Bright Lights, Big City: The Development and Influence of the Metropolis

A Graduate Symposium

Presented by the Graduate Group in Classics, Archaeology, and History of Art at Bryn Mawr College

November 13-14, 2015, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA
Keynote speaker and respondent: Ellen Morris, Assistant Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University
 
What are the key elements that have defined urban centers, capital cities, and metropoleis throughout history? How have big cities structured the intersection of cultural, commercial, and political institutions and activities through time? What attracts people to the metropolis? How does the metropolis absorb and influence ideas and practice?
The fabric of cities is not limited to geography or physical structure.  As centers of civic engagement, trade, and innovation, metropoleis have promoted cultural ferment by supporting diverse populations of merchants, artists, intellectuals, leaders, workers, and emigrants. Cities have been conceived of as cosmopolitan and urbane as well as morally dubious, dangerous, and home to crime and social inequality. Can there be a single definition of the metropolis if diversity is a constitutive element?
The Bryn Mawr College Graduate Group invites submissions to an interdisciplinary graduate symposium. We seek abstracts addressing dimensions of metropoleis both ancient and modern from graduate students in classics, archaeology, art history, and related fields. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Deconstructing the core and the periphery
• The emergence and development of metropoleis
• The metropolis within wider networks
• Anthropomorphizing the metropolis
• Autonomy and alienation in civic identity
• Urban experience and embodiment
• Landmarks and urban landscapes

Please fill out the form at:
https://brynmawr.wufoo.com/forms/abstract-submission-form/  by May 8, 2015. Address any questions to bmcsymposium@gmail.com.

Call for Publications

Tales from the Crypt: Museum Storage and Meaning

 
Museums are about display. But are they really? In spite of recent curatorial attempts to exhibit ‘visible storage’, prevailing debates in the history of museums and collecting are mainly centred around questions of exhibiting, display and spectatorship. This kind of discourse, however, distorts the museum in many ways: it ignores the fact that museums do not just consist of exhibition halls but of vast hidden spaces; it leaves millions of objects out of our museum histories; and lastly, it presents the museum as an organized and stable space, in which only museological ‘results’ are visible not the intermediate stage of their coming into being. Display seems to be about the structured, purposeful, strategic gathering of things according to a system, the features of which are clearly defined. What remains out of sight is the fact that the majority of museum objects lie in storage. As a result, not only a vast physical but also important epistemological and semantic aspect of museums and their collections are eliminated from our discussions. The binary between ‘display’ and ‘backstage’ of museums has previously evoked the assumption that the exhibition area functions as a kind of theatre with objects ‘perform’ on stage, while in the back they are processed from their existence as a mere ‘thing’ to a proper artefact. But there is much more to say about museum storage. Backstage areas of museums are not simply areas where potential display objects are kept. They perform functions and fulfill intentions that, when studied, reveal deep purposes of the museum that go well beyond a mere history of display. A history of storage is a thus history of things that are not shown, but also not written about. The understanding of museums and the intellectual histories they encode undergoes a radical shift when we consider what a museum shows alongside the (usually much larger) range of things it stores. These issues may and will be discussed very differently in various parts of the world, which is what this volume intends to address.
Seeking a variety of historical contributions (e.g. with specific case studies), theoretical and philosophical intervention as well as reflections on practical issues, we wish to explore these ‘tales from the crypt’ along the lines of the following themes:
– Storage and canonization
– The Politics of Collecting
– Power and Censorship
– The economic and epistemic value of museum objects
– Ethics and moral aspects of preservation
– Disposal, sale, and de-accessioning
– The (scholarly) uses, necessities and functions of storage
– Curated and un-curated storage
– Visible storage, off-side storage, deep storage, ‘non-museological’ storage
– The politics of displayability
– Storage, the archive and data mining
– Architecture, real estate and the physical spaces of storage
– Issues of access to storage
– Economic aspects of storage
– Storage and digitisation
The volume will partly present the results of a workshop (Victoria & Albert Museum, October 2014), organized under the aegis of the India-Europe Advanced Research Network on Museum History that invited a small group of scholars to respond to museum storage – concept and practice – in India and Europe. It is this cross-cultural approach that we wish to take with the volume. We therefore welcome contributions addressing a broad variety of material and theories across all continents.
A report of the IEARN workshop can be found here:
http://iearn.iea-nantes.fr/rtefiles/files/iearn-museum-storage-workshop-2014-report-copy.pdf
Abstracts (max. 300 words) for papers (max. 8000 words) should be sent to mirjam.brusius@history.ox.ac.uk and kavising@gmail.com by May 15, 2015.
Authors will be notified in June. The deadline for final papers will be October 15, 2015.
Concept by Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh for the
Research Group on Museums and History, March 2014 and 2015

