[Commlist] McGill Art History and Communication Studies CFP

CFP: McGill Art History and Communication Studies Graduate Symposium


Call for Papers: Reorienting the Sublime
McGill University
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
Graduate Student Symposium
Deadline for Submissions: December 29, 2023
“The sublime is something added that expands us, overstrains us, and 
causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and 
sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, 
joy—fascination” -- Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
The Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill 
University is pleased to invite submissions for the Annual Graduate 
Symposium “Reorienting the Sublime,” to be held on Thursday, April 4 and 
Friday, April 5, 2024.
The sublime has held a steady yet complex position within the discourse 
of art history and visual culture, and encourages a consideration of its 
relationship to media and communication studies. Its perhaps best known 
form can be traced to Edmund Burke in the 18th century, who defined the 
sublime through a dual emotional quality of attraction and fear, which 
Immanuel Kant honed to describe a magnitude of unlimited feeling that 
humans are unable to possess. Jacques Lacan, who follows from a Freudian 
notion of the sublime as a positivised or aestheticised counterpart to 
the uncanny, also suggests that the “sublime object” points us towards 
that which has the power to de-realise and dematerialize, revealing the 
contradictions at the center of a law.
As such, the sublime has provided a rife affective terrain for artists 
to draw from that could elicit awe, power, and a certain delight in 
transgressing limitation. It has also offered a useful framework to 
think through the meanings and affects circulating new communication 
technologies, which are often simultaneously feared and viewed as 
opportunities for human transcendence. At the same time, the sublime has 
provided the means to bolster colonial understandings of “taming the 
unknown” and efforts to seek command of that which appears to be out of 
order. What can be said of the sublime as revelatory, a call to 
re-translate or re-visit the foundational systems of meaning which 
structure the world and our place in it? How might we position the 
sublime in relation to contemporary politics, culture, and technologies? 
In what ways do awe, terror, beauty, and overwhelm play into our current 
objects of research, and how might these aspects of sublimity reorient 
the objects and approaches within our fields of study?
Following this history of contestation, our symposium seeks to consider 
the state of the sublime today and how its discourse continues to take 
shape within the interdisciplinary realms of art history and 
communication studies. We invite papers from all periods of art history, 
communication studies, and related disciplines to consider these 
questions, as well as the following topics as prompts for further thought:
-       Beyond the worldly, transcendence, (dis)embodiment
-       Affect, desire, aversion, horror, tragedy
-       Consumption, glut, excess, control
-       Technological sublime
-       Hyperreality, capitalist/cyber/digital sublime
-       Landscape painting, romanticism, colonial origins and 
post-colonial critiques
-       Gestalt, Gesamtkunstwerk
-       Historical reconfigurations of Kant, Burke, Hegel, Lacan, etc.
-       Incomprehensibility, inspiration, confusion
-       The non-human, anthropocene, pre-linguistic
-       (Against) the uncanny, the beautiful, the harmonious
The Art History and Communication Studies Graduate Symposium committee 
invites proposals for fifteen-minute-long paper presentations. Current 
and recently graduated Masters, Doctoral, and Postdoctoral students from 
various Humanities fields whose research addresses this year’s theme are 
encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit an abstract of no more 
than 300 words with the title of the paper, along with a separate 
document that includes a 250-word bio, to (ahcs.pgss /at/ mail.mcgill.ca) by 
Friday, December 29, 2023. Please include your full name, affiliation, 
and contact information in your bio. There is no fee associated with 
application to or participation in this conference. A blind panel will 
be reviewing all submissions, so please ensure that your name and other 
identifying marks do not appear in the abstract document.
While we encourage in-person participation at the symposium, we will 
have limited spots for presentations over Zoom. If you would like to be 
considered for a virtual presentation, please indicate so in your 
abstract, in addition to any other accommodations or considerations you 
would like the committee to know of.


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