Call for Papers: CHROMOTOPE closing conference
The CFP for the closing conference of CHROMOTOPE is now open!
Chromatic Encounters: Experiencing Colour from Early Modern Literature to Modernism
Place: Sorbonne Université and Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris
Dates: 26-28/06/2025
Since the pioneering work of Michel Pastoureau and John Gage in 1990s, colour studies have grown into a wide interdisciplinary field, embracing new research trends, from gender-focused to environmental and post-colonial approaches. Following the recent ‘material turn’ in the humanities, chromatic materiality is also being discussed by an ever-increasing number of disciplines (Feeser 2012; Young 2018). Literary studies, however, have so far lagged behind. Indeed, with the exception of the illustrated text, the difficulty of reading colour is that it is not there (Conquer 2019), the black-and-white page necessarily invoking it by absence or abstraction.
The conference ‘Chromatic Encounters’ aims to create a dialogue between literary and colour studies by exploring the experience of colour in literature written in English. It builds on the expertise developed by the CHROMOTOPE team (Sorbonne Université, CNAM and the University of Oxford) during the past five years. The main objective of the ERC project CHROMOTOPE was to study what happened to colour in the 19th century – a period when the art of ‘chromographia’ (Gaskill 2018) seems to have taken on a new dimension following the invention of a wealth of new synthetic dyes for which new names had to be devised. The conference broadens the historical scope of the project, going back to the age of print which marked the dawn of modernity and radically changed the experience of reading, and up to the age of modernism in the early 20th century. Within this broad time framework, ‘Chromatic Encounters’ seeks to interrogate how literature provided a stage for the shifting relationship between colour and changing concepts of the modern.
‘Chromatic Encounters’ wishes to take the significance of colour in literature beyond the universalizing symbolism which has dominated many approaches to colour so far. Instead, we invite speakers to look at the specifics (cultural, historical, material, geographic, political, sensorial, racial and environmental…) of the experience of colour within and surrounding the literary space/text. How do literary texts envisage and represent colour and its material forms? How does colour, in the guise of illustrations or additions to a text, influence processes of reception and remediation? Such questions should help us to see how colour can challenge our understanding of literature by taking it beyond the book/page.
We welcome abstracts for 20-min papers on any aspect related to the following topics from early and more established researchers, whatever their disciplinary background.
- Reading/writing colour
- Colour and ekphrasis
- Colour and intermediality
- Translating colour
- The evolution of colour symbolism through the ages
- Literary chromophobia
- The politics of colour in literature (colour and the racialised and/or gendered body etc.)
- The ecologies of colour
- The poetics of colour
- Performing colour (cosmetics, pigments, costumes, stage designs etc.)
- Sensory responses to literary colour
- Specificities of colour in literary movements (neoclassicism, realism, romanticism etc.)
- Colour naming and classification
- Colour as a way of reading, making or reassessing literary history
- Colour and the materiality of the printed word (fonts, inks, illustrations, illuminations, book covers, hand colouring, colour printing, etc.)
- The hermeneutics of colour (close or distant readings)
- Colour in the history of literary criticism
Proposals specifying COLOUR PAPER in the subject should be sent to chromotope@gmail.com by 15 Novembre 2024.
The submission should include, as an attachment, a short biography and a 300-word abstract in PDF format. Proposals will be reviewed by our scientific committee and accepted applicants will be notified around 25 January 2025.
Accommodation and transportation costs will be covered and meals provided for all speakers.
Organizing committee: Anne-Valérie Dulac, Stefano Evangelista and Charlotte Ribeyrol
Scientific committee: Aurélia Gaillard, Robert Stagg, Claudia Tobin
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This event has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 818563)
Image credit: Edward Lear, Nonsense Alphabet, Letter O, 1862, pen on ink on blue paper, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
