We are inviting chapter abstracts for a collection of essays designed for academics, specialists, and enthusiasts interested in the interrelations between art and science in women’s collections and collecting practices beyond Europe in the long 18th century. This volume will follow our forthcoming compendium on the topic entitled, Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe, published by Routledge. This book recovers women’s histories through numerous interdisciplinary discourses pertaining to the subject of collecting, and it examines their interests, methodologies, and practices in relation to cultures of art and science. In the second volume, we continue this discussion and consider women’s relationships to collecting of European and non-European objects, gathered, exchanged ,and displayed within colonies and with indigenous cultures beyond Europe. Responding to ideas about indigenous collecting raised by Nicholas Thomas, Jennifer Newell, Greg Dening, Anne D’Alleva, Adriana Craciun, Mary Terrall, and others, we also aim to consider intercultural exchanges and collections of objects relatively unknown to Europeans. European collecting often traces its roots to Biblical mythologies, such as the stories of Adam (naming and owning) and Noah (rescuing and preserving). What are the histories of collecting beyond Europe? And in what ways did women actively participate in or challenge those stories?
- The practice of collecting as cultural construct
- Decolonizing collecting
- What motivated women to collect in places outside of Europe? What were they collecting? How were women’s collections beyond Europe similar or different to their European counterparts?
- Women’s travel, immigration, exploration and the mobility of objects
- Collaborations
- Classification, taxonomies and methodologies of collecting outside of Europe
- Religious collections
- Display
- Collecting for power and status
- Preservation, creation and learning
- The aesthetics of collecting beyond Europe
- Women’s exchanges/interactions with indigenous populations
- Collections formed as a means of making sense of the world