Decorative Arts in the Early Modern Era and Now Co-organizers: Giancarla Periti and Ulrich Pfisterer Decorative arts played a major role in shaping the visual identity of the early modern world. Scholarship over the past twenty years has enriched our understanding of the making of decorative objects, their multilayered interpretations and agency, and the significant impact of the decorative arts on the early modern visual culture of the Mediterranean, Asia and the New World. Additional topics addressed in recent studies have included the artisanal skills, technologies and seriality inherent to the production of decorative arts, their circulation across distant geographical areas, and their network of social, economic and artistic interrelations.

We seek proposals that confront the critical and epistemological issues concerning the place of decorative arts in the enlarged early modern world and that consider how they impacted the decentering of the visual culture of the period. Other topics of interest can include gendered approaches and interactions with decorative arts or attempts to interrogate categories of decorative arts employing more refined historically or theoretically-driven concepts than the labels of "minor" and "applied" used in the past. Please send proposals to Giancarla Periti ([email protected]) and Ulrich Pfisterer ([email protected]) by July 27, 2018.

As per RSA guidelines, proposals should include the following materials: 1) abstract (150-word maximum); 2) and a succinct curriculum vitae (300-word maximum).