Call for Papers & Applications

The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut (KHI) invites applications for post-doctoral positions to start in June 2024 or thereafter for a period of one year, with the possibility of renewal.

Founded in 1897, the KHI is dedicated to the history of art and architecture in a transcultural and global perspective. It promotes methodologically innovative research, which looks to the future of the discipline and combines historical approaches with a critical engagement in contemporary debates.

We invite candidates from art history and adjacent disciplines to submit proposals that may relate to the research focusses of the Department of Gerhard Wolf  “Image, Object, Site"; for example, along the following key terms:

  • environments, catastrophes, heritage, tourism;
  • materiality, sacred topographies and narratives;
  • transcultural art histories, geopolitics, and aesthetics.

The Max Planck Society is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from those currently under-represented in art history. The position is open to candidates of all nationalities who have completed their PhD.

Salary and benefits will be determined according to either a German or Italian contract, which is subject to the respective tax and social security laws.

At the KHI, fellows are expected to work solely on their projects, and to participate in the scientific activities of the institute.

APPLICATION DOCUMENTS

The application should include:

  • a detailed curriculum vitae;
  • a cover letter;
  • a description of the Postdoctoral project (maximum 3 pages);
  • a writing sample (not exceeding 25 pages);
  • names of three references and respective contact information;

Please send applications in pdf format as one document (max. 2 MB) by April 15, 2024 to: dirwolf@khi.fi

The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut (KHI) invites applications for pre-doctoral positions to start in June 2024 or thereafter for a period of one year, with the possibility of renewal.

Founded in 1897, the KHI is dedicated to the history of art and architecture in a transcultural and global perspective. It promotes methodologically innovative research, which looks to the future of the discipline and combines historical approaches with a critical engagement in contemporary debates.

We invite candidates from art history and adjacent disciplines to submit proposals that may relate to the research focusses of the Department of Gerhard Wolf  “Image, Object, Site"; for example, along the following key terms:

  • environments, catastrophes, heritage, tourism;
  • materiality, sacred topographies and narratives;
  • transcultural art histories, geopolitics, and aesthetics.

The Max Planck Society is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from those currently under-represented in art history. The application is open to PhD students of all nationalities.

Salary and benefits will be determined according to either a German or Italian contract, which is subject to the respective tax and social security laws.

Applicants should hold an MA degree granted within the last five years (extenuating circumstances may be taken into consideration if the degree was granted earlier). At the KHI, fellows are expected to work solely on their dissertations, and to participate in the scientific activities of the institute.

APPLICATION DOCUMENTS

The application should include:

  • a detailed curriculum vitae;
  • a cover letter;
  • a description of the PhD project (maximum 3 pages);
  • a writing sample (not exceeding 25 pages);
  • names of three references and respective contact information;

Please send applications in pdf format as one document (max. 2 MB) by April 15, 2024 to: dirwolf@khi.fi

The Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.) is a world-leading, independent, non-profit research organization with the goal to promote cutting edge basic research. Within 84 Max Planck Institutes over 24,000 employees pursue basic research in broad areas of life and natural sciences as well as humanities, social sciences and law and have a strong interest in innovative and interdisciplinary research areas.

Lise Meitner Research Group
(Tenure track positions at Max Planck Institutes)

The Max Planck Society invites outstanding applicants to apply for tenure-track Lise Meitner Research Group Leader positions. The appointments will be made in partnership with suitable Max Planck Institutes according to the applicants’ research topics. With the Lise Meitner Excellence Program, the Max Planck Society expressly aims to attract and promote the careers of outstanding female scientists who are at an early stage of their scientific career and have a documented track record of independent and innovative research.

The successful candidates will be offered a Lise Meitner Research Group at a suitable Max Planck Institute for an initial period of six years plus one additional year for maternal leave. The funding package includes a W2 tenure-track position (equivalent to assistant/associate professor), resources for scientific staff and running costs as well as a start-up package. Upon successful tenure evaluation, four to five years after the start of the group, the W2 position and the financial support will be continued. For particularly outstanding group leaders, however, this evaluation can also be carried out at any time beforehand. Further career development is possible including con­sideration for a Max Planck Director position within the Max Planck Society.

