Call for Papers: The Cartographic Imagination: Art, Literature And Mapping In The United States, 1945-1980. Paris, 18-19 May 2018.
A two-day international conference funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, in conjunction with the Départment d’Etudes Anglophones at the University of Strasbourg and the Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent.
Organizers: Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg) and Will Norman (University of Kent)
Keynote speakers: Pamela Lee (Stanford University), David Herd (University of Kent) and Stephen Collier (Simon Fraser University)
This conference investigates spatial representations and practices in postwar US literature and art, and their intersection with mapping. We are particularly interested in the ways in which American space is constructed, imagined, reconfigured, displaced, and questioned in writing and in artistic form. The conference will examine the specificity of the literary and artistic appropriation of cartographic tropes, as well as the possible points of convergence and divergence of literature and art in relation to mapping and the material culture of mapping.
Art and literature have rarely been treated together with cartography in the same equation. Literature and mapping, on the one hand, and art and mapping, on the other, have already been discussed in bilateral configurations, but this conference attempts to place them side by side, and ideally to inaugurate a dialogue between the two, with the aim to encourage the articulation and confrontation of literary, artistic, and cartographic thinking.
Proposals for papers and panels that address maps and mapping in postwar American art, literature are invited.
Proposals submission deadline: 30 November 2017.
The full call for papers is available here.