models based on the idea of art as something that developed intrinsically. Nevertheless, it has always been a challenge to adapt Marxist theory for use in art-historical analysis and to link that theory to existing approaches to the subject. For art history, grappling with Marxism meant more than just a need for constant methodological reflection and updating. It was also necessary, and remains necessary, to define the Marxist conception of art itself within the various historical contexts in which it arose. Since Marxist theory aims at achieving social change, applying Marxism has demanded not only that art be set in relation to the social conditions that apply to it, but also to making a critical revision of the history of art and to revealing its social role in the relevant context in each case.


The conference sets out from these starting points. It aims to reflect on the history of Marxist approaches to Art History, hoping to reveal new insights for the wider discipline. It forms the third part in a series of conferences whose task was set as to investigate the history of art history in Eastern European countries formerly under socialist rule. In the wake of the first two conferences, “Art History and Socialism(s) after World War II” (2016, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn) and “Socialist Internationalism and the Global Contemporary. Transnational Art Historiographies from Eastern and East-Central Europe” (2017, GWZO Leipzig), this third conference will make a programmatic break from the geopolitical framework set out up until now. It will thus bring together considerations on Marxist art history that have up until generally been treated separately in accordance with the political systems within which they arose. We believe that the potentials of and the variations between the various different Marxist approaches to art history – both in relation to the concepts that they contribute to art history methodology and in terms of their socio-political functions – can be elaborated using a comparative approach and can thus be subjected to a differentiated critique. The historical beginning of the period for our observations is set roughly around 1945. We would like observations to extend into the period after 1989 and all the way up until the present day, so that we can include in our reflection the response made to what was a fundamentally transformed political situation.


We would like to examine how Marxism was adapted for the purposes of art-historical analysis in each specific historical moment under whatever political system under which it found itself.

• What impulses and demands both from within and outside the subject of art history were available to tackle Marxist theories and/or to subject existing Marxist approaches to art history to criticism? What role did the relevant institutional, local, national and other contexts play in these processes?
• What key points of theory were addressed, what pre-existing concepts were seized upon and what new ones were coined, and what aspects of theory became subject to criticism? How did the actors interlock their approaches with established strategies of art-historical interpretation and/or with discourses and discussions outside the field of art history (for example, on questions of nation, socialism, post-colonialism, feminist theory, etc.)?
• To what extent did appeals to Marxist theories succeed in opening out potential insights into art history and in making a substantial contribution to the fruitful revision, critique and further development of models of art-historical analysis? Have any innovative new models emerged? What critiques were raised against art histories based on Marxism? In what contexts did the concept of 'Marxist art history' remain no more than a hollow formulation that responded to political requirements, inside which other conceptions could be concealed?
• To what extent did the art-historical reflections of Marxist theory succeed in delivering an approach to the critique of the theory itself and/or to the historicization of Marx's understanding of art and/or of conceptions that followed on from Marx?
• How was the concept of 'art' negotiated in this context? Is it possible to identify approaches to a theory of art through these processes? To what extent and on the basis of what theoretical premises were concepts of a comprehensive art theory, Kunstwissenschaft, discussed in connection with Marxism?
• Who were the actors in these processes (from within the discipline and from people involved in culture policy, publishing, etc.)? What forms of institutionalization did such actors use to establish a Marxist history of art? What types of subject-related, social, political criticism were formulated or demanded by that institutionalization?
• To what extent was political or ideological commitment derived from or required of art history on the basis of a Marxist concept of art? How was it, and how was it expected to be, practised?

These questions should be understood as suggestions: specific, object-related elaborations of the issues would be very much welcome. Case studies or cross-sectional presentations would also be positively received, as would reflections on theoretical models and methodological discussions.

The conference will take place in Berlin from 31 January to 2 February 2020 at the Department for Art and Visual History of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Please send your exposé, with a length of approx. 2000 characters, by 12 July 2019 to:
katja.bernhardt@culture.hu-berlin.de

Job: Curator Position, Museum of Russian Icons

Deadline to Apply: Rolling, apply as soon as possible


Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton Massachusetts seeks accomplished, experienced, energetic full-time Curator with expertise in icons, Byzantine or related art field, and working knowledge of Church Slavonic and Russian. Will lead regional and national activities related to the collection, temporary exhibitions, and build the Museum’s academic programs with its Center for Icon Studies, including the Journal of Icons Studies.

