[1] Association for Art History 2025 Conference
[2] Art and Politics in the Early Cold War: The Americas and Beyond
[3] Art Histories of Experience
[4] Women Reading Letters in Paintings
[5] How was it made? How interdisciplinary collaborations in Material Culture Studies and Art History can unlock new avenues of knowledge
[6] The Work of Sculpture: Object Encounters within Art History and Everyday Life
[7] Art, Esotericism and the Ecological Imagination
[1] From: Rebecca Morland
Subject: CFP: Association for Art History 2025 Conference - Call for Papers
The Association for Art History’s Annual Conference brings together international research and critical debate about art history and visual culture. A key annual event, the conference is an opportunity to keep up to date with new research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas.
The Annual Conference attracts around 400 attendees each year and is popular with academics, curators, practitioners, PhD students, early career researchers and anyone engaged with art history research. Members of the Association get reduced conference rates, but non-members are welcome to attend and propose sessions and papers.
We actively encourage applications from candidates who are Black, Asian, minority ethnic or from other groups traditionally underrepresented within art historical roles in the UK, as well as new partnerships from those representing these groups.
Please visit the website to find all panels and sessions: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2024-annual-conference/
To offer a paper for a session in general please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s).
You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional
affiliation (if any).
[2]
From: Beatriz Cordero Martín
Subject: CFP: Art and Politics in the Early Cold War: The Americas and
Beyond
Panel: "Art and Politics in the Early Cold War".
Areas of research may include: artistic networks, the role of exhibitions and cultural diplomacy, local responses to the aesthetic and political battles of the Early Cold War, and political resignification of artworks
and/or artists during the early Cold War era, focusing on transatlantic and/or inter-American contexts.
The panel will examine a key period that shaped the racial and political wars of the 1945-1962 period and beyond.
Please send a brief bio (100 words aprox.) together with an abstract of
your research (300 words max.) to beatriz.corderomartinslu.edu
Panel convenors:
Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus,
fabiola.martinez.1slu.edu
Beatriz Cordero Martin, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus,
beatriz.corderomartinslu.edu
Laura Katzman, James Madison University, katzmalrjmu.edu
Deadline for abstract: November 1, 2024
[3]
From: Peyvand Firouzeh
Subject: CFP: Art Histories of Experience
Panel: "Art Histories of Experience".
This panel explores the experience of spatial environments as an art historical question. Experience is multivalent, subjective, and above all ephemeral. Our experience of the built environment, designed landscapes, and the world at large is highly mediated and contingent, connected to both individual perspectives and cultural framing. It is, moreover, a subject that lies at the complex intersection of the humanities and the sciences, as the senses, emotions, perception, and memory incorporate objective and
subjective elements of cognition.
What contributes to our experience of a site or space?
How do textual, visual, spatial, and cognitive elements interact to create experience?
What sources can help reconstruct that experience?
How does experience change across different cultural contexts, and how should our methods change in
response?
How can digital tools, such as mapping, 3-D modelling, or augmented reality, aid our understanding of experience?
We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore historical experience of landscape and the built environment through art historical and interdisciplinary means.
Papers may focus on experience of a specific site, take up a range of examples, address broader methodological issues, or pursue other approaches.
We welcome submissions employing analog and/or digital methods and are eager to create conversation across the two. We also warmly encourage proposals from scholars working on pre-modern
materials, and outside Euro-American contexts.
To offer a paper:
Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s).
You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a
20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional
affiliation (if any).
Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the digital programme.
Stephen Whiteman, Courtauld Institute of Art, stephen.whitemancourtauld.ac.uk
Peyvand Firouzeh, University of Sydney, peyvand.firouzehsydney.edu.au
You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within
two weeks.
Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2024.
[4]
From: Isabel Mehl
Subject: CFP: Women Reading Letters in Paintings
In her book “Letters to Gwen John” (2022) painter Celia Paul addressed John who died in 1939 in thinking about parallels and differences in their lives and artistic practices in the form of letters: “Dearest Gwen, I
know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, ‘Time is a strange substance’ and who knows really,
with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.”
Not only in epistolary practices but also in the depiction of letters in paintings – often a white shaded area without legible letters – the absence of the addressee as well as the gap between the message sent and
the message received plays a crucial role. Research so far focused on the depiction of women letter readers by male artists. However, women painters have employed the motif of the letter at least since the 18th century – prominent examples being Adélaïde de Labille-Guiards “Portrait de femme” (1787), “The Letter” (1894) by Helene Schjerfbeck or “Self-Portrait with Letter” (1907) by Gwen John. What stories do these
paintings tell and how is our reading of them dependent on our situatedness? Do women artists undermine voyeuristic desires, or do they employ them differently? In what way does the depiction of a women reading
a letter differ from a women reading a book?
This session seeks to bring together scholars whose work deals with the letter as motif in paintings by women. After the presentation of the papers, we’ll come together in a roundtable to discuss.
Please email proposals for 20-minute papers directly to Isabel.Mehlfu-berlin.de.
Proposals should include a paper title, abstract (250 words maximum), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
The deadline for submission is November 1, 2024.
More details: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2025-annual-conference/
[5]From: Rebecca Klarner and Julia Tuveri
Subject: CFP: How was it made? How interdisciplinary collaborations in Material Culture
Studies and Art History can unlock new avenues of knowledge
Traditionally in Art History, the study of Material Culture and Decorative Arts has been relegated to a subordinate role. Only more recently, objects and their materiality have received more rigorous attention: from Smith’s interdisciplinary project ‘Making and Knowing’ to work by e.g. Yonan,
Adamson, Scott, etc. While object-based and Technical Art History approaches do consider the material knowledge of curators, conservators, heritage scientists, and others, rarely is the knowledge and material intelligence of makers considered through this art historical lens.
