Art Histories and Terminologies II

The series of three workshops – Languages and Terminologies of Art History – organized by the Chair of Global Art History are a collaborative venture with the Forum Transregionale Studien (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices), Berlin and the Max Planck Institute Of Art History in Florence. They address the challenges posed by issues of language and conceptual terms to the scholar working in a transcultural perspective. How does scholarship involving more than one cultural context and different philological traditions negotiate the gap between languages of the sources and a shared academic vocabulary – mostly in a European language – that implicitly claims universality? What are the issues of translation that scholarship on transcultural questions has to deal with –what are the limits of translatability and how can these be plausibly handled? And importantly – how are terminologies formed (and recast) within the context of transcultural encounters and relationships – what kinds of historicization do we need to pay attention to so as not to fall into the trap of cultural essentialism?

In the second of the three workshops doctoral and post-doctoral students from Heidelberg and Berlin will problematize these questions from within their respective research projects.