The Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre in Split invites you to participate in an international scholarly conference organised as part of a week of events in research and scholarship.

DISCOVERING DALMATIA XII:
Travel Drawing / Islands in Travel Writing.

Travel writing offers a particularly valuable framework for examining how the experience of moving through space is recorded, mediated, and interpreted across different media. Visual language occupies a special place in this context, present in travel writing in various forms, from drawing and printmaking to photography. While travel photography has long been recognised as an autonomous medium with a well-established position in the study of travel and visual culture, drawing, despite its long and continuous presence, has yet to be clearly defined as a distinct category.

Instead, it is most often subsumed under the broader concept of illustration, which obscures its specific possibilities as a medium capable of directly conveying the experience of observing, moving through, and dwelling in space. Taking up this observation as a starting point, this year’s conference raises the question of travel drawing as an autonomous category, one which has yet to be theorised sufficiently.

At the centre of our inquiry is the premise that the visual language of drawing can independently articulate the experience of travel – just as photography does – without necessarily relying on textual description. This approach does not deny the importance of the image-text relationship in travel writing, including questions of the image’s status within the text and its diachronic and dialogic relations, but seeks to expand the field of inquiry and open up a space for considering drawing as an equally valuable medium for expressing travel experiences. In this sense, travel writing offers a particularly productive framework for examining the historical shift in visual representations of space, from drawing to photography.

Alongside this theme, the conference also focuses on the island as a phenomenon in travel narratives. Islands appear in the travel writing tradition as specific spaces of isolation, transition, and the projection of meaning; spaces that simultaneously function as geographical realities and cultural constructions. Dalmatia, with its distinctly articulated island landscape, thus holds a prominent place in the European cultural imagination. Analysing how islands have been described and interpreted through travel writing raises questions about the relationship between space, identity, and perception, as well as the role of travel writing discourse in shaping cultural representations.

The conference aims to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines – history, art and architectural history, literature, visual culture, ethnology, anthropology, and media studies – to collectively reflect on the spatial and medium-related dimensions of the travel writing genre and contribute to its further theoretical development.

Submissions:
Abstracts (up to 250 words) accompanied by a short biographical note in English should be submitted in PDF format to: discoveringdalmatia@gmail.com
Submission deadline: 1 July 2026

The conference is organized as part of the Croatian Science Foundation project Travelogues Dalmatia IP-2022-10-8676. The organisers will host a reception on the evening of 22 November and a closing event on 25 November; coffee and refreshments will be provided during breaks.
There is no conference fee.
The organisers are unable to cover travel or accommodation costs. However, the organisers can assist participants with finding reasonably-priced accommodation in the historical city centre.
The official languages of the conference are Croatian and English.
Presentations should be 20 minutes in length.
Papers will be organised into thematic sessions; each session will conclude with a discussion.
Selected papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed volume.

Read more: https://ipu.hr/content/info/Discovering_Dalmatia_XII_CFP.pdf