The Hispanic Studies Department at Cardiff University’s School of European Studies invites submissions for a three day international conference on Hispanic visual cultures. Contributions on all aspects of visual cultures from the Spanish speaking world are welcome and the event aims to provide an encounter between studies of film, photography, and the graphic arts, both old and new, conventional and unconventional, digital and plastic.

Topics could include, but are not limited to: cinema, design, cover art, maps, installation, the built environment, peripheral visions, transnationality, autobiopicture, visual history, documentary, propaganda, poster art, genre, interior design, graphic design, murals, graffiti, mirrors, architecture, and the webscape. The conference will create a space for a distinctive cross-sectional view of images of Iberia, Latin America, and Hispanic Africa and Asia . How does the Hispanic world look in a post-global environment of fracture and eccentric subjectivities? How are Hispanic selves represented in the pixelated reflective surfaces and devices of a digital planet? How have visual cultures facilitated hegemony and dissent in the past?

Themes and strands will be shaped by contributions and do not follow a predetermined prescriptive rubric. Papers will be grouped around area specific nuclei—e.g. Peninsular studies, Cuba (Insular and Diaspora), Mexico— and are not restricted to a single theme, though the event aims to assess the role of visual cultures in mapping the contemporary and historical stresses and fractures of individual and national subjectivities within the Hispanic world. The conference aims to be a forum for new directions in the study and interpretation of Hispanic visual cultures.

Invited speakers include María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco (Buscadores de Belleza: Historias de los grandes coleccionistas [with Cindy Mack], Arte y estado en la España del siglo XX), and Katie Halper, director of La memoria es vaga. A collaborative photography workshop looking at Hispanic dress codes and photographic technique is planned with Ffotogallery, as well as a virtual exhibition of Spanish artworks collected overseas. A selection of papers will be published in an edited volume in 2010. The editors will endeavour to include as many contributions as possible. A postgraduate bursary is available to cover conference registration fees on a first come first served basis. The event is supported by the Histories, Memories, and Fictions Research Unit at Cardiff University’s School of European Studies.