Daily Archives: 18 October 2016

Art as Meaning: Redefining Communication – Call For Papers

Art as Meaning: Redefining Communication
School of the Arts & Media (SAM) Postgraduate Symposium
Robert Webster Building, UNSW Kensington
18 November, 2016

‘My work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance?’
Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes

Intentional or unintentional, an audience reads a message in the works we create. I ‘love it’ and I ‘hate it’ are visceral reactions to the messages conveyed. Regardless of the medium, and the tools used to create, they all share a commonality: the conveyance of meaning. What meanings are conveyed? How? For what purpose? The focus of this conference is to turn our attention to the messages that artists are sharing and to discuss the meanings, themes, and ideologies present within artistic works that are understood by viewers, readers, and listeners. Throughout these talks, we hope to share the many ways that meaning is imparted across disciplines, and broaden our definitions of communication.

Key note speaker: Emeritus Professor, Theo van Leeuwen, University of Technology, Sydney

Call for Papers

Please send an abstract to sampg@unsw.edu.au.

A proposal of maximum 250 words is expected.

We are welcome to various fields of Arts: Literature, Cultural Studies, Media, Music, Creative Writing, Performing Arts, Journalism, and so on.

Deadline for submission: 30 October, 2016.

Associate Professor Mark Seymour, The University of Melbourne Free Public Lecture

“Emotional Arenas: Historicising Emotions through Spaces and Places in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” Associate Professor Mark Seymour (The University of Otago)

Date: Thursday 27 October 2016
Time: 6:15pm–7:30pm
Venue: Arts West North Wing-361, Collaborative Learning Room, Bld 148, The University of Melbourne
Enquiries: che-melb-admin@unimelb.edu.au

Registration not required.

The ARC’s CHE and other centres around the world attest to the fact that over the past decade emotions have emerged as a dynamic field of historical inquiry. In the process, terms such as ‘emotives’, emotional ‘regimes’, ‘communities’ and ‘practices’ have now established secure places in the scholarly lexicon. Yet historians pursuing this evanescent quarry could still do with further conceptual tools that might help to pin down, visualise, and analyse moments and mechanisms of emotional change in the past. Based on ideas developed through research on marriage, love affairs, a murder and a sensational trial in 1870s Italy, this seminar proposes historicising emotions in a way that emphasises space and place. Italy’s rapid transformation from ancien-régime backwater to constitutional nation provides the context for my argument that the spaces and places of modern western life function as ‘emotional arenas’, where subjective feelings meet the external world in a process of mutually re-shaping interplay.

Mark Seymour is Associate Professor of History at The University of Otago, New Zealand. He received a BA (Hons) from The University of Sydney, and an MA and PhD from the University of Connecticut. His research area is nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy, with a particular interest in the nexus between private life and more public, institutional forces. His first book, Debating Divorce in Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), reconstructed Italy’s long struggle (1870–1970) to introduce a divorce law. He has since published articles in Social History, Rethinking History, Gender and History, Storicamente, and the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. In 2012, with Penelope Morris and Francesco Ricatti, he co-edited a special issue of Modern Italy on ‘Italy and the Emotions’ and the volume Politica ed emozioni nella storia d’Italia dal 1848 ad oggi (Rome: Viella). His most recent article was a review essay for the Journal of Women’s History on love and politics from eighteenth-century America to twentieth-century East Germany (2015). He is co-editor of the journal Modern Italy.