Recognizing Borrowed Images, the Structure of the Repeated.

Panel sponsored by the Newberry Library at the Sixteenth Century Society conference.

This panel focuses on the exchange of images in the emergence or creation of types. By centering the movement of images, through print or other reproductive technologies, and literary forms, across temporal, cultural, or intermedial boundaries, we hope to encourage generative methods for engaging with types, in particular racial types, in the long sixteenth century.

If the type is the conciliation and collusion between the general and the particular, then the stereotype is its intensification, what might be called the surplus of recognition. This panel seeks papers that explore how surplus recognition shapes and, at times, disrupts race- and world-making in order to better understand how epistemologies are structured through exchange in the early modern period.

Papers might answer questions such as:
- What are the afterlives of images that circulate across cultures?
- How does cross cultural or cross media transformation change how images are used and understood?
- What is the role of print and other reproductive technologies in the circulation and transmission of types?
- What is the logic of the “copy” and its relationship to the original?
- What is the relationship between the type and individual?
- What are the goals of a particular type?

Practical examples of types might include, but are not limited to:
- Studies like tronies
- Hagiographic types like the magus, tormentors of Christ, demons, and the Madonna and Child
- Allegorical types like the Four Continents or Vices and Virtues
- Mythological types like the black venus
- Sonnets and other lyric forms
- Cross-cultural objects and works of art in inventories and Kunstkammer
- “Blackamoor” tableware or decorative arts
- Cartographic motifs (“marginalia”)

We welcome submissions across all histories in the long sixteenth century in the aim of creating an expansive and generative approach to the type.

If interested, please email co-chairs Chloé Glass (Art Institute of Chicago, cglassartic.edu) and Dontay Givens (New York University, dmg9793nyu.edu) by May 5, 2026 with:

- Name
- Bio (150 words maximum)
- Paper title
- Paper abstract (300 words maximum)