The purpose of the Lise Meitner Excellence Program is to increase the number of out­standing women scientists in the Max Planck Society. Therefore, the program primarily focuses on the recruitment of outstanding woman scientists, though it is open to all applicants (for details, see Lise Meitner Excellence Program: FAQs). Furthermore, the MPG is committed to increasing the number of individuals with disabilities in its work­force and therefore encourages applications from such qualified individuals.

Your application should include:

  • a cover letter,
  • a CV,
  • a list of publications,
  • a one-page summary of scientific achievements, (written for a non-specialist),
  • a research statement of max. three to five* pages (written for a specialist),
  • copies of three most important publications,
  • names and contact details of 3 other scientists as experts in your research area

combined in one PDF file.

You are also required to invite two reviewers to upload recommendation letters for you to the application portal.

Only necessary for applicants in the field of the Chemistry, Physics and Technical Section: Please provide a host letter from at least one Max Planck Institute in the relevant research areas*.

For more details about the program (*including further application instructions) please visit the FAQs page.

To submit your application online, please visit https://lme.cloud.opencampus.net/. The deadline for applications is April 10, 2024.

More information about the Max Planck Society and its institutes.

Please do not hesitate to contact us in case of questions: info@khi.fi.it.

At least since the Enlightenment, Western culture has been in the echo chambers of autonomy and its ethos of a rational, active, and ultimately self-creating and self-serving individual subject. Unlike in antiquity, when the fragile relation between otium and negotium was thought fundamental for the well-being of the (free) individual and society, today inactivity has become an increasingly problematic and, to a certain extent, morally and politically destabilizing category. Not too surprisingly, the French socialist Paul Lafargue’s claim that, next to the right to work, there should be a ‘right to be lazy’ (1883) was harshly criticized. His position, inspired by ancient philosophy, was reproached by socialist and capitalist perspectives. Significantly, in today’s age of hyperactivity, 24/7 accessibility, and accelerationism, one hears of the need to slow down, to do less (or indeed nothing at all), and to contemplate. The interest in (in)action — slow cinema, and even slow food and other so-called practices of ‘self-care’ — becomes steadily more important to artistic practices and in academic discourses. But what are the narratives behind this development? Are there different forms of inaction, some perceived as ‘productive’, and others as ‘destructive’? Can inaction be a progressive gesture ‘of doing’ at a moment when classical ‘actions’ have exhausted themselves? Would that also apply to a hypercapitalized and accelerated art market and exhibition system?

This workshop aims to critically examine artistic, literary, philosophical, and political strategies and practices of inaction. It looks at how these practices, on one hand, work against dominant cultural and political narratives and, on the other, are absorbed by capitalism and ultimately become neoliberal adjuncts to prevailing economic and political systems. The focus of the workshop will be on artistic and aesthetic practices from the early twentieth century until today, since they offer a particularly fertile testing ground for thinking through strategies of action and inaction. One example might be found with so-called unofficial artists, writers, and intellectuals in totalitarian or post-totalitarian systems. They could not afford to protest in plain sight and thus often chose non-assuming and perhaps counter-intuitive strategies like leisure, ambivalence, and irony for staging their resistance. Also, Eastern European performance art, for example, has long demonstrated that inaction can structure the artist’s presence as much as (if not more eloquently than) action. Here, the typical action, which with its Western connotations is often imagined to lead to a romanticized version of revolution, is subverted.

At the same time, conceptualizing inaction as an agent of change — also in the sense of contemplation as basis of creativity — comes with its pitfalls. When does inaction simply become a willful act of ignorance? As Hannah Arendt has elucidated, we have been witnesses to mass atrocities that we have refused to acknowledge, which alerts us to exercise caution when it comes to doing nothing. In this light, individual positions like ‘opting out’ and departing from sociopolitical life (e.g., abstaining from voting) become highly problematic. After all, who is free to ‘opt out’ and who remains helplessly stuck?

