Ashgate Publishing Blog

Posted by Luana Life, Marketing Coordinator, Literary, Music, and Art & Visual Studies

Join Mark A. Cheetham, author of Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The ‘Englishness’ of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century for a Q & A and book signing at Ben McNally Books (366 Bay Street, Toronto) Wednesday, June 6, from 6–8 pm.

“In this revisionist and superbly erudite study, Mark Cheetham rigorously articulates the implicit theoretical armature of English artwriting, revealing the unacknowledged play of national and transnational themes in a body of discourse and criticism that typically attempts to obscure its conceptual and political commitments. The ‘imperial empiricism’ that Cheetham detects among English artists and critics—from William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds to Clive Bell, Roger Fry and beyond—emerges from the shadows with great clarity. It will no longer be possible to imagine that the English art world of the last three hundred years maintained an insular independence from concepts of ‘theory’ that it imagined as foreign and continental.” — Gary Shapiro, University of Richmond

Learn more about Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain

About the Author: Mark A. Cheetham is a professor of art history at the University of Toronto

This is a guest post by Michael Yonan, series editor of ‘The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting 1700–1950′

The annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies just took place in San Antonio, Texas, from 21–24 March 2012.  This year’s conference was held at a Hyatt conference hotel on the Riverwalk, San Antonio’s well-known district of restaurants and clubs, and a short walk away from the Alamo.  This building, now a popular tourist attraction, is the remnant of a former Spanish mission and the site of a major battle in the 1836 Texas Revolution, a war that created the independent Republic of Texas.  Texans to this day take pride in their state’s former status as an independent country.

The conference continued ASECS’s history of meeting regularly in the southwestern US; prior sites include Tucson, Las Vegas, and in 2010 Albuquerque.  When not busy in sessions, the conference attendees enjoyed spectacularly beautiful, sunny weather, which made for a dramatic change from last year’s conference in mountainous and brisk Vancouver, British Columbia!

This year saw an unusual congregation of panels devoted to concerns directly relevant to the series I edit for Ashgate, The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting 1700–1950.  This suggests once again that there is a healthy interest in the social lives of objects and on collecting among scholars working in multiple disciplines.

Ashgate author Denise Amy Baxter, University of North Texas, chaired a panel titled “Life and Luxury: Material Culture and Decorative Arts,” which featured presentations on clocks, desks, rococo prints, and embroidered portraits.

Sabrina Ferri, University of Notre Dame, chaired a similar panel that focused on a tighter geographical area: “The Cultural Life of Things: Material Culture in the Long Italian Eighteenth Century.”

Heidi Strobel, University of Evansville, and Ashgate author Jennifer Germann, Ithaca College, co-chaired another panel that viewed eighteenth-century objects through the lens of gender, dubbed “Gendered Objects in the Long Eighteenth Century.”

Finally, I organized a roundtable on “Disciplinary Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Material Culture.”  The speakers were Baxter, Germann, musicologist Karen Hiles, and literary scholars Barbara M. Benedict and Chloe Wigston Smith.  We enjoyed a lively discussion about how our respective disciplines handle (or neglect!) the study of objects, be they musical instruments, works of art, books, literary descriptions, or everyday things.

These panels solidified my impression that material culture studies, broadly understood, is a thriving area in contemporary eighteenth-century scholarship.

We are delighted to announce that Margaret Michniewicz has joined Ashgate Publishing as Commissioning Editor for Art and Visual Studies.

Margaret has years of valuable experience in the publishing industry, and is an award-winning news and feature writer. She has a personal passion for art history, visual culture and the performing arts, and in addition has a Master’s Degree in Art History from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Margaret is based in Ashgate’s Burlington office in the United States, and welcomes all visual studies proposals, with particular interest in the time periods of Medieval and 18th-20th centuries. She is excited to expand the list beyond traditional Western Art History, and is especially keen on studies incorporating gender and race.

Ashgate will be attending the 100^th annual conference of the College Art Association at the Los Angeles Convention Center from February 22-25, so please drop by and say hello to Margaret and her US colleagues!

The Ashgate Art and Visual Studies list ranges from scholarly research monographs and specialist catalogues to illustrated artist monographs and exhibition catalogues.

To keep up to date with all developments in Ashgate’s Art and Visual Studies programme, please sign up to receive our email updates