Constructor Univ. Bremen; Julia Secklehner (Web)

Time: 15.-16.05.2025
Venue: Constructor Univ., Bremen
Proposals by: 15.12.2204

Central Europe’s modernist movements in the twentieth century have widely been accepted as middle-class phenomena, driven by figures with the education, time, and financial resources to devote themselves to creative production. Yet, as the First World War shook up the social and economic stability of many, comfortable backgrounds no longer guaranteed support. Women, in particular, found themselves in a new situation, not only gaining new liberties in the post-imperial successor states but often also facing the need to make a living. How did this affect their creativity and access to artistic education and production? From privately sold goods made in the home to administrative work and wage labour, women artists in the 1920s and 30s followed various professions to support themselves, their (artist) partners, and their dependents. While some of this work was to make ends meet, other activities, such as journalism and editorial work, craftwork, teaching and photography, also played an essential role in developing their artistic practice.
Taking this as a point of departure, this workshop addresses the invisible (wage) labour of modernist women artists and how it affected their creative work in different fields. It seeks to examine the ambivalences of paid and creative work faced and negotiated by individuals and their impact on our understanding of modernist artistic production. The workshop invites proposals for papers exploring examples and case studies that analyse the role of paid work in women’s artistic production. Studies can be comparative and historical analyses that take into account questions of gender, class, and race and approach the subject through, for example, art history, visual culture, labour history, or gender studies. While the main focus is on central Europe, contributions that examine examples from other geographies from the 1920s to the 1940s are welcome. Specific questions that might be addressed include, for example:

• To what extent did the necessity to follow a profession to make a living foster and develop women’s creative practice in the first half of the twentieth century?
• Which kinds of professions were particularly important in helping to develop women’s artistic practice? Which ones remained invisible?
• How did questions of class impact women artists and designers‘ opportunities and skills in relation to both wage labour and creative work? Continue reading →

Fandom | Culture | Research 2/25; Philipps-Univ. Marburg (Web)

Proposals by: 01.12.2024

Fandom | Cultures | Research is the first international journal based in Germany for scholarship in the fields of Fan, Audience, Media, and Cultural (Data) Studies. With its different formats – ranging from full papers to reviews, conference reports, and data papers – the journal fosters academic discussion across these disciplines, especially regarding methodological questions: Each issue will consist of double-blind peer-reviewed full papers, alongside with an editorially reviewed section consisting of data papers (data sets and complementary text), reviews, conference reports, and a „Method Lab“ section with shorter papers and interviews that provide insight into work-in-progress, methodological challenges, as well as best practices. Other creative format suggestions are also welcome. Furthermore, we invite themed guest sections for every issue.
Cultural interaction and participation in their myriad forms – from critical and affirmative audience responses to civic engagement and consumer activism – have become highly mediatised phenomena taking place in both analogue and digital spheres. Accordingly, doing research in the fields of Participation and Fan Studies requires a sensibility for media-specific contexts and a diverse set of methodological tools adapted to them. It also benefits a lot from interdisciplinary cooperation and discourse. The journal aims to foster synergies between all disciplines interested in fan phenomena, e.g., Media and Communication Studies, Sociology, and Digital Humanities among others, and invites contributions focusing on a wide range of fan cultural and civic practices, mainstream as well as niche identities and media. It is especially interested in digital platforms and infrastructures as frameworks for a diverse range of cultural practices and as a home to many fan, brand, and other communities.
Fandom | Cultures | Research is an openly accessible, bilingual online journal (English/German), published via the open access repository media/rep/ aiming to establish an innovative platform to further develop the understanding of situated cultural practice and ultimately, to negotiate the methodological foundations of their investigation. Continue reading →

The Cultures of Philosophy project at the Univ. of Exeter (Web)

