Revivalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Conference
Welsh School of Architecture | Cardiff University
Monday 19 February 2024
Keynote Speaker: Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin, University of Cambridge
The past often informs the present in many, interconnected ways. For example, Howard Colvin in his well-known essay on the ‘Gothic Survival and Gothic Revival’ offers a nuanced reading of medieval architecture’s perpetuation in C17–C18 Britain (‘Gothic Survival’) and the style’s quite separate revival. Like the ‘Gothic Revival’, references to and recreations of the past can take many different forms across the arts and humanities; these revivals can leverage mimesis, or perhaps they are more frivolous and based upon loose associationism. Revivals’ form, fidelity, function, and motivation are therefore varied and crucial to understanding and mapping the materiality and ideas from history to its continued relevance, recycling, and recreation in the present.
This conference wishes to examine the legacies of the past and the past’s recreation under the broad label of ‘revival’ across time, place, and discipline: how and why has the past been reworked, recreated, or revived; what are the minimum requirements for work(s) to be considered a revival; can revivals be counter-cultural? The conference also wishes to examine how revivals have been interpreted (both positively and negatively); and how revivals can be and are set against the source material that inspired them.
20-minute papers on any aspect of revivalism across the arts and humanities are solicited for this in-person conference. Proposals that explore interdisciplinary manifestations of revivalism are especially welcome. Topics could include:
Art; Architecture; Applied design
Literature (fiction and non-fiction)
Revivalism, pastiche, and forgery
Historiography of revival
Interdisciplinary revivals
Motivation(s) for revivals/ism
Comparisons between revivals and the revied
300-word proposals should be sent to the conference organiser, Dr Peter N. Lindfield, FSA, Welsh School of Architecture: LindfieldP@Cardiff.ac.uk no later than 24 November 2023.
Image: Fireplace in Great Hall, Cardiff Castle, photo via Peter Lindfield