The Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" welcomes applications for its Summer School "Seeing Matter(s): Materiality and Visuality" to take place at the Karl Jaspers Centre from Sunday, July 29, to Saturday, August 4, 2012.

This year's Summer School "Seeing Matter(s): Materiality and Visuality" will explore the role of visual and material culture in the context of transcultural exchange processes between Asia and Europe. In highlighting the tensions between visual culture studies, art historical approaches and recent material culture studies, the Summer School will address questions such as: How can we move “beyond representation” to take on images in all their tangibility and material presence? Is “thing theory” a site for us to analyse the confluence of materiality and visuality? How can we look at images and objects differently when we approach them from transdisciplinary and transcultural perspectives? In what ways do such perspectives challenge concepts and methods of our own disciplines?

Another aim of our Summer School is to address the transgressing mobility of images and objects as a key challenge for today’s Humanities, by tying it to current theoretical debates on this subject within various disciplines and testing it in case studies derived from the participants’ research projects and regions.

The programme is designed to provide stimulating discussions and new inspiration for graduate and junior research work, to exchange ideas and test methods from individual research projects and to actively engage with an international group of peers and senior scholars who share an interest in transcultural visuality and materiality. Keynotes will be presented by Kenneth George (Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Janice Bardsley (Japanese Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Invited speakers include Kajri Jain (South Asian Visual Culture, University of Toronto Mississauga), Sumathi Ramaswamy (History, Duke University), Kavita Singh (Art History, Jawaharlal Nehru University), and Paola Zamperini (Asian Languages and Civilizations, Amherst College). Contributions from Heidelberg University come from Christiane Brosius (Visual and Media Anthropology), Monica Juneja (Global Art History), Barbara Mittler (Chinese Studies), and Melanie Trede (Japanese Art Histories).

Applications are accepted until April 15, 2012. The application form and additional information on fees, scholarships and the programme can be found at http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/summerschool/

The Cluster’s Summer School 2012 is organised by Christiane Brosius (Heidelberg) together with Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg) and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke), coordinators of project B4 "Transcultural Visuality". Christiane Brosius holds the Chair of Visual and Media Anthropology at the Cluster, Barbara Mittler is Speaker of Research Area B "Public Spheres", Sumathi Ramaswamy, Professor of History, is one of the Key Partners of the Cluster.