Deadline: 1 July, 2026
Call for Papers
Re-Sounding the Early Modern: Art, Power, and the Global Soundscape of the Dutch Masters
The Texas Tech University Vernacular Music Center, in collaboration with the Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts and the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, invites proposals for a one-day interdisciplinary symposium exploring the cultural, historical, economic, and sonic worlds of the Early Modern.
Centered on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) and Bruegel’s late works—including The Peasant Dance (c1570s)—this symposium examines how these and related images both reflect and obscure the profound transformations of the Early Modern world. These paintings emerge from a period marked by artistic innovation, expanding global trade, technological change, and the consolidation of colonial and commercial empires. “Re-Sounding the Early Modern” seeks to place these works in dialogue not only with each other and their immediate contexts, but also with broader global histories and expressive cultures. In particular, the symposium asks what happens when we “re-sound” these visual artifacts—when we consider their acoustic, performative, and embodied dimensions alongside their visual and material presence?
This interdisciplinary symposium, capped with a keynote from a noted international specialist on the art history of the period, brings together historians, artists, performers, creators, and the general public to put Bruegel’s and Rembrandt’s works in dialog: not only with each other and with their times, but also with both history and the visual and sounding arts–and the power, class, and international relations–which that time inherited and which these masterpieces reveal.
R-STEM links thinkers, teachers and makers for critical, creative, and educational work in the areas of music, art history, cartography, theater and dance, early modern history, colonial studies, and studies of empire and technology. We welcome art historians and musicologists, global history specialists and language experts, historians of books and maps, music and acting ensembles; research centers, museums, and teaching nodes; historical performance and vernacular styles; costume theorists, studio artists, dance scholars and makers; cultural critics and public commentators; graduate students and undergraduates, K-12 educators; film scholars and series, and many parts of the general public. Our goal is to link the humanist disciplines of history and criticism with the fine arts disciplines of historical (and historicized) performance.
We welcome contributions that engage critically and creatively with the intersections of art, sound, history, and power.
Themes and Topics
Possible areas of inquiry include (but are not limited to):
- Soundscapes of the Early Modern world: music, noise, and acoustic environments
- Visual art and sonic imagination: translating image into sound or performance
- Vernacular and courtly cultures in the Low Countries
- Art, empire, and global exchange: colonial routes, trade networks, and cultural flows
- Representations of labor, class, and everyday life
- Technologies of art, war, and production
- Race, representation, and early modern constructions of difference
- Historiography and critical reappraisals of canonical works
- Interdisciplinary and practice-based research (music, theater, dance, visual arts)
- Pedagogical approaches to Early Modern art and global history
- Museum studies, curation, and public humanities
- Creative responses: composition, performance, installation, or multimedia work
Commentary
The Night Watch (1642), by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), is one of the most recognizable Early Modern paintings in the world, a richly observed, imaginatively composed, and powerfully evocative image capturing a moment of Dutch urban, political, economic, and military life in the 17th century. Commissioned as a gigantic (11×14 foot) self-tribute by a group of wealthy militia members; the object of ongoing study by art historians, museum curators, X-ray technicians, and other specialists; and viewed by 2.2 million people annually, it is so well-known that allusions appear in civic parades (link), digital educational programming (link), flash-mob videos (link; hover for preview), curated installations (link; link)–and in modern composers’ musical works (link) and an avant-garde film-maker’s catalog (link)–to this day.
A century before, in a series of works all painted within the space of a very few years (Hunters in the Snow, Winter Landscape, the Harvesters, The Hay Harvest, The Wedding Dance, The Peasant Dance [below], and The Peasant Wedding), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525-69) had created unprecedentedly sympathetic and precisely-observed depictions of rural and working-class experience and music. The two painters’ works thus delineate a period of enormous creativity in Dutch visual arts, and of the Low Countries’ influence on world affairs.
Yet Bruegel’s works, in their near-ethnographic observation of 16th century rural life, and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, in its technical and expressive genius and “tenebrist” interplay of darkness and light, also reveal other aspects of the era they bookend. The works of Bruegel’s late period introduced a new realism and close observation which helped shape the Early Modern era of which The Night Watch marks an apotheosis. Conversely, the latter work’s origins reflect the influence of new commerce and sources of income, many of them flowing to and from European colonies in the “Global South”; new technologies for war, art, and production; and new, and much darker, ways for international trading empires and corporations to enclose, exploit, and appropriate from subaltern peoples.
R-STEM welcomes new critical and historiographic thinking in the widest range of arts histories and soundscapes (especially West African, Mediterranean, Eastern European, East and South Asian, and New World/Indigenous). The project reaches far beyond The Peasant Dance and The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, Holland, and Europe itself–and beyond the confines of the Early Modern–to investigate the continuing resonances, associations, and meanings, both “bright” and dark,” that these images and their “re-sounded” back stories, known and obscured, may evoke.
Among those other, perhaps darker, back-stories we will explore the flow of people, culture, objects, ideas, wealth, and sounds: along trade routes and communications, through early colonial stations and slave trade entrepots, sites of extraction and exchange, appropriation and exploitation, and the cross-cultural new thinking–in peace and war–which birthed the modern era.
Timetable
- Deadline for proposals: July 1
- Decisions & notifications by August 1
- Dates: Friday Oct 23 – Saturday Oct 24
Formats
We invite proposals in a variety of formats, including:
- Traditional academic papers (15–20 minutes)
- Lecture-performances or demonstrations
- Panel sessions (3–4 participants)
- Artistic or practice-based presentations
Participants from across disciplines are encouraged to apply, including scholars, performers, artists, educators, curators, and graduate students.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit the following:
- A proposal of 250–300 words
- A brief bio (100–150 words)
- Indication of possible format (paper, performance, panel, etc.)
- Technical requirements (if applicable)
To: https://forms.gle/
Alternative mode / queries:
- Dr Theresa Flanigan theresa.flanigan@ttu.edu
- Dr Christopher J Smith christopher.smith@ttu.edu