Call for Papers: The Image on the Page: A Study Day Around Illustrated Print Culture

This study day aims to gather researchers around the subject of the printed image since the 1880s. With particular attention to material bibliography and production techniques, we seek to better understand how illustrations contribute to the formation of meaning and discourses within different contexts from illustrated newspapers to etiquette manuals, from scientific journals to children’s books.

Straddling the disciplines of literary studies, art history, bibliography, and library sciences, the field of illustrated print culture is a privileged inroad to social history. We are inspired by the foundational work of Richard Benson’s The Printed Picture (MoMA, 2008) as well as recent scholarly interest in vernacular media, such as Sarah Mirseyedi and Gerry Beegan’s important contributions on the development of photomechanical reproduction and Thierry Gervais’ edited volume The “Public” Life of Photographs (The MIT Press, 2016). Heeding the call of rare books specialist Roger Gaskell, who has identified the need to develop a “bibliography of images,” we invite contributions in French and English that address any aspect of mass-produced visual materials as well as the diverse industrial or manual processes that enabled their production.

Organizing committee:

• Stéphanie Hornstein, PhD candidate, Department of Art History, Concordia University and Concordia Library’s Researcher-in-Residence 2022-2023.
• Michel Hardy-Vallée, PhD (Concordia University, 2019), Visiting scholar, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University.

Deadline to apply is July 15, 2023.

See full call for papers here.