ACE and the centre for Arts and the Sacred at King's College London (ASK) invite you to submit an abstract for the 12th international ACE conference on the theme of 'The Sacred City: London, art and the religious imaginary’.
William Blake famously hoped to see “Jerusalem builded here” in London. But he was hardly the first or the last creative mind to imagine a new metropolis. In the days after the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren, the great architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, drafted a bold, utopian design for the City of London that was never realized. The performance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is an annual London tradition which began in the composer’s lifetime. For the novelist Emmanuel Litvinoff, the East London of the late 19th and early 20th Century, all but obliterated during the Blitz, was both a grimy a Jewish ghetto and a Garden of Eden. In the Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon gave us the figure of Moses, the leader of a ragtag group of Caribbean immigrants making their way in 1950s London. More recently, the young British artist Mark Wallinger filmed himself reciting backwards the opening lines of the Gospel of John on the escalator of the Angel tube station. These are only a few of the various ways in which London has been both the site and subject of the religious imaginary. In this conference, we invite participants to explore the unique intersections between art and religion in a city which has increasingly become not only a new Jerusalem but also another Mecca, Benares and Amritsar.
Keynote speakers include Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martins-in-the-Fields, and Alison Milbank, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham.
Papers are welcome on all aspects of this theme as well as on cities and urban life in general. Sessions for delivering papers will be broadly divided into the following:
Architecture and multi-culturalism
- Medieval to Victorian cities
- Biblical ideas of the city
- Contemporary art and film
Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words to Laura Moffatt [email protected] by 1st February 2014. Please also state your position and current field of study. We will respond to you by 15th February.
The conference will include specialist guided tours to the National Gallery, the V&A, churches and places of worship in central and east London.