CFP: The Seminar and the Expanded Field (CAA Atlanta 2005)

CAA, Atlanta, February 2005

Has the graduate art history seminar outlived its usefulness? Can its traditional form and logic serve a field expanded almost beyond recognition, if viewed from its former borders? This session explores the relationship of the seminar to an art history we continue to transform theoretically and methodologically. It asks, how are changes in what counts as our field impacting the seminar’s status as the foundational unit of graduate training and privileged gateway to professional art history practice? In what ways, why, and with what results have art history professors or students addressed the content of the seminar's form in addition to its procedures and politics? Also, what might we learn if we examine the seminar as a social and cultural construct bound up with art history’s history? Rarely do we hesitate to identify and redress canonical formations of pedagogy and epistemology, as with the survey. What explains our failure to scrutinize the seminar accordingly?

Deadline: 14 May 2004