Also of interest are cultural and artistic practices that thematize inactivity as forms of resistance, resilience, or counter-movement in the broader field of heritage discourses, conservation, and art history, as well as within the museum context. The aim is to discuss, on the one hand, whether decay is understood as a kind of inactivity that causes a revaluation of objects, sites, and practices in terms of negation or negotiation. On the other hand, the aim is to interrogate how to interpret inactivity regarding questioned monuments, events, and places without sticking to the binarity of ‘productive’ or ‘destructive’ discourses. Does decay as process — and/or doing nothing as practice in the above-mentioned fields — also become an agent of change or, referring to the Aristotelian philosophy, counter-energeia in times of political and ecological crises?

The historical longue durée — starting with vita contemplativa and its contemporary relevance and adaptability — and the conceptual complexity of ‘inactivity’ require further analysis. Many of inactivity’s manifestations in artistic and aesthetic practices, in political actions, and in everyday life forms remain undertheorized. The interest of the workshop is therefore in concrete, historically-grounded case studies and broader systematic-methodological approaches that help us conceptualize and re-vise well-known narratives of inactivity, mostly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but also in accounts that tackle the longue durée. The organizers thus invite scholars from art history, philosophy, sociology, literature, and related fields, and those who work in different geographical areas, to present a short talk of about 25 minutes (followed by a discussion).

Please send an abstract of max. 2,000 characters and a short bio (in one pdf) in English by email to oliver.aas@khi.fi.it.

The organizers kindly request that the abstract be submitted by 7 April 2024. Feedback on workshop participation as well as information on lodging and travel reimbursement will be provided by 22 April 2024.

The scope of the OSCOP project (https://pric.unive.it/projects/oscop/home) is to study and promote the collection of photographs of South Caucasian art and architecture taken by the research group of Adriano Alpago Novello between the 1960s and 1980s, now preserved in the Centre of Study and Documentation of Armenian Culture in Venice. The photographs show the monumental and natural heritage of Georgia and Armenia, in particular the so-called 'crystal churches' (Brandi 1969). With their pure forms, geometrically defined spaces, and central dome, they offer a highly articulate expression of ‘architectural spirituality’ in which the landscape takes part. Alpago Novello’s collection is particular in its context. Together with his colleagues from Italy and the Armenian diaspora he recorded the Armenian and Georgian historical landscape at a time when the territory was politically and theoretically part of the Soviet Union, and any reference to the sacred and spiritual was excluded from the critical discourse on the natural and monumental heritage.

Beyond this, the photo collection raises questions about the specific elements that make a landscape ‘spiritual’. What prompted people to define a landscape as spiritual rather than sacred? The study of landscape involves the consideration of the role of human interventions in its shaping, the perception of geomorphology, and of the interplay between human and non-human agencies, such as vegetation. Under which premise and in which ways is a spiritual dimension attributed to them? What is the role of architecture in the making and marking, as well as experiencing of, hierotopic landscapes (Lidov), or vice versa? While inviting contributions to the discussion of these and related questions, the workshop will also engage with photographic images and ask if photographs can stimulate or convey a religious, mystical, or ascetic experience – and, if so, how do photographs mediate such a ‘sense of spirituality’, for instance, through light, composition, scaling, proximity, or distance. Can strategies of ‘spiritualization’ (or ‘de-spiritualization’) be identified, which are site-specific, regional or transcultural?

Photographs, with their own forms of spiritual engagement require, imply or promote specific settings and dynamics of spectatorship. There may be a spiritual dimension to the personal experience of the photographer regarding her or his interest in capturing markers from the past (such as churches or khachkars), and also the spirituality of local communities around them.

The conference aims to cross-examine photographs of spiritual landscapes from various point of view, with the double lens of seeking innovative methodological approaches to study the interplay between nature, humans, artifacts, and the underlying transcendental relations on the one hand and the role of the spiritual in related photographs and photographic aesthetics on the other. Contributions presenting case studies that consider wider geographical areas, from the Caucasus to the Mediterranean, and which engage with broader spiritual frameworks, from religion to mysticism, are welcome’.

Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words, as well as a short CV, by 2 April 2024 to stefano.riccioni@unive.it and hoffmann@khi.fi.it

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