Shii News – Academic Items

1.Mediterranean Seminar Winter 2025 Workshop: “The Multilingual Mediterranean”, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 28 February – 1 March 2025

The theme encompasses such topics as language contact zones, multilingual art forms and media, and the relationships between language and identity. We invite contributions from scholars working on several geographical contexts and historical periods in the Mediterranean world – including the interplay and inter- section of visual, musical, and material “languages” in the Mediterranean world.

Deadline for applications: 15 October 2024. Information: https://mailchi.mp/mediterraneanseminar/cfp-the-multilingual-mediterranean-mediterranean-seminar-winter-2025-workshop-28-february-1-march-urbana-champaign?e=82aeb6c61d

2. National Museum of African Art – Contract Provenance Researcher
https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=67354

3. Conference – ‘Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds’, University of Bern, August 29-30

The international conference “Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds” proposes to reflect on the artistic practices that shaped the materiality, iconography, and texts of legal objects in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. What forms did these objects take? How did they confer authenticity and legal authority? What education and knowledge are evident in the objects? The conference seeks an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars from art history, legal history, history, archaeology, and related disciplines who engage with legal objects.

Organized by Corinne Mühlemann (University of Bern) and Fatima Quraishi (University of California, Riverside).

Location: Institute of Art HIstory, University of Bern, Mittelstrasse 43, 3012 Bern, Room 120, First Floor

For registration, please contact: janina.ammon@unibe.ch
The conference will be held in person.

PROGRAM

THURSDAY | August 29th, 2024
9:00-9:30 ARRIVAL | COFFEE

9:30-10.15 Introduction by Fatima Quraishi and Corinne Mühlemann

10:30-12:00
PANEL 1 | FORMATIONS OF AUTHORITY
Moderated by Omar Anchassi, University of Bern, SNSF Project “Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies”

Zahir Bhalloo (University of Hamburg)
Social and Spatial Dynamics of Bukharan Fatwas as Written Artefacts

Stella Wisgrill (University of Cambridge)
Testing Virtue, Forging Nobility: Emperor Frederick III’s 1462 Augmentation of Arms for the Margravate of Moravia and the Performance of Legal Authority

12:00-13:30 LUNCH

13:30-15:00
PANEL 2 | CIRCULATION AND FORMATION OF LEGAL KNOWLEDGE
Moderated by Irina Dudar, Institute of Art History, University of Bern

Phillipa Byrne (Trinity College, Dublin)
The Materiality of Medieval Judicial Ordines

Niko Munz (Oxford University)
Bildnisrecht: Legal Aspects of Early Portraiture

15:00-15:30 COFFEE

15:30-17:30
PANEL 3 | MULTIPLE MATERIALITIES
Moderated by Corinne Mühlemann, Institute of Art History, University of Bern

Subah Dayal (New York University)
From Golkonda to Siam: Secret Letters, Envelopes, and Governing Freight Trade in the Mughal Port-city

Masha Goldin (University of Basel)
Weapon of Justice? Medieval Swords as Objects and Images

Nino Zchomeldise (John Hopkins University)
Aesthetics of Illusion and Authenticity in Ottonian Legal Documents

19:00 DINNER

FRIDAY | August 30th, 2024
8:30-10:30
PANEL 5 | LEGAL PERFORMANCE
Moderated by Fatima Quraishi, University of California, Riverside

Shounak Ghosh (Vanderbilt University)
Epistolary Texts as Legal Objects: Querying the Mughal Farmān in Diplomatic Contexts

Daniela Maldonado Castaneda (Queen’s University, Canada)
Between Sacred and Script: Examining Legal Objects in Promises, Vows, and Oaths as Defined by Alfonso X in The Seven-Partidas

Jordan Skinner (Princeton University)
The Medieval Curfew Bell: Sonority and the Voice of Law

10:30-11:00 COFFEE

11:00-12:30
PANEL 5 | LONGUE-DURÉE STUDIES
Moderation TBA

Krisztina Ilko (Queens College / University of Cambridge)
The Chess-Knight Seal

Heba Mostafa (University of Toronto)
“God Protect us from One Finger under Twenty!” The Abbasid Nilometer Column as a Legal Object

12:30-14:00 LUNCH

14:00-15:30
PANEL 6 | EVERYDAY LAW
Moderated by Moïra Dato, Institute of Art History, University of Bern

Gül Kale (Carleton University, Toronto)
The Material and Social Implications of Measuring Tools in Ottoman Legal History

Lorenzo Paveggio (University of Padua)
What Does a Bribe Look Like? Carolingian munera in Literary Texts

15:30-16:00 COFFEE

16:00-17:30
PANEL 7 | OBJECTS IN COURT
Moderated by Carlos Rojas Cocoma, Institute of Art History, University of Bern

Nathalie Miraval (Yale University)
The Sacred Suspended: Martha, Law, and Image in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic

Linda Mueller (Bibliotheca Hertziana Rome/Harvard University)
Drawings, Courtroom Practices, and Juridical Decision-Making at the Edges of the Spanish Empire

17:30-18:00 CLOSING REMARKS

Contact Email

janina.ammon@unibe.ch

4. CFP – ‘Making the Subject of Portraiture in a Trans-Asian Context ca. 1000-Present Day’, SOAS London, December 5-6, 2024

Dates

Call for Papers Deadline: 29 July 2024

Conference: 5-6 December 2024

Portraits have commonly been understood as naturalistic likenesses of human beings, centred on the face. The work of scholars such as Jean Borgatti, Richard Brilliant (1990) and Joanna Woodall (1997) opened the field in conceptualising portraiture as a truly multi-local genre, foregrounding relational and performative processes. Following their research, this symposium defines portraiture as a process where subjectivities are constructed as a result of the collaboration between artists, patrons, subjects, and viewers living in a specific time and space, This call for papers therefore is addressed to scholars of art, cultural, visual and material culture but also anthropology and literature at any career level who explore how notions of subjectivity are constructed in text and images created roughly between the fifteen century and the present day in Asia and its diasporas. The symposium organisers will consider papers analysing literary and pictorial processes of embodiment through the production of objects and artefacts such as paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, ceramics, jewellery, and currency; and of designed spaces including gardens and architecture.

Portraits have long been studied as documents or biographies of a person that once existed. Without denying the capacity of a portrait to index a living person, the symposium wishes to address the varied performative elements that portraits display in the Asian context. These performances reveal the enactment of class, gender and race of specific societies and cultures of Asia and its diasporas. The performative function of portraiture in Asia, we argue, reveals important cultural, social, religious, and philosophical ideas to understand the region.

The symposium focuses on the portraiture of Asia with two specific purposes in mind. First, to decentre studies of Asian portraiture from Eurocentric conceptions of subjecthood and thus to expand the field of portraiture studies; second, to foreground the connections, transfers and tensions articulated by portraiture within the trans-Asian context. The focus on Asia should not be read as exclusionary, but rather as the intent to initiate a dialogue with existing research on the portraiture of other regions such as Africa and Europe. Thirty-five years after Borgatti, Brilliant and Woodall’s contributions to the field of portraiture studies, the symposium ‘Making the Subject of Portraiture in a Trans-Asian Context ca. 1000-Present Day’ proposes to take stock of a changing field by contributing the scholarship of art, cultural and literary historians, anthropologists and specialists in gender and critical race theory whose research interests focus on the embodiment of selfhood in portraiture from Asia. We therefore invite papers which develop our core concern with ‘Making the Subject’ and with the performative dimensions of portraiture in Asia.

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