The Intermedia Restoration | February 16, 2018  | University of Maryland, College Park
intermediarestoration.wordpress.com[intermediarestoration.wordpress.com]
Organized by Laura Rosenthal & Scott Trudell
Featuring William Germano, Stuart Sherman, & Amanda Eubanks Winkler
“The Intermedia Restoration” is a one-day conference that takes the interdisciplinary conversation in media history back to an especially vibrant intersection: the English Restoration, c. 1660-1700. This period of media novelty upon media novelty included newspapers, novels, still life, landscape painting, opera, and a newly cosmopolitan stage featuring female actors. The dynamic interactions across Restoration media were crucial to what made them appear to be so “new.” This conference will bring together scholars working across art history, musicology, literary study, and other disciplines to think collaboratively about this historical moment.
We are seeking papers that explore the intermedia Restoration through questions such as:

• What theoretical and methodological shifts do we need to better understand this period’s media ecology?
• How might we reimagine the concept of the seventeenth-century “baroque” in fresh, interdisciplinary ways? What new histories of religion and politics can we connect to media interplay?
• How can transnational histories of slavery and colonization be more fully integrated into our conceptions of Restoration aesthetics and media cultures?
• How might we think through the period’s failures and breakdowns in media interactivity?
• How might we use the concept of intermediation to rethink continuity and change in the periods preceding and succeeding the Restoration?

We invite proposals for 10- or 20-minute presentations, and we welcome a broad variety of topics and methodological approaches from disciplines including literary studies, musicology, history, art history, theater and performance studies, philosophy, cultural studies, religious studies, rhetoric, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory.
Please submit 500‐word abstracts to Scott Trudell ([email protected]) by September 1, 2017.
Please include your title, full name, affiliation, contact information, and abbreviated bio (250 words); and please indicate whether you wish to speak for 10 or 20 minutes.
The conference will serve as the basis for a special issue of the journal Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, to be published in the 2018-19 academic year. It is co-sponsored by Restoration, the UMD Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, and the UMD Department of Art History.
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