REVISIT THE 2023-2024 "LANDSCAPES" SYMPOSIUM

Time: 5 p.m. September 13 - 7 p.m. April 11

View or download the "Landscapes" Fall Season Preview flyer or Spring Season Preview flyer.

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LANDSCAPES evoke ideas about nature, the natural world, and artifice. Consider how you might frame your proposed project related to this theme…

Landscapes are both “real” and “contrived,” and this is so whether we mean scenery, terrain, territory, or topography … or being situated viewers or makers of those landscapes, with an emphasis on perspective, viewpoint, or outlook. Landscapes thus reference visual, aesthetic, spatial and social imaginaries more broadly, and the varied kinds of environs we might inhabit or create, e.g., cityscapes, soundscapes, dreamscapes, or mindscapes.

Artforms tied to landscapes are myriad, as are artistic interventions and innovations in and on the land. Relatedly, landscapes are deeply affective—they hold memory, evoke feelings and places—and their representation/creation is contextual (linked to particular histories, social conditions, and peoples). Diverse politics and histories imbue the landscapes that surround and shape us (and which we, in turn, shape). Landscapes have been portrayed or rendered in ways to help rationalize settler colonialism, slavery, and war. In turn, landscapes and their re-presentation have been engaged as sites of counter-memory, evoking histories of resistance and viewpoints that contest dominant perspectives and portrayals.

Finally, we are at present inhabiting a natural world in crisis—whether we are talking about water (rising tides, algal blooms, drought), loss of arboreal forests, world-wide deforestation, accelerating loss of biodiversity, melting ice caps and glaciers, and more. These rapid changes and their impacts are being lived and experienced unequally around the globe, playing out in particular ways in and on different landscapes and peoples.

Whether in the arts, the environment, or the imagination, landscapes are saturated with meaning, politics, and possibility. For the Spring 2024 “Symposium” Faculty Fellowship, we invite proposals that showcase how and why the humanities and arts are essential to these and other questions evoked by the concept, “Landscapes.”

This year's series introduced a new SU Libraries Reading List for Spring 2024.