University of California - Los Angeles, Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies
Editor & Technologist
Institution Type: | College / University |
Location: | California, United States |
Position: | Fellow |
Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowships
The theme-based resident fellowship program, established with the support of the Ahmanson Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust, is designed to promote the participation of junior scholars in the Center’s yearlong core program. Awards are for three consecutive quarters in residence at the Clark. Scholars must have received their doctorates in the last six years, and their research should pertain to the announced theme. Fellows are expected to make a substantive contribution to the Center’s workshops and seminars. The Core Program for 2018–19 is:
Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization
organized by Bronwen Wilson (UCLA) and Angela Vanhaelen (McGill University)
co-sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant
Narratives of colonialism, empire building, and religious mission—of center, periphery and globalization—have been under revision in recent years in order to nuance our understanding of what were immensely complex and multi-faceted phenomena. This year’s conference series will shift the focus from governing regimes and institutions to ways in which creative forms and practices were intertwined in the dynamics of materiality and early modern globalism. Such a proposition directs analysis toward the flow of materials, artefacts, and motifs across borders and bodies of water. It attends to experimentation that activated and responded to this traffic in things; it investigates these interactions as constant, on-going processes, thereby bringing innovation, ornamentation, improvisation, and sensation to the fore.
Such interactions were given impetus by an efflorescence of cosmopolitan spaces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are cities, ports, exhibition sites, ships, caravanserais, markets, museums, theaters, and warehouses. They are spaces that are open to becoming something new, provisional instead of fixed in their form; they are not inherently hierarchical nor merely commercial, but inflected by global relations of power; they are spaces in which distance and presence are brought into consideration with each other. They are spaces through which people of diverse ethnicities, faiths, and vocational interests came and went. Allowing for convergences, reorientations, and interconnections, cosmopolitan spaces propelled people and artefacts in unexpected directions, giving rise to new ways of thinking.
These interconnected themes of spaces, materials, and imagination will be examined in three conferences through developing a series of interrelated case studies of movement and migration. These sessions will foster discussion and debate with visiting and local researchers and with the Making Worlds research project (www.makingworlds.net).
The first conference, In Between Spaces, will consider movement, migration, and invention through, between, and within early modern spaces. The papers will explore new uses for, practices in, and configurations of spaces such as inns, ships, caravans, islands, warehouses, deserts, streets, and waterways. Such spaces could be in motion or transitional, both isolated and connected, and open to unpredictable forms of traffic. These spaces have much to teach us about flows and commingling of materials, media, motifs, practices, and people across and between cultures in the early modern world. The second conference, Material Flows, will consider the flows, circuitry, and transformations of materials, motifs, styles, artistic vocabularies, and practices across geographical boundaries. Recent considerations of transnational studies and the global turn have prompted a shift away from area studies, state formation, and fixed borders to take into account concepts such as mobility and cultural entanglement. Papers will take up artefacts and motifs, tracing their circuitry and their paths to explore the implications of global movement and material flows. The final conference turns to “Other Worlds.” These are imaginary places, such as utopias and paradises; sites, like Jerusalem, that have been recreated elsewhere; travel narratives; costumes, performances, and ballets, such as Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) and Daniel Rabel’s designs of Americans for René Bordier’s Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626); and representations of terrestrial and astronomical imagery. Papers will consider ways in which literary, theatrical, theological, mythological, architectural, and geographical forms became loci for imagining and inventing other worlds.
Bronwen Wilson is on the faculty at the UCLA Department of Art History, where she specializes in Renaissance and Early Modern art history. Her current book project, The Horizon and Inscription in Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Imagery, brings to light innovative uses of media and ways in which diverse temporal experiences were materialized as lines. Angela Vanhaelen is professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She specializes in the study of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture. She is the author of The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (Penn State University Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize by Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. She is also author of Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (Ashgate, 2003). In 2012 the organizers co-edited a special issue of the journal Art History, "The Erotics of Looking: Materiality, Solicitation and Netherlandish Visual Culture" (Nov. 2012).
October 12–13, 2018, Conference 1: In Between Spaces
February 1–2, 2019, Conference 2: Material Flows
May 3–4, 2019, Conference 3: Other Worlds
Scholars will need to have received their doctorates in the last six years, (no earlier than 1 July 2013 and no later than 30 September 2019). Scholars whose research pertains to the announced theme are eligible to apply. Fellows are expected to make a substantive contribution to the Center’s workshops and seminars. Awards are for three consecutive quarters in residence at the Clark.
Stipend: $48,216 for the three-quarter period including paid medical benefits for scholar and dependents.
Contact: |
302 Royce Hall, UCLA P: 310-206-8552 |
Website: | http://www.1718.ucla.edu/research/postdoctoral/ |
Primary Category: | Early Modern History and Period Studies |
Secondary Categories: | Art / Art History Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies Geography |
Posting Date: | 11/01/2017 |
Closing Date | 02/01/2018 |