Call for Papers: Art, Anatomy, and Medicine Since 1700, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, March 31-April 1, 2016. Deadline: July 15

This call for papers just in for an exciting looking conference on Art, Anatomy and Medicine to take place at Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina in April, 2016!

Full call follows; deadline is July 15. Good luck, and hope to see you there!

Call for Papers: Art, Anatomy, and Medicine since 1700

DEADLINE approaching (but extended to July 15)! Travel and lodging funds available for speakers!! 

A two-day symposium sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s Provost’s Office and the School of Visual Art, in partnership with the Columbia Museum of Art To be held @ the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, March 31-April 1, 2016

The symposium organizer seeks proposals for papers that address visual, theoretical, cultural, historical and/or contemporary connections, relationships, conflicts and/or collaborations among the visual arts, anatomy/dissection, and medicine from the eighteenth century to the present. Participants may be historians of art, medicine, science or technology, art educators, medical professionals, artists (who may propose to contextualize their own work), etc. Successful papers may also be invited for publication in an edited volume of the same theme. 

Broad topics may include (but are certainly not limited to):

• The role of anatomy in artists’ training (past, present and/or future)

• Artists’ roles in the creation/dissemination of anatomical knowledge

• Artistic representation of anatomical and medical professionals

• Anatomical and medical models: from écorché figures to nano-imagery

• Anatomy as art, art as anatomy

• Anatomical displays, exhibitions (e.g. Body Worlds), and collections: from curious to educational to controversial

• Corpses, dissection and grave-robbing in art, literature and medical history

• Imaging bodily surface and anatomical depth: from sculpture to M.R.I.s and beyond

• Beyond human, superhuman, inhuman(e)?: technological ‘improvements’, additions and extensions of human anatomy from prosthetics/implants to Google glasses

• Zombies and vampires, and the creative/fantastic defiance of or resistance to anatomical, medical and worldly reality

• The evolutionary human in art and science: looking backward and looking ahead 

• Parts vs. whole: the functions of specificity and generality in aesthetics and visual medical information 

Please send cover letter, abstract (no more than 3 pages, double-spaced typed), and CV to Dr. Andrew Graciano, Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Director, School of Visual Art and Design via email: graciano [at] mailbox.sc.edu.

Image: De dissectione partium corporis humani...Charles Estienne, anatomist; Paris, 1545. Woodcut. National Library of Medicine. As seen in Dream Anatomy, curated by Michael Sappol