Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference 2024 (HNA): Britain and the Low Countries / Cambridge, UK, July 10–13, 2024
Submission Deadline: September 29, 2023
It has been almost thirty years since ecologist and philosopher David Abram coined the phrase “more-than-human world” to describe the endless enmeshment of the human and non-human (including plants, animals, and natural phenomena). Today, this idea takes on yet another dimension with the increasing presence of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in our daily lives. With this in mind, this roundtable seeks to foster a robust and timely discussion around the role, both historic and contemporary, of the more-than-human in seventeenth-century Dutch visual and material culture.
This roundtable seeks papers that consider the role of the more-than-human in Dutch seventeenth-century visual and material culture. We will explore how artworks articulate period attitudes and perspectives surrounding this topic, and how they prompt comparison between the human and non-human world. At the core of this conversation is the question: how was art variously understood as a non-human actor or, as an extension of human actors? How, for example, can visual or material depictions of animals or landscapes serve as passive or active agents capable of negotiating with humans? How do animals and plants adapt to changing environments, particularly when transported to the Netherlands from distant locales, and how does this adaption influence the production of visual and material culture? How did ways of knowing and seeing the non-human world encourage the innovation of new technologies, such as the microscope? How does the depiction of the non-human draw attention to issues related to taxonomy and scale, particularly in colonial contexts where the very status of human life was a matter of debate? Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:
- The role of collectors in shaping ideas of the more-than-human
- The demonstration and display of the more-than-human
- Strategies for defining and identifying the more-than-human
- Colonial encounters and the more-than-human
- Artistic innovation as a product of non-human encounters
- Humanism and knowledge production
- Migration and travel in the more-than-human realm
- Gender and the more-than-human world
- Machines and the more-than-human
- Curating the more-than-human in today’s museums
- A.I. and the study of Dutch Art
This session will consist of five short papers, each one twelve minutes in length. Presentations will be followed by thirty minutes of discussion amongst the panelists and attendees. For more information about the session, see the HNA Conference 2024: Call for Papers. Please submit your proposal (no more than 500 words) and a C.V. (one page) by Friday, September 29 to Sarah Mallory smallory@themorgan.org and Rachel Kase rlkase@bu.edu.