The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts, reminds us that the deadline for receipt of proposals for its upcoming conference "Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America," to be held November 4-5, 2011, is February 1. The conference, which is co-sponsored by CHAViC and by the Center for the History of the Book at the AAS, seeks to present new research on advertising in North America before the rise of the modern advertising agency in the late 1870s. The call for papers states:
Proposals consisting of a paper abstract of no more than one page and a two-page CV should be submitted electronically to Georgia Barnhill. Please check the full call for papers for additional information.. . . before the rise of the modern advertising agency, . . . advertising saturated the media of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. From newspaper agate print to trade cards to broadsides to posters, ads were everywhere in early America, helping to support the rise of entire sectors of the publishing industry and introducing Americans to the ever-expanding world of goods and services that the growing nation offered. . . .
Graduate students, college and university faculty, librarians, curators, and independent scholars from any discipline are welcome to submit proposals that deal with any aspect of advertising in early America, but we particularly welcome proposals that address the visual culture of advertising, the role of advertising in the printing and book trades, and the business history of advertising.
