{"id":47,"date":"2015-02-13T11:40:53","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T11:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=47"},"modified":"2015-11-09T15:17:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T15:17:34","slug":"the-tiny-and-the-fragmented-a-postcard-from-the-caa-annual-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"The Tiny and the Fragmented: A postcard from the CAA annual conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"petsofa\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by Jessica Hughes<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m at the annual College Art Association conference, which this year is being held in New York. The CAA is a huge conference taking place over four days; it’s\u00a0packed with\u00a0hundreds of papers, panel discussions, and an array of networking events. I arrived two days ago and gave my paper yesterday, in a session called \u2018The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken and Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World\u2019. I\u2019d been invited to speak about my research on anatomical votive offerings, which are always ‘fragmented’ and occasionally\u00a0‘tiny’ (see image: these are miniature offerings from a peak sanctuary on\u00a0Crete, now in the collections of the British Museum<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The whole session was really interesting, with five papers addressing different but complementary aspects of ‘incompleteness’ in the ancient world. Highlights included Verity Platt\u2019s exploration of\u00a0the unfinished paintings recorded in ancient literary texts, and Douglass Bailey\u2019s paper on ‘holes in the landscape’ from the Neolithic to Contemporary Art. The session chairs Becky Martin and Stephanie Langin-Hooper did a great\u00a0job of tying everything together in their introductory and concluding comments, which\u00a0underlined the need for new theoretical approaches to the ‘archaeology of the incomplete’.<\/p>\n

Now the session is over, it’s time\u00a0to relax a bit and enjoy\u00a0the rest of the conference, and of course to explore some of the city’s museums. It\u2019s 5.30 am on Friday (thanks, jetlag!) and I\u2019m putting together my itinerary for the day ahead. To begin, there’s an\u00a0early morning\u00a0paper on ‘Spolia and Souvenirs’, which\u00a0looks very relevant\u00a0to my new research project on modern-day souvenirs from classical sites;\u00a0then I’ll go off to the Metropolitan Museum to do some fieldwork for that same project in their gift shop (trying very hard not to buy too many fridge magnets!). Then it\u2019ll be back to the conference for our \u2018sister\u2019 session on ancient art, followed by\u00a0a browse around the book fair to discover\u00a0the latest trends in Art History. Finally, I’m having a dinner this evening on the Upper West side with some new US friends who also work on\u00a0material religion – we’ll discuss our shared interests and maybe come up with some new collaborative projects.<\/p>\n

Coming to a big overseas conference like this one does involve a lot of time, money and effort – and I should mention here that\u00a0I\u2019m extremely grateful to Kress Foundation and the OU for help with subsidising the trip. But the effort is more than worth it, because\u00a0I’ll be returning to the UK with new contacts, ideas and inspiration for my research, and will hopefully reap the benefits of this trip for many months to come!<\/p>\n

You can follow the conference on Twitter at\u00a0#CAA2015\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jessica Hughes I\u2019m at the annual College Art Association conference, which this year is being held in New York. The CAA is a huge conference taking place over four days; it’s\u00a0packed with\u00a0hundreds of papers, panel discussions, and an array of networking events. I arrived two days ago and gave my paper yesterday, in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":427,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}