[1] Photographing Industry: Pittsburgh and Beyond

Over the years, Pittsburgh and its industries have played host to several key photographic surveys. Beginning in 1907 as part of the pioneering Pittsburgh Survey, documentary photographer Lewis Hine recorded the complex relationship between the city's factories and its citizens. Roughly forty years later, W. Eugene Smith made nearly twenty thousand images of Pittsburgh, creating what he considered his finest work. In keeping with the spirit of these important projects, this panel seeks papers exploring the rich and complicated relationship between photography and industry. Topics of exploration may reflect the broad range of the subject, from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. The panel welcomes papers examining not only art and documentary, but also casual and vernacular photographic records of industry.

  • Session chairs: Emily Morgan, Iowa State University, and James Swensen, Brigham Young University.
  • Contact: emorgan[at]iastate.edu

[2] Confluence in the Americas

The Americas has often been theorized as a space of confluence, cross-cultural exchange, and hybrid engagement. This panel will interrogate this notion of "confluence" within the Americas. For scholars in the humanities, the cultural amalgamation taking place in the American continent has derived multiple, positive concepts including 'mestizaje,' 'hybridity,' 'syncretism,' among others, which are constantly examined and revised. For over 20 years, the term "contact zone," developed by Mary Louise Pratt as “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations,” has been the flagship term used to discuss the two-way hybridization beginning with the EuroAmerican encounter.

We invite papers in modern and contemporary art history that seek, like Pratt, to question the terms used for exchange between or among the Americas. We are particularly interested in papers that examine the agency at play in such cross-cultural exchange, and those rethink the notion of 'border' as something other than an inflexible boundary to be policed.

  • Session chairs: Nicole F. Scalissi and Paulina Pardo, University of Pittsburgh.
  • Contact: nfs14[at]pitt.edu