The Craft, Texture, and Aesthetics of Letter Forms from Antiquity to the Present
Call for Papers
We encourage submissions of 300 word abstracts for a twenty-minute paper in relation to the following topics:
- The contested role of aesthetics in palaeography and related disciplines
- The interaction between ideals of beauty, legibility, effectiveness and functionality
- Reflecting on, and historicising, the criteria of judgement applied to letter forms
- Reading letter forms for human values: agency, character, beauty, idiosyncrasy, etc
- How letter forms adapt as they pass between different media
- Pedagogy of letter formation and handwriting
- Process-based, mindful, or meditative, accounts of letter formation
- The relationship between academic knowledge and practical skills
- The role of the letter arts in forms of craft revival, present and historic
- Cross-period perspectives and reception work
- Disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary perspectives
- Letter forms in the context of recent thinking about material culture
- Connections to heritage practices and skills
- Interactions between analogue lettering and digital lettering technology
- Interactions between letter forms, tools and technologies of reproduction: e.g. carving, casting, photography
- Interactions between letter forms and principles of space and spacing
- Engineering, materials and letter formation
- Relations between western practices of letter formation and other calligraphic traditions
- The different role of letter forms in public and private space
- Different lettering time-signatures, from the lasting or preservative to the ephemeral
- Lettering and literature
