Image/Text - What/Next?

Cultural creators including William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Dorothea Tanning, Alasdair Gray, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye could be described as avowedly cross-disciplinary and avant-garde. Discussions on these artist-writers, however, have not been marked by a comparably interdisciplinary methodology: art-historical and literary scholarship has remained consistently segregated and thus discussions around interdisciplinary figures are often stunted — their respective oeuvres continuing to resist, disorient, and frustrate critical efforts.

This conference aims to to centre a range of difficult and neglected research questions within arts and humanities scholarship and methodologies: how should interdisciplinary art-historical and literary research be approached? What are the issues with current methodologies for addressing art-literature? What are our shared barriers in conducting this image-text work? How can we facilitate disciplinary ‘ambidexterity’ in frequently mono-disciplinary departments or courses? Who is the responsible agent for seeing and advancing a connection between the visual and verbal? How might we say one art form resembles, imitates, or subverts another?

Equally, the conference will facilitate questions of interdisciplinary pedagogy and ‘the institution’ itself: is it more beneficial, for instance, to study a wide-ranging ‘arts and humanities’ degree as opposed to single-honours subjects? How do we assess and value interdisciplinary work? How can a university facilitate interdisciplinary art-historical and literary research that achieves outcomes that could not be achieved within the framework of a single discipline.

Full programme: here

Registration (online and in person): here