Time: 02.-04.06.2025
Venue: Exeter
Proposals by: 29.11.2024

The history of philosophy is experiencing a major paradigm shift, with the work of early modern women philosophers in the spotlight (for e.g. Detlefsen and Shapiro 2023): this conference builds on that momentum to produce a more inclusive account of “science” in the long seventeenth century. The conference aims to recover women’s contributions to early modern natural philosophy, looking beyond the treatise and dialogue to other genres both in manuscript and print; and to examine women’s roles in transnational communities of scientific exchange.
In particular, the conference will foreground women’s textual engagement with natural philosophy and investigate transnational institutions, communities, and collaborations. How are philosophical concepts conveyed by diverse literary forms that cannot be categorised as scholarship? How did European women draw on global perspectives and philosophical cultures outside Europe? How can we trace women’s engagement with philosophical networks and institutions? How might including different genres, figures, and communities shift our understanding of natural philosophy in this period?
Taking a comparative, relational, and transnational approach, the conference seeks to investigate women’s collaborations, exchanges, and roles in networks both within or at the margins of academies, institutions, and other official sites of scientific knowledge exchange; and their involvement in informal salons, manuscript circles, and other spaces of encounter. The CultPhil project examines the European context, but we welcome papers that engage with non-European cultures and philosophical traditions, with attention to different languages, international networks, and contexts. We encourage proposals from scholars in disciplines including (but not limited to): history of science, environmental humanities, literary history, intellectual history, book history, and the history of philosophy.

Proposals could include, but are not limited to:
– Women’s participation in (and exclusion from) academies, salons, manuscript circles, institutions, and other spaces of learning
– Women and transnational and national manuscript and epistolary networks … read more and source (Web)

Gerold Bönnen (Stadtarchiv Worms) (Web), Nina Gallion und Regina Schäfer (Historisches Seminar, Johannes Gutenberg-Univ. Mainz) (Web) und Matthias Schmandt (Historisches Museum am Strom – Hildegard von Bingen, Bingen) (Web)

Zeit: 08.-10.04.2026
Ort: Historisches Museum am Strom – Hildegard von Bingen, Bingen am Rhein
Einreichfrist: 30.11.2024

„Frau in der Stadt“ erweckt als Titel Erinnerungen an deutschsprachige Studien, die in den 1980er-Jahren erschienen. Genannt seien hier nur die Veröffentlichungen von Erika Uitz und Edith Ennen oder die Quellensammlung von Peter Ketsch und Anette Kuhn. Oft verbanden diese Werke, denen man zahlreiche weitere zur Seite stellen könnte, Frauenforschung mit einer sozial- oder alltagsgeschichtlichen Fragestellung. Es ging um Lebensformen und Alltagswelten.
Seitdem wich nicht nur die Historische Frauenforschung weitgehend der Geschlechterforschung. Methodisch ging auch die Geschichtswissenschaft zahlreiche neue Wege – zur Lokalisierung wurden Geoinformationssysteme genutzt, die Netzwerkanalyse half beim neuen Erschließen von Personenbeziehungen, die Kulturgeschichte fragte nach symbolischen Elementen und trieb den material turn voran, universalgeschichtliche Ansätze wurden entwickelt, diskursgeschichtliche Zugänge auch für die Vormoderne ausgetestet – um nur einige der dominierenden Zugänge in der Geschichtswissenschaft der letzten Jahrzehnte zu nennen.
Die weiter blühende stadthistorische Forschung nahm immer auch Frauen in der Stadt mit in den Blick. Doch erfuhren die weltlichen Frauen weit weniger Beachtung als die geistlichen, die Bürgerinnen weniger als die Adeligen, verheiratete Frauen weniger als Witwen. Selbst wenn Frauen in der Stadt angesprochen wurden, wie bei der Tagung, die 2019 im Mainzer Landesmuseum stattfand und nach Rollenvorbildern von jüdischen und christlichen Frauen im Hochmittelalter fragte, blickte man vor allem auf Beginen und Nonnen. Der Komplex „Frau und Stadt“ blieb eher auf Arbeiten lokalen Zuschnitts beschränkt. Weiterlesen und Quelle … (Web)

Aspekte der Analyse könnten sein: Die Berufstätigkeit von Frauen | Die Wohnsituation von Frauen | Die Rechtsfähigkeit von Frauen und ihre Präsenz bei Gericht | Die Sichtbarkeit von Frauen in der Stadt | Die Benennungen von Frauen