Call for Papers—2008 Graduate Student Symposium
Department of The History of Art, University of California, Berkeley.

Keynote Speaker: TBA

More than Meets the Eye: The Five Senses

Friday and Saturday, March 14-15

The experience of an artwork, so often reduced to the visual and the tactile, is in fact a complex phenomenon with its own contentious history of trans-sensorial experiments. From the dual modalities of the East Asian brush arts to the site-specificity of the 1970s, from altars to installations, from the physical consumption of medieval manuscripts to the integration of sound into Minimalist and post-Minimalist performative practices, the history of art—in all of its periods, cultures, and media—is rich with examples of works which problematize a unidirectional understanding of art as an exclusively visual experience, speaking, sometimes through idiosyncratic uses of media, to the emergence of an embodied viewer.

The Symposium will provide a forum in which to critically assess the dynamic relations and interrelations of the senses not only as they materialize within the art work itself, but also as pertains to art production, theory, and criticism. We intend this Symposium to reflect as broad a geographical and chronological scope as possible; accordingly, we invite pertinent applications from all fields and periods in the humanities and social sciences.

Please email your one-page abstract (300 words maximum) and CV as an attachment to BerkeleySymposium2008@gmail.com by January 20th. Final presentations should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Presenters will be notified by January 31.

Thank you.