The graduate students in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara announce our 36th Annual Symposium, devoted to the theme "Moralities in the Visual Arts." We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of this theme from graduate students and recent PhDs in all areas of scholarship. The Symposium will take place on April 29-30, 2011.

Operating under the assumption that there are multiple interpretations and understandings of the term "morality," our conference hopes to explore various moral systems as they are manifested in visual materials. We ask what ethical purpose(s) are expressed through the visual arts? What are the moral responsibilities of artists, architects, historians, curators, and audiences? How do value systems figure into the production, display, and collection of visual culture?

The theme crosses temporal, geographical, and even disciplinary boundaries. Submission examples include:
- Examining the place of painting in Victorian moral education
- Analyzing Last Judgment scenes on medieval European churches
- Considering the role of the arts in periods of initial contact between cultures, such as the use of the visual arts by Spanish missionaries in the New World
- The ethics of conservation
- The role of the museum curator or private collector
- The moral responsibilities of a film director

We invite proposals for innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship that follow these and other lines of inquiry. Our keynote speaker, Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies, King's College, London, has published widely on aspects of race and sexuality in film and popular culture and will share some of his ongoing research about serial killers.

Please submit proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers along with a brief CV to Brigit Ferguson, symposium co-organizer, at bgfumail.ucsb.edu by December 31, 2010. We will contact all submitters regarding acceptance of the proposals by February 1, 2011. We ask that papers, including images, be submitted to the organizers at least one week in advance of the symposium for the benefit of panel respondents.