The 2024-25 Mark Roskill Graduate Symposium, "Colonial Fragments: Overlooked Art Histories," is now accepting submissions for graduate papers on the topic of the colonial fragment. Read the Call for Papers below!
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Colonial Fragments: Overlooked Art Histories
The 25th Annual Mark Roskill Graduate Symposium in Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst featuring a keynote address by Dr. Romita Ray of Syracuse University
Email submissions to @email by Friday, January 10, 2025, 11:59PM EST
How can fragmentation function as productive ground for new scholarship concerning what has been looked past, looked over, or looked away from? Fragmentation of the natural world undergirded colonial economies while stolen, fractured monuments bolster museum collections to this day. Ancient infrastructure only preserved in fragments exposes the realities of colonization programs executed in antiquity. Archives necessitate reading between the lines of fragmentation. From the debris of the everyday to the disassembled remains of monumental objects, fragments can serve both as the grounds for a prismatic understanding of the whole or as a strategy for its very renunciation. As we reckon with the legacies of colonial pasts, the fragment and fragmentation take on urgent roles in the discourses of loss, repression, knowledge production, and revision. Shifting attention to the fragment can allow for the treatment of subjects on their own terms, inviting new methodologies and breaking open the typical lines of art-historical analysis for a more interdisciplinary approach.
The 25th Annual Mark Roskill Symposium in Art History, “Colonial Fragments: Overlooked Art Histories,” invites submissions that focus on the fragment and on questions of fragmentation overlooked across disciplines, with a preference for topics that address colonialism and its fragments. How can scholars productively consider the remains of empire? How can the act of looking engage the fragment? In asking these questions, we hope to interrogate the privileged role of sight in art-historical methodology: what is excluded by accounts that deny the partial, fragmentary glimpse in favor of an all-encompassing perspective? This symposium hopes to highlight, reassess, and uncover what has been “overlooked” in the field of art history, understanding the fragmentary as an integral feature of histories of colonialism and decolonial practice. We welcome submissions from a wide range of fields and seek to foreground topics that push the boundaries of art historical analysis from both within and outside the discipline.
Examples of possible paper topics include but are not limited to:
- Archives & archival silences
- Destruction/reconstruction
- Printed material and its dismemberment
- Decolonial methodology
- Fractured materialities
- Ecological fracture
- Fragments of time
- Disability studies
- Transplantation & dislocation
- Marginalities
The Mark Roskill Symposium is organized by second-year MA candidates in the History of Art & Architecture Department at UMass Amherst. The symposium was initiated to honor the legacy of Mark Roskill (1933–2000), art historian who taught at UMass for over 30 years. The in-person symposium will take place on Saturday, March 8, 2025 at the Old Chapel on the UMass Amherst campus. Graduate students at any stage in their career are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words for in-person 15-20 minute paper presentations to @email by Friday, January 10, 2025, 11:59PM EST. Accepted participants will be notified by February 7, 2025.