The School of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford is pleased to host the 2015 annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference.
www.tag2015bradford.org
The next TAG will be held at the University of Bradford, 14-16^th December 2015.
The call for sessions is now open. We encourage sessions based on our broad theme of Diversity, however, we are happy to accept proposals outside of the theme.
Diversity:
In our discipline & demographics: students, academics, professionals & community
In what we study: including food and drink, past genders, past identities
The diversity of archaeological practice: i.e. theory, science, lab, fieldwork
Deadline: 22^nd May 2015
In order to keep parallel sessions to a minimum, organisers of similar sessions may be requested to collaborate – all in the good spirit of TAG! Session organisers will be notified of the outcome in early June. A call for papers will then follow.
To submit a session proposal, please email TAG-Bradford@bradford.ac.uk with a session abstract, as well as potential (or confirmed) speakers. Please note the TAG email address is staffed part-time, so there may be a delayed reply.
TAG ART BRADFORD – An exhibition 14^th-16^th December 2015.
A call for visual art, informed by archaeology, preferably exploring the broad concept of ‘Diversity’. The call includes archaeologists exploring art.
Where appropriate, please label reproductions with an indication of scale, year of execution and materials used. No more than five images should be submitted for consideration.
Please contact Kate Johnson K.M.Johnson1@bradford.ac.uk if you are interested in exhibiting artwork, and/or are interested in a participating in a session on this theme.
Initial expressions of interest by 22^nd May 2015

Social Spaces and Industrial Places:

Multi-Scalar Approaches to Production in the Ancient Mediterranean

Organizers: Katherine Harrington and Linda Gosner
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology (Brown University)

From massive industrial installations such as the large terra sigillata kilns at La Graufesenque or the mountains collapsed by imperial gold mining at Las Médulas, to neighborhood-level production of bread at Pompeii, to the metal workshops associated with many Greek sanctuaries or the household-level production of textiles in houses across the Mediterranean, people made things at many different scales and in many different places in the ancient Mediterranean, with varying social and economic consequences and benefits. As interest in the archaeology of production increased in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative scholars like van der Leeuw, Peacock and Costin sought to develop models to aid comparative archaeological study of the organization of production, producing typologies which included scalar categories like “household industry,” “nucleated workshops,” and “community specialization.” These models directed attention to often-overlooked aspects of productive activity and inspired many new approaches in subsequent years.
One unintended consequence of this work, however, has been the reification of scalar categories as a hierarchy of development. Thus, in many studies, production activities at either end of the scale are not subject to the same types of analysis as workshop production—domestic production is assumed to make very little impact on the larger economy while, conversely, major industrial works are often subsumed within the study of empire and political economy, obscuring the complicated reality of how very large scale industrial ventures worked on a human level. Following a recent call for more rigorous integration of data at different scales of analysis by Dietler, among others, we propose in this session to investigate ancient production that took place at different scales alongside one another to examine the role(s) of production in larger social and economic processes and questions in the ancient Mediterranean world. We will take an intentionally broad definition of the word production, encompassing both craft production (ceramic, glass, metal, leather, etc.), major industrial production (mining and quarrying), as well food production (olive oil, fish salting, etc.). Examining labor organization and the role of production in wider communities and landscapes can illuminate commonalities and differences in production at the household-, neighborhood-, workshop-, industrial- levels, especially when considered in comparative perspective.
We invite papers that consider social or economic aspects of production at any scale from Greek, Roman, or other Mediterranean contexts, with the aim of forming a colloquium in which we can discuss production from a multi-scalar perspective. Topics may include new or innovative archaeological work at a site of production; labor organization in houses, workshops, or industrial communities; the social role of production in wider communities; production in urban or rural settings; and the wider economic impacts of production. Additionally, we especially welcome papers that consider the issue of scale in analysis, from archaeometric analysis of industrial debris to landscape/GIS models of ancient productive activity.
Please send titles and abstracts of 400 words or less to linda_gosner@brown.edu by March 18 for consideration in this colloquium, which we intend to submit as a session for the Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting in San Francisco on January 6-9, 2016.
 
More information may be found at https://www.academia.edu/11237221/Social_Spaces_and_Industrial_Places_Multi-Scalar_Approaches_to_Production_in_the_Ancient_Mediterranean