International conference in March 2025 

Published in November, 2024

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The international conference “Mourning Arcadia: Afterlives of the Pastoral Elegy in the Literature and the Arts of the English-Speaking World” will be held at Université de Picardie-Jules Verne (Amiens, France) on 13-14 March 2025.
 

Word-and-image proposals welcome!

Deadline: 30th November
 

https://pastoralelegy.wordpress.com

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Remembering Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe 

Published in September, 2024

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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, artist, critic, theorist, and teacher, a long-time member of IAWIS/AIERTI and member of its Board from 2006 to 2010, died in Gainesville, Florida, on 14 August 2024.

He was 79. 

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Inspired by Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1951, MOMA), Gilbert-Rolfe produced paintings exploring geometric abstraction which are now in some of the nation’s most important museums: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery, and the Hammer Museum, among others. Born in Tunbridge Wells, England, on 4 August 1945, he earned a degree in painting from the Tunbridge Wells School of Art and a teaching certificate from the Institute of Education, University of London. In 1968 he moved to the United States, earned an MFA from Florida State University in 1970, and settled first in New York and then in California, where he taught at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena from 1986 until his retirement in 2015. One of the initial co-founders (along with Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson) of the influential journal October and a regular contributor to Artforum, Bomb, and Critical Inquiry, Gilbert-Rolfe wrote prolifically on modern and contemporary art, as well as on literature, film, photography, architecture, and theoretical issues. His Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999), which included his seminal essay on “Blankness as a Signifier,” was crucial in steering the idea of the sublime toward technology. He discussed this subject in formal and informal contexts at IAWIS conferences in the early 2000s.

Gilbert-Rolfe was a passionate advocate of inter-art relations and wrote frequently on the interactions between images, texts, and music. As a member of the Board of IAWIS/AIERTI, he was instrumental in setting up the Max Nänny Prize for the best article in word and image studies and also the policy of the association’s support of smaller conferences outside the triennial conference. He was a committed educator, teaching at the California Institute of the Arts from 1980 to 1986 and then at the Art Center, where he was Chair of the department for eleven years. He held visiting posts at numerous institutions, including Princeton, Yale, CUNY, and the Royal Academy Schools in London. Members of IAWIS/AIERTI will remember him for his stimulating conversation and his droll sense of humor: the statement on his website describing the importance of uncertainty to his painting —“ I should like my paintings to be made out of uncertainty, or to make uncertainty be an active force.  There’s too much certainty around in art […] (I’m sure of that)” — is typical of his irony toward both others and himself. The irony, however, should not obscure the seriousness with which he thought about the connection between the work, the viewer, and the world, a theme that is evident in his teachin and writing, as well as his painting.

Gilbert-Rolfe earned many honors in the course of his career, notably the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art and Architectural Criticism (1998) and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships (1989, 1997). He is the author or co-author of seven books and he trained many students who have gone on to flourishing careers. In IAWIS/AIERTI he was likewise a supporter of young scholars. With his passing, we have lost someone who greatly enriched our Association by combining the practice of art with reflection on it and on its importance in the world.

—Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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ESSE Conference 2024 

Published in January, 2024

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Dear IAWIS members,

We are pleased to anounce the CFP for the next ESSE conference organized by SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers at UNIL Lausanne, Switzerland, https://essenglish.org/). 26-30 August 2024

Literatures in English, Cultural and Area Studies

     Seminar 43. Word and Image in Process: Adaptation, Repurposing and Re/Trans-mediation
       [in person]

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This seminar invites speakers interested in diverse transformations of words and images in the process of adaptation, remediation and transmediality. While adaptation involves broader cultural contexts, repurposing puts the stress on the conceptual or ideological agenda of the adaptor. Remediation converges around mediality showing how one medium is adapted, absorbed, and transformed by other media. Transmediality, and transmedia story-telling, refers to the ways in which narratives are developed across various media platforms. We are interested in the complexity of the processes, their rhizomatic proliferation and aesthetic effects. We invite researchers working in the broadly conceived field of word/image relations including more traditional forms of literature/visual arts and film to new media, such as computer games and graphics, video, digital art.

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Convenors:
• Ewa Keblowska-lawniczak (Wroclaw University, Poland) freeway.bohemia@gmail.com
• György Szönyi (Szeged University, Hungary) geszonyi@lit.u-szeged.hu

• Liliane Louvel (University of Poitiers, France) liliane.louvel@wanadoo.fr

We hope you'll be interested in this seminar ! If that is the case, you may send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to the three e-mails mentioned above by 31 January 2024.