Ethnography and American Culture in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870-1920

Call for Papers

19th May 2014

University of Kent, Canterbury

Organiser: Dr. Michael J. Collins (University of Kent)

Plenary Lectures by Professors Nancy Bentley (University of Pennsylvania)

and Brad Evans (Rutgers, New Jersey)

Recent scholarship on the relationship between social science and the creative arts in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era USA has sought to question more traditional understandings of the era as the moment when scientific inquiry and artistic expression finally “broke” from one other. The perception that ethnography became a scientific discipline whose reach extended solely to universities and specialist periodicals is belied by the period’s rich and vibrant use of ethnographic materials and concepts in a huge variety of different artistic and cultural settings, including literature and mass-market periodicals (Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century), early film and photographic exhibitions, illustration, design, and architecture.

In other words, renewed attention has begun to be paid not just to the work of Gilded Age and Progressive anthropologists within their own institutional and disciplinary contexts, but how that work was diffused and circulated in the period’s popular culture. These questions of diffusion invariably raise further questions relating to the dangers implicit in the cultural appropriation, aestheticisation or marketisation of ethnographic subjects.

This one-day symposium will attempt to unite literary studies and print culture with intellectual history, anthropology, the history of science and visual culture studies in order to explore how mainstream media related to emergent social-scientific disciplines in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era United States. As such, we welcome proposals for 20 minute papers on any topics related to the themes and concerns of the conference.

Please send a CV, brief biography and an abstract of no more than 300 words to: ethnographyandamericanculture@kent.ac.uk by April 17^th 2014.

The symposium will conclude with the first British screening of a new version of the American photographer Edward Curtis’s important, 1914, silent feature film, In the Land of the Head Hunters (the first major motion picture to star Native North Americans) at the Gulbenkian Cinema on The University of Kent campus. Based on recent archival research, in 2008 a collaborative team led by Aaron Glass (now at the Bard Graduate Center), Brad Evans (Rutgers), and Andrea Sanborn (of the U’mista Cultural Centre in BC) oversaw a new restoration of the film that returned the film’s original title, title cards, long-missing footage, color tinting, initial publicity graphics, and original musical score—now thought to be the earliest extant original feature-length film score in America.

http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/

Professor Brad Evans, who served on the team restoring the film, will be providing an introductory lecture. A Q&A will follow the screening.

Sponsored by The School of English, Centre for American Studies, and Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Objects of Modernity

Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity

The University of Birmingham, 23-24 June 2014

Confirmed Keynote: Dr Ulrika Maude (University of Bristol)

 Conference blog: http://objectsofmodernity.wordpress.com/

What were the objects that shaped modernity? How did they function? Who created them, used them and reflected on their significance?

This two-day conference, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at The University of Birmingham and partially funded by the British Academy, seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines in order to reflect upon a cultural history of modernity by way of its objects. This burgeoning field of study, which encompasses scholarship on material cultures, the history of technology, social theory and psychoanalysis and which has been pioneered by the ‘cultural phenomenology’ of Steven Connor and the ‘thing theory’ of Bill Brown amongst others, has spawned new, interdisciplinary research from literary critics, art historians, philosophers, sociologists and cultural historians. Yet this work has often not been drawn together in such a way as to reflect upon its specific significance as a subject of study or its relevance for more traditional forms of historical analysis. Answering the question of how a particular object should be read entails an assumption about its readable qualities and interpretive value. Reflecting upon the key interpretive tools that allow objects to become meaningful in this way will therefore be a fundamental component of the conference and, while the nature of the final panels cannot be predicted in detail, it is envisaged that several methodological or thematic strands will run throughout. These will include, but are not limited to:

• The Phenomenal. How do ‘the things themselves’ of phenomenology shape our being-in-the-world? How do they throw us into a world of cultural practices that make our experience precisely what it is?
• The Phantasmagoric. How do objects both display and hide their inherent traits? How do they circulate? Who possesses them?
• Obsolescence and Waste. What happens when apparently ‘modern’ objects become obsolete? What kind of an object is rubbish?
• The Materiality of Art. What kind of object is the book, painting or sculpture? How does its ‘thingness’ mediate the experience of art?
• Subject and Object. In what ways can human bodies (or their parts) be considered objects? How have technological innovations altered bodies and subjectivities? Are objects invested with human traits?

The approach of this conference is therefore both thematic and methodological rather than period specific. However, it is also true that the range of questions referred to above can be most effectively addressed when given some limited terms of reference. As such, the organizers are looking for papers that deal broadly with the period 1850-1950.

The second day of the conference features a research networking forum, generously supported by the British Academy, which will run parallel to the academic conference. 

At this forum, we are seeking Early Career Researchers in academia, in heritage management and in the creative arts to talk about their professional and creative encounters with objects of modernity. The forum will provide an opportunity for ECRs working across different disciplines to come together to talk about the ways in which objects of modernity (physical, phenomenological, imagined) function in art, literature and culture, and will offer researchers a space in which the challenges of such objects (hermeneutic, methodological and curatorial) can be debated in an interdisciplinary way. ECRs from the heritage sector in particular will be encouraged to bring along information about their institutional collections, particularly in areas they consider to be untapped. The aim of the forum is to help unlock some of the resources, archives and collections of objects, things and artefacts of the industrial and post-industrial heritage of the UK to ECRs, and to help forge new professional, cross-disciplinary connections that will shape a growing and fertile field of study in the coming years.

We welcome all participants to both events at a reception and buffet dinner on Monday 23rd June.

Those interested in speaking at the academic conference should submit a 500 word abstract, together with a brief biography, to Dr. Rex Ferguson (r.ferguson@bham.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014. Those interested in presenting at the networking event should send the same information to Dr. Dan Moore (d.t.moore@bham.ac.uk) by the same date.