Aimé-Jules Dalou, Brotherhood (La fraternité), 1883, plaster. Paris, city hall of the Xth arrondissement. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 / photo by Coyau.

15-16 May 2018, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

Male Bonds is a two-day international conference organized by Ghent University and the European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art (ESNA); in cooperation with the University of Antwerp and the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent; and with the support of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), of Radboud University’s Institute for Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies, of the Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History (OSK) and of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD).

This conference will probe, challenge and expand upon the academic narrative of male homosociality through the lens of art history. It aims to establish an overview of a variety of male bonds that underpinned nineteenth-century art, and to consider the theoretical and methodological implications of the study thereof. In so doing, it seeks to build a bridge between traditional art-historical scholarship and the fields of gender and gay and lesbian studies: an interdisciplinary exchange of which the full potential for scholarship on the nineteenth century remains to be exploited.

For more information, see the conference website: http://www.malebonds.ugent.be/ or the event’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/599483510426231/.