Clinton is a small urban community, approximately one half hour from Worcester and one hour from Boston. To apply, email cover letter, cv and salary requirements to krussell@museumofrussianicons.org.

CFP: Questions of Periodisation in Art Historiographies

Deadline to Apply: Mar 24, 2019

Bucharest, New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, November 30 - December 1, 2019

New Europe College - Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest is pleased to announce an upcoming two-day conference on questions of periodisation in the art historiographies of Central and Eastern Europe.

The early stages of research by local historians into the art of Central and Eastern Europe went hand-in-hand with their gradual familiarisation with Western art and art history. These two processes shaped each other, even if the relationship between them was asymmetric, with the search for what was local framed by the knowledge of what was Western. However, the periodisations developed by Western art historians encountered difficulties when applied to artistic production from Central and Eastern Europe. Art historians from these regions needed to refine, ignore or hybridise such periodisations, while still bearing in mind the West as a point of reference, and the desirability of maintaining the idea of a synchronous development with it. In the centre-periphery paradigm, distance from the centre equated temporal belatedness, and/or allowed for alternative periodisations. 

While the usefulness of periodisations in general has been questioned before, the established periodisations of Central and Eastern European art histories have not been systematically compared or criticised. Our conference aims to address this issue, inviting proposals that critically investigate how the art historians writing in or about Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries used periodisations. We are interested in instances when established periodisations (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque etc.) were adapted, adopted or contested, as well as in cases when different, local or regional periodisations were proposed. Comparative perspectives are especially welcome.

Prof. Matthew Rampley (University of Birmingham, UK) will deliver the keynote.

The conference is organised within the ERC project Art Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe. An Inquiry from the Perspective of Entangled Histories, hosted by New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest. Help with travel and accommodation costs may be offered to participants who are not able secure funding from their institutions. There is no participation fee. The organisers intend to publish the conference proceedings as an edited volume.

All papers must be 30 mins maximum. Please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words, together with a one-page CV (with relevant publications) by 24 March 2019. Dr Ada Hajdu, Dr Mihnea Mihail, Dr Magdalena Kuninska and Dr Shona Kallestrup warmly welcome all submissions and queries at arthistcee@nec.ro. Successful applicants will be announced by 21 April 2019.
http://www.nec.ro/data/pdfs/research-programs/Call_ArtHistCEE_2019.pdf

CFA: Graduate Assistantships opportunity

Deadline: January 10, 2019

Dodge Assistantships at the Zimmerli Art Museum for Graduate Study in the Department of Art History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ

The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University offers Dodge Graduate Assistantships to doctoral candidates admitted to the Department of Art History who are committed to research on unofficial art of the former Soviet Union. Established in 2002 with a generous endowment from the Avenir Foundation in honor of Norton T. and Nancy Dodge, this assistantship program provides full tuition, fees, and health benefits, as well as an annual stipend for living expenses, to graduate students (known as Dodge Fellows). Travel funds for research and language study abroad, as well as for participation in conferences, are also available to Dodge Fellows by formal application.

Dodge Fellows are eligible for five years of assistantship funding. During the course of the first three years, students work 15 hours a week in the Zimmerli’s Russian and Soviet curatorial offices; the subsequent two years support dissertation research and writing without any work obligation.

Work at the Zimmerli Art Museum is supervised by Dr. Jane A. Sharp, Professor of Art History and Research Curator for the Dodge Collection, and Dr. Julia Tulovsky, Curator for Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art, with the assistance of other museum staff. The fellows perform a variety of tasks such as curatorial assistance in exhibition and catalogue production as well as administration and collection management. During the third year Dodge Fellows are given the opportunity to curate their own exhibition from the Zimmerli’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection.

Application and Selection Process:  Dodge Assistantships are awarded by the Department of Art History in consultation with the Zimmerli’s Director and staff to incoming graduate students.  Applications for the fall semester are due by January 10^th, 2019. For information about the Dodge Assistantships, contact Professor Jane Sharp at jasharp@arthist.rutgers.edu or russian.department@zimmerli.rutgers.edu.