‘How was it made?’ With this question as our starting point, this panel argues that material literacy should be an art historical priority. New avenues of knowledge can be unlocked through interdisciplinary collaboration when we consider the material processes of an object, combining the unique and often tacit knowledge of craftspeople and artists with the knowledge of conservators, art historians, heritage scientists,
and curators.
As professional curators and conservators we invite professionals of various disciplines, including the above, working with and in various media, across all time periods to explore the question ‘How does our
understanding of material and manufacturing processes enhance our understanding of an object’s historical value?’ and ‘What can material literacy and material intelligence offer the study of art history today?’
To offer a paper:
Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s).
You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the
paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the
digital programme.
Rebecca Klarner, University of Leeds, fhrlmkleeds.ac.uk
Julia Tuveri, University of Leeds, ml17jmleeds.ac.uk
You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within
two weeks.
Please download our complete guide to the Call for Papers, which includes full details of all of our #ForArtHistory2025 Conference Sessions (please email your paper proposals directly to the session convenor(s) listed below).'
Website: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2025-annual-conference/
[6]
From: Lynn M Somers
Subject: CFP: The Work of Sculpture: Object Encounters within Art
History and Everyday Life
Lynn M. Somers, Ph.D., convener
Independent art historian and critic, New York, NY
This panel seeks critical approaches to sculpture (broadly conceived to include objects, installations, environments, and architectural-based work) through different modalities of encounter, that is, how observers engage with art in ways conventional art historical narratives of autonomy, interpretation, and beholding cannot fully address. How we use artworks is a key element of these encounters. For example, we use art objects to think, imagine, exchange, and enact emotional and affective experiences, particularly those affording difference, ambivalence, wonder.
Transdisciplinary encounters with research, practice, making, and theorizing artworks highlight the “complexity of language, subjectivity, symbolic practices, affects, and aesthetics” that produce meaning within
our encounters (Pollock 2018). From Julia Bryan-Wilson’s “counter-monographic” study of Louise Nevelson that explores a queer feminist reading of sculptural embodiment; to Delcy Morelos’ immersive environments of textile, fibers, clay, and soil evocative of human and ecosystemic relationships; to Julia Phillips’ ceramic and metal sculptures conjoining tools, prosthetics, and body parts suggestive of interpersonal object relationships, encounters with three-dimensional work afford viewers divergent ways to engage with hybrid experiences in everyday life and world. The work of sculpture is meant to suggest the materiality and labor of making, the cultural, archival, emotional, and psychological work of attending to objects with care and imagination, but also the critical ways that artworks can be said to “work on” viewers. Open to global perspectives on the theme of encounter, the panel welcomes intersectional studies on sculpture including (but not limited to)
anthropological, ecological, political, phenomenological, feminist, race, queer, gender, and disability frameworks.
To offer a paper:
Please include title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
Email paper proposals as either a Word doc or PDF directly to the convener:
Lynn M. Somers, lmsomersmac.com
Deadline: November 1, 2024
You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.
[7]
From: Michelle Foot
Subject: CFP: Art, Esotericism, ant the Ecological Imagination
When the art, visual culture, and creative practices of the ecological imagination are informed by esotericism, they reveal rejected knowledge and recover enchanted relationships. In recent years scholarship has expanded significantly in the fields of art and ecology, and art and esotericism, but intersections between all three categories remain underexplored.
Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm have noted one of the analytically most powerful capabilities of the concept of the esoteric is its ability to shine light on the ‘betwixt and between’ and phenomena that transgress seemingly impermeable borders. Esoteric thinking resists boundaries, linearities of time and progress, and conformity to anthropocentrism.
Esotericism has long held the imagination as an important faculty to transcend the mundane and the human, the everyday and the present. Similarly, environmental philosophers have evoked the imagination to negotiate and conceive, simulate and project increasingly complex world systems. As Diana Villanueva-Romero, Lorraine Kerslake and Carmen Flys-Junquera have demonstrated, artworks promote environmental awareness through the exercise of imaginative processes, paving the way for encounters of affective knowledge between us and ‘other’ - the ‘more-than-human’. With the creative potential and possibilities of these mutual imaginative forces - both esoteric and ecological - artists explore alternative entanglements with the natural and supernatural, visualising the interconnectivity and reciprocity between planes, scales and beings.
What are the visual manifestations and wider implications of the ecological imagination when it unites with esotericism? How are alternative entanglements conceived, envisioned and given form? This session invites
papers to investigate the intersections of art, esotericism and ecology in their broadest sense, including transhistorical and global perspectives. In addition to academic papers, we welcome interdisciplinary approaches and other presentation formats from artists, ecologists and esoteric practitioners.
Session Convenors:
Michelle Foot, University of Edinburgh, Michelle.Footed.ac.uk
Natasha V. Moody, University of Plymouth / Research Network for the Study
of Esoteric Practices, natashavmoodygmail.com
To offer a paper:
Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenors, details
above. Provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (or alternative presentation format), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the digital programme.
Reference:
CFP: 7 Sessions at AAH (York, 9-11 Apr 25). In: ArtHist.net, Sep 22, 2024 (accessed Dec 6, 2024), <https://arthist.net/archive/42662>.