International conference
HISTORY AND ITS IMAGES
12-13 November 2018
Francis Haskell’s groundbreaking book History and Its Images was published twenty-five years ago. Since then, it has set the direction for the investigation of visualizing the past. The problems posed by the British scholar are relevant to this day.
Recent events provide several striking examples of how historically fraught images are represented in traditional arts, as well as new media. Among the most noticeable, and far from the only, examples of this kind, are the hot spots of debate about the demolition of the Confederate monuments in the USA and the multimedia exhibition projects that are devoted to the history of the Russian state. Contradictions implicit in the national and the public past are still important ways of constructing collective conceptions of the present and the future. Therefore, we devote our conference to the problems of visualizing history, and how the issues were understood particularly in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. To be exact, in what way and for what reason did visual art and visual culture create particular images of the past, how these images were perceived by the different communities and how they were transformed by the national context of their production.
Visualizing history, as a complex scholarly investigation, began to be studied relatively recently in Russia mostly by historians, whose attention has focused on the investigation of historical culture. In Western scholarship, visualizing history has been the focus of attention of foreign art historians and cultural historians since the middle of twentieth century. More recently, scholars are interested in studying the interconnections between history and historical conceptions with visual arts, the representation of history and propaganda, visual art’s participation in the processes of invention and construction of national and public past.
The conference program will be split into the following panels:
Visualization of history and ideology:
• Historical representation and propaganda;
• The role of visual art in the process of the invention of history;
• Visual arts, history and the construction of national/public identity.
Visualizing history in the context of historical culture:
• The function of historical knowledge in artistic milieu;
• The influence of historiography on the production of works of art;
• The role of works of art in the processes of historical education;
• Images of the past in art and society’s conceptions of it;
• Visualization of history and the problem of historical memory.
We are ready to consider proposals on other themes and subjects remain relevant to the main topic of the conference.
The conference will be divided into a number of sessions with 20 minute presentations, as well as a series of round-table discussions.
The conference will be held at the European University in Saint-Petersburg.
The application for participation in the conference should include the following information:
1. Information about participant (full name and academic status: student, Ph.D., independent researcher);
2. Contact information;
3. Abstract (600 words)
Please submit your application no later than 20 May 2018.
Time-limit: Each paper presentation should be scheduled for 20 minutes to be followed by 10 minutes for discussion.
Applications should be sent to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The working languages of the conference: Russian and English
Organizing committee: Ilia Doronchenkov, Natalia Mazur, Evgenii Anisimov, Elena Glukhovskaya, Anna Korndorf, Maria Chukcheeva, Ekaterina Mikhailova-Smolnyakova.