University of Newcastle (Australia), 18-19 June 2018.

Central and Eastern Europe have been both the site of numerous local conflicts and the battleground of some of the largest conflicting ideologies of the eighteenth – twentieth centuries. The symposium aims to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to examine how these conflicts in their various forms (such as social, economic, religious, ethnonational, imperial, and ideological) have been represented in diverse visual media (including, but not restricted to, painting, photography, film, cartoons, caricatures, museum displays, maps and graphs). Themes papers might address include:

How does visual culture contribute to or mitigate conflict?
Are there distinct Central and Eastern European cultures of representation of conflict, be they national, imperial, religious, etc.?
How have ideological and regime shifts shaped representations of conflict?
Conversely, do visual cultures transcend ideological and regime shifts?
What role have the sciences, e.g. cartography, ethnography, and physical anthropology, played in shaping representations of conflict?
How has visual culture been use to elide and disguise conflict?

We intend to publish a themed issue with a scholarly journal from the conference. Potential contributors may contribute to the themed issue without attending the symposium.

This symposium is hosted by the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle (Australia), in cooperation with the Antipodean East European Study Group (AEESG) at Victoria University (Wellington).

Please send abstracts to: sacha.davis@newcastle.edu.au by 15 April 2018.