CALL FOR PAPERS: Dressing Global Bodies

The clothes on our backs...

are intimately connected with bodily experiences, cultural, social and gender portrayals. Economies of fashioning and re-fashioning demonstrate multiple priorities across place and time. The materialities of fashion are shaped by global flows of cloth and beads, furs, ready-made and second-hand apparel, in dynamic processes of exchange.

Pasold Conference 2016 | 7-9 July 2016 | University of Alberta
This international conference will showcase new research on the centrality of dress in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements, emphasizing entangled histories and cross-cultural analyses.

Themes could include, but are not limited to:

• Cross-cultural practices and patterns of dress and / or body adornment
• Production and distribution of clothing
• Gendered and ethnic shaping of dress practice
• Fashion politics of dress in globalizing contexts
• Circulation and re-use of dress and dress idioms
• Design in globalized contexts
• Representations of clothing cultures
• Appropriation / acculturation of designs, materials, motifs
• Dress in colonial / post-colonial contexts

Submission Requirements:

For individual speakers: a 200-word proposal and a 1 page CV

For full panels: a 200-word panel rationale, plus 200 word proposals for each panel participant along with their individual 1 page CVs.

We especially welcome themed panels, maximum three speakers but individuals papers are welcomed as well.

Send all submissions to: dgb.conference@ualberta.ca

Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2015.

Acceptances of papers to be announced: 1 December 2015.

Plenary Speakers:

Fashion in Qing/Early Republican China - Antonia Finnane Professor, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne
Author of Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation

Cultures of Dress within Global Africa - Karen Tranberg HansenProfessor Emerita. Department of Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Northwestern University
Author of Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia

Colonial practice, cross-cultural influences in the dress of colonial Spanish America - Dana LeibsohnPriscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art, Department of Art, Smith College

Principal Organizers:
Beverly Lemire, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta lemire@ualberta.ca
Giorgio Riello, Department of History and Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick pasold.research@warwick.ac.uk

For further information please refer to http://www.dressingglobalbodies.com

CALL FOR PAPERS: Framing the Face: New perspectives on the history of facial hair

One-day workshop, 28 November 2015
Friend’s Meeting House, Euston Road, London

Over the past five centuries, facial hair has been central to debates about masculinity. Over time, changing views of masculinity, self-fashioning, the body, gender, sexuality and culture have all strongly influenced men’s decisions to wear, or not wear, facial hair. For British Tudor men, beards were a symbol of sexual maturity and prowess. Throughout the early modern period, debates also raged about the place of facial hair within a humoural medical framework. The eighteenth century, by contrast, saw beards as unrefined and uncouth; clean-shaven faces reflected enlightened values of neatness and elegance, and razors were linked to new technologies. Victorians conceived of facial hair in terms of the natural primacy of men, and new models of hirsute manliness. All manner of other factors from religion to celebrity culture have intervened to shape decisions about facial hair and shaving.

And yet, despite a recent growth in interest in the subject, we still know little about the significance, context and meanings of beards and moustaches through time, or of its relationship to important factors such as medicine and medical practice, technology and shifting models of masculinity. We therefore welcome papers related to, but by no means limited to the following questions:

• To what extent were beards a symbol of masculinity and what key attributes of masculinity did they symbolise? 
• To what extent did the profession of the barber influence beard styles and the management of facial hair? 
• To what extent were beard trends led by the elite and by metropolitan fashion? 
• How far did provincial trends influence metropolitan trends through migration? 
• What impact did changing shaving technologies have on beard fashions/trends?
• How were beards understood within the medical frameworks of different eras? 
• How have women responded to facial hair in different eras? 
• How has the display of facial hair by women been viewed as both a medical and cultural phenomena?

Please send abstracts of up to 300 words, by 30th September 2015, to framingtheface@gmail.com

For further information please contact the organisers
Dr Alun Withey, University of Exeter A.Withey@exeter.ac.uk
Dr Jennifer Evans, University of Hertfordshire J.evans5@herts.ac.uk

https://framingtheface.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/