Conference 2009: “Feeling Photography”

Feeling Photography Conference, October 16-17, 2009, Toronto

“Feeling Photography” was an international, interdisciplinary conference that brought together scholars working in a range of interpretive and theoretical approaches to interrogate the relationship between the affect, emotion, and/or feeling and the photograph. The conference was held at the University of Toronto on October 16-17, 2009 and was sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States and the Toronto Photography Seminar.

The conference featured plenary addresses from the following scholars: Lisa Cartwright (UCSD); Ann Cvetkovich (UT Austin); David Eng (Penn); Marianne Hirsch (Columbia) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth); Christopher Pinney (University College, London); Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); and Diana Taylor (NYU). We assembled fifty-two papers from our fall CFP into sixteen panels featuring scholarly work from across the globe and the disciplines. Panel topics included Children and the Political Management of Affect; Feeling Together: Publics and Counterpublics; Emotional Geographies; Marketing Emotions: Loss, Fear and (Comic) Loathing; Racial Affects; Emotional States: Citizenship and Photography; Instrumental Images: Bodies, Cities and Empires, 1903-1918; Digital Affects; Public Intimacies; Touching Photo; Visual Witnessing: Photography and World War II; Feeling First: Documentary and Left Internationalism; Photography, Trauma, and the Ethics of Witnessing; Queer Affect(s); Affective Economies; Facial Tics – Faciality.

Conference organizers were Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto; Prof. Thy Phu, University of Western Ontario; and Prof. Matt Brower, University of Toronto with the assistance of David Sworn, graduate student in History at the University of Toronto and Nina Boric, Munk Centre. For the Toronto Photography Seminar, see related pages on this site; for the Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto, see http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/

If you are interested in seeing the conference program, it can be downloaded here [link tk].