This symposium will be of interest to curators, scholars and arts practitioners working on nineteenth-century visual culture: cartography; draughtsmanship; etching; engraving; lithography; mark-making; photography; painting; printing; modes of illustrated publishing, scrapbooking and album assemblage and, related documentation of visual culture in journalism and literature.

The symposium intends to bring together research which interrogates nineteenth-century visual worlds to include perspectives from The Global South and the colonial and ex-colonial world. It encourages papers which challenge traditional art historical understandings and genre/medium silos. Papers may touch on themes such as (but not confined to):

• Relationships between and across visual media
• Illustrated publications
• New (nineteenth-century) technologies of image-making and reproduction
• Histories of cultural resistance, survival and/or, contact as expressed in visual culture
• Expanded understandings of portraiture and ‘the portrait’
• Amateur participation and innovation in nineteenth-century visual culture
• Histories of collecting and cultural theft, and early museological practices
• Curating nineteenth-century visual collections today
• Networks and exchanges between artists and/or, across geographies/Country
• Imperial and Indigenous visions of Country, geography or place
   

The symposium is hosted in-person by the Centre for Art History and Art Theory and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra between 16-18 July 2023.

The program will include two public keynote addresses, in the evenings on Sunday 16 and Monday 17 July, and a two-day program for participants of presentations, discussions and a collection visit.

Keynotes will be delivered by: Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Professor of Art History, University of Oxford) and Dr Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway artist and curator of First Nations Art and Culture at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery)

Prospective participants are asked to pitch a 250-word abstract for a 20-minute paper. Please submit this along with a 150-word biography.

Call for papers closes: 30 March 2023.

Enquiries and paper submissions: Dr Elisa deCourcy [elisa.decourcy@anu.edu.au], DECRA Research Fellow, Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Research School of Humanities and the Arts.