[1] Partnerships in Print: Rethinking Collaboration and Authorship in Early Modern Works on Paper

From: Ashley D. West
Date: June 22, 2026
Deadline: July 19, 2026

Organizers:
Ashley D. West, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
Brittany Rubin, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

This APS-sponsored panel seeks contributions examining early modern print production between two or more hands, and the complex works that result from such collaborations, from c. 1450-1700. Print production has often involved multiple people reflecting distinct specializations: early modern woodcuts were usually designed by a draftsman, cut by Formschneiders, and printed by a publisher. The signatures invenit, sculpsit, fecit, excudit, delineate a work’s multilayered phases and temporalities of production and authorship, from inspiration to resulting image. Matrices themselves were sold, traded, and repurposed, resulting in unforeseen or delayed “collaborations,” such as with Rembrandt’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, partially altered from Hercules Seghers’ Tobias and the Angel plate. We aim to complicate the notion of singular artistic authorship in the history of print by examining early modern production structures established within the confines of a workshop, as well as less official forms of “collaboration.” Potential topics could include:

1. Early modern cross-disciplinary collaborations, including between artists and poets, antiquarians, or scholars of the natural sciences.
2. Unplanned partnerships: how were matrices or resulting impressions altered, collaborated upon, or renewed and edited ex post facto by other artists or printers? How does necessity or circumstance—including modifying damaged matrices or altering imagery to avoid censorship—provide the opportunity for an unforeseen collaboration between two or more artists or artisans?
3. Cross-cultural collaborations across geographies: how did the affordances of durability/ephemerality, scale, and portability of matrices and paper provide opportunities for artists and makers from different countries, cultural identities, or religious confessions to shape works for different audiences?
4. Prints that provided an outlet for two or more artists to explore fantastical or taboo subjects.

Participants must be current RSA and Association of Print Scholars (APS) members at the time of the conference.

Please submit your 200-word abstract and a 2-page CV to brittany.rubintemple.edu and ashley.westtemple.edu by July 19, 2026.

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[2] Women, Religion, and Mobilities in the Low Countries and Beyond

From: Sarah Moran
Date: June 22, 2026
Deadline: July 15, 2026

The early modern Low Countries, divided in the late sixteenth century into the Protestant Dutch Republic in the North and the Catholic, Spanish Habsburg-ruled South, were a crucible of religious upheaval, intellectual debate, and commercial expansion. This panel will situate women's religious lives within broader histories of migration, exile, evangelization, and globalization, contributing to emerging scholarship that treats mobility not as exceptional but as constitutive of women's experience in the early modern world.

Confessionalization often spurred women to move. During the Revolt, Catholics fled to Germany and Italy, while after Spain re-took the South, Flemish Protestants moved to the Republic, or went farther afield to exile communities in England, the Rhineland, the Baltic, and North America. Evangelization was also a motive to cross the seas, and the Counter-Reformation channeled Catholic women's mobility into new missionary convents across the Spanish Empire. As women migrated, so did their ideas, and the presses of Antwerp, Leiden, and Amsterdam circulated their theological and devotional works within the Low Countries and around the globe.

The panel brings together scholars working across confessional and disciplinary lines to ask: How did women adopt religious identities that enabled, constrained, or redirected their movement? What roles did women play in transplanting and adapting faith across borders? How did print culture facilitate the development and transmission of women's theological viewpoints and devotional practices? And how did colonial and missionary expansion transform the possibilities for and the perils of female mobility? We welcome papers that engage any aspect of this framework, from local case studies to investigations of global networks.

Please submit proposals to both Amanda Pipkin (apipkincharlotte.edu) and Sarah Moran (sarah.joan.morangmail.com) by July 15, 2026.

Your email should include:
- Name and preferred email address
- Paper title (15 words maximum)
- Paper abstract (200 words maximum)
- A short Academic CV (PDF or Word, 5 pages maximum, mentioning major publications)
- Your primary discipline (see the RSA discipline list)
- Current affiliation and position
- Year PhD received or expected

Applicants will be notified of acceptance by July 31, 2026. The panel (possibly with multiple sessions) will be submitted for sponsorship from the SSEMWG.