“Surrealism: From France to the World,” an international conference, will take place at Princeton University on April 27^th-28^th 2018.  Further details will be posted as they are announced.

Surrealism was born in Paris after the First World War, generating major new artists and artworks for over fifty years and fostered strong international membership; as European politics became increasingly unstable during the 1930s and into the Second World War, surrealist groups began appearing in Europe as well as in Japan, Morocco, Egypt, Mexico, Chile, Haiti, Cuba, and the United States. Today surrealism remains popular and important as a major intellectual movement in modern poetry and art. International museums feature artwork by such artists as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Matta; other surrealist or surrealist-inspired artists are rediscovered on a regular basis, including Leonora Carrington, Yves Tanguy, Louise Bourgeois, Hans Bellmer, and many others. The movement’s influence permeates contemporary poetry, art, and philosophy, as well as the history of leftist and anti-colonial politics.

Although the scholarly field of surrealism studies is vibrant, it is fragmented both disciplinarily and geographically. Anglo-American and French academia are the main centers of research on surrealism and there is a major need and opportunity to make it possible for scholars there —as well as scholars and curators worldwide— to convene for sustained interdisciplinary exchange that will redefine the field and streamline discussions on the continued relevance of surrealism as an avant-garde experimental movement in literature, art, and thought.  The International Conference, “Surrealism: From France to the World” aims precisely at unifying the scholarly field of surrealism studies in the arts and humanities.

The language of the conference will be (mostly) English.