CALL FOR PAPERS

Exploring Early Modern Dress: The Merits and Challenges of Diverse Sources

Inaugural Dressing The Early Modern Network Conference

Saturday, 19 September 2015, Dutch University Institute for Art History (NIKI), Viale Torricelli 5, 50125 Florence, Italy (www.niki-florence.org)

The field of early modern dress history draws from a variety of sources in order to map out fashions and trends within the confines of readily available early modern source materials. The analysis of a vast range of sources is done in the context of an interdisciplinary research where different research fields and schools of thought collide and emerge in the form of dress history. Pictorial representations of early modern dress together with surviving garments, garment fragments and textiles form some of the obvious tools from which information is drawn and pieced together. Archival sources, including house inventories, account books and sumptuary legislation, among others, have also consistently been employed to verify the various types of garments used in the early modern period. However, while each of these sources have their definite merits, they also pose considerable challenges due to the fact that they can sometimes be fragmented. The conference aims to generate a discussion about the benefits and advantages, as well as the limitations and constraints that the plethora of these diverse sources pose in order to build a solid platform from which researchers can draw conclusions about early modern dress history.

PhD students and early career researchers are invited to speak about their experiences in relation to the sources that they use, with reference to their current or previous projects. We invite potential speakers to submit as a single document: (1) a 300-word paper abstract, which should include the main question of the research project, (2) a paper title, (3) a brief curriculum vitae, (4) institutional affiliations and (5) contact information to the Dressing the Early Modern Network at info@dressingtheearlymodern.com

Each speaker will be allotted twenty minutes. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2015. Notification of the outcome will be advised by e-mail on or before 15 June 2015.

Please note that funding is not provided for this event, so participants will be required to fund and arrange their own travel and accommodations.