Call for Papers
TRANSNATIONALISM AND VISUAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN: ÉMIGRÉS AND MIGRANTS 1933 TO 1956
9-11 September 2009
Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne
Second-round deadline for proposals: 19 January 2009

Keynotes:

Dr Marian Malet 
(Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London)

Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta
(Synema - Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, Vienna) 

Historically British visual culture has been shaped by trans-cultural cooperation,
exiles, émigrés and migrant workers. Besides multi-faceted collaboration across 
geographical and cultural boundaries, the political situation in the mid-twentieth
century in continental Europe prompted various migration movements. Many professionals,
artists and intellectuals left their home countries as a response to the establishment
of totalitarian regimes first by Italian, German and Spanish fascists and later 
by communists in central and Eastern Europe. Others arrived in Britain almost by
chance - caught out by war or redrawn national boundaries. To a significant number
Britain offered a new - often permanent - home. Among the large group of émigrés
who helped to change the face of visual culture in Britain were film producers such
as Alexander Korda, art historians such as Nikolaus Pevsner, filmmakers such as 
Karel Reisz and Lotte Reiniger, ceramic designers such as Grete Loebenstein and 
Agnete Hoy, architects such as Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn, avant-garde 
artists such as László Moholy-Naghy, and photographers such as Bill Brandt. 

This international and interdisciplinary conference looks at the cross-fertilisation
and trans-national contact of British visual culture from the year the Nazis seized
power in 1933 to the uprising in Hungary in 1956. Its wide focus invites papers 
on the avant-garde as well as on popular culture, centres of immigration as well
as marginalised communities. 

Presentations may feature analyses of individual émigrés, trajectories of migrants,
specific studies of cross-cultural contacts, specific artefacts, schools of thought
and theory, places of migration and trans-national cultural life, film, photography,
material visual culture, fashion, journalism, television, architecture, academic
life, the avant-garde, design, race, gender, national identities, etc. 

Topics of trans-national aspects of visual culture in Britain not included in the
above list are also welcome. Panel proposals are also welcome but we ask each presenter
to submit his or her own paper proposal. Roundtable sessions and international participation
are strongly encouraged.

Please send 150-250 word proposals to 

Dr Tobias Hochscherf, Conference Co-organiser
Northumbria University                
School of Arts and Social Sciences               
Lipman Bldg.              
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST                 
United Kingdom 
Phone: ++44(0)191-227-4932        
Email: [log in to unmask]

----
Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex
podcast:
http://www.screenlex.org