[1] History, Rhetoric, and Life with the Dazzling Bits: In Memory of Vernon Hyde Minor

From: Jasmine Cloud
Date: 22.06.2026
Deadline: 31.07.2026

The shaping of art history as a discipline has come from the work of many noteworthy thinkers. This session seeks to celebrate one such scholar, Vernon Hyde Minor. In a 2013 interview, Vernon summed up his approach to and the ramifications of our discipline, stating “...interrogating images and objects in historical, aesthetic and critical contexts tells us a great deal about how we live in a visual culture, how we as a culture and a species understand everything around us, whether we’re studying the natural sciences or the humanities.” He brought this breadth and interdisciplinarity to his research on the art of Early Modern Rome. Vernon’s passion for the Baroque in particular can be summarized with a phrase from his Baroque and Rococo: Art & Culture: “Baroque art is life with the dazzling bits left in (25).”

Vernon’s research and publications impacted the field well beyond an audience of Italianists. Many art historians first encountered Vernon’s work in his writings inspired by his work as an educator, especially his Baroque and Rococo textbook and his seminal Art History’s History. He taught thousands of undergraduates and graduate students in his thirty years at the University of Colorado - Boulder. His associations with the American Academy in Rome, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a teaching position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, meant that his research and theories reached a huge swath of people in his career. His writings bring the visual spectacle of Rome to life with interdisciplinary methods and alternative interpretations as he sought to broaden our approaches in looking at art.

This session seeks papers from those touched by Vernon, his teaching, scholarship, and/or approach to the discipline of art history. Some potential topics include:
- Historiography, especially of the Baroque, and its future
- Critical theory and its role in early modern art historical studies
- Rhetorical issues in early modern art
- Spectacle as a tool in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art
- The concept of taste

Please send a proposal to Jasmine Cloud (clouducmo.edu) by Monday, July 20, 2026 including:
- full name, current affiliation, and email address
- paper title (15-word maximum)
- paper abstract (200-word maximum)
- resume (.pdf or .doc)
- PhD or other terminal degree completion year (past or expected)
Notifications regarding acceptance in the panel will be communicated to applicants by Friday, July 31, 2026.

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[2] Within and Beyond the Sensual: Representing Women in Baroque Sculpture

From: Karen Lloyd
Date: 23.06.2026
Deadline: 31.07.2026

The sculpted representation of women in the baroque—whether religious, mythological, allegorical, commemorative, or otherwise—is often reduced to Bernini’s sensual portrayal of the female form. Yet however prevalent his visual language, especially in Italy, it was but one of a myriad of manners by which baroque sculptors across Europe portrayed women in the three-dimensional arts. Other modes of representing women are hinted at in dreamy bust-length Madonnas by Francois Duquesnoy and Domenico Guidi or their tearful sisters in the representations of Luisa Roldan, Pedro de Mena, and Caterina de Julianis; in highly ornamented portraits by Andrea Bolgi and Lorenzo Ottoni; and in muscular, anguished allegories by Filippo Parodi, Giusto de Corte and Balthasar Permoser. These sculptures raise questions about idolatry and illicit desire, the conventions of conveying virtue and beauty, and possibilities of range in the representation of the female body - including non-European women - that have yet to be fully explored. This session seeks papers that examine how depictions of women across genres and media in seventeenth-century European sculpture embodied complex aesthetic and social ideas about gender, female agency, and sculptural practice.

1. The challenges or affordances of representing women in genres like portraiture or through devices like allegory
2. Sensuality as a multivalent mode that encompasses vulnerability, seduction, heroism, and so on; or counter-sensual modes inspired by censorship of the female body
3. Considerations of how female makers and patrons of sculpture represented themselves in their work or navigated commissions to serve their interests
4. Gendered conceptions of sculptural material and style
5. Sculpture in the service (or not) of women in power - how was sculpture used by female rulers, and what were the limitations or strengths of sculpture in comparison to other media when representing them

To propose a paper, send:
- A paper title (15 word maximum)
- An abstract (200 word maximum)
- A short resume, including the PhD or other terminal degree completion date (past or expected)
- Full name, current affiliation, and email address

Proposals should be submitted to mangoneprinceton.edu and karen.lloydstonybrook.edu by July 31, 2026.

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[3] Catalogued Empire: New Readings of Habsburg Inventories

From: Oskar J. Rojewski
Date: 25.06.2026
Deadline: 01.08.2026

Papers are invited for an interdisciplinary session on new research related to the Habsburgs at the Renaissance Society of America meeting in Philadelphia from March 11-13, 2027. Scholarly study of Habsburg inventories has revealed a family that managed their empire, in part, through the accumulation of things within a complex network of relationships. Much of this scholarly attention has been paid to female members of the family who used their personal belongings to advocate for their position and prerogatives. This session aims to build upon previous studies by not only considering the inventories of individuals, but the historical narratives that can be read in the spaces between the items to reveal relationships, social networks, and imperial ambitions. We invite new research that expands our understand of the Habsburgs through new source material (visual, material, or textual), the application of new methods and theoretical frameworks, or new lines of inquiry. All topics related to early modern Habsburg inventories will be considered; proposals the center women or issues of gender in thought-provoking ways are especially welcome.

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be sent to Oskar J. Rojewski (o.rojewskigeo.uned.es) and Jessica Weiss (jweiss16msudenver.edu) by August 1st and should include the following:
- Author’s name and affiliation
- The email address associated with your RSA profile (which should be up to date)
- Paper title (15-word maximum)
- Paper abstract (150-word maximum)
- PhD completion date (past or expected)
- A brief CV (2 page maximum)

The organizers will notify selected speakers as soon as possible, before the RSA session submission deadline. The conference will be in-person. Participants must be RSA members at the time of the event.

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[4] Eating in Mission Territories: Food, Survival, and Knowledge in Early Modern Catholic Missions

From: Alysée Le Druillenec
Date: 29.06.2026
Deadline: 25.07.2026

Food was one of the most basic, and yet one of the least studied, conditions of missionary life. To eat in mission territory was never simply to satisfy a biological need. It meant learning how to survive in unfamiliar environments, depending on local and Indigenous knowledge, negotiating with missionized communities, adapting Catholic norms, and transforming landscapes through agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, storage, trade, and ritual consumption. In Catholic missions, food also raised urgent religious problems: missionaries should fast, abstain, celebrate the Eucharist, discipline bodies, and reproduce a Christian life that was based on bread, wine, oil, meat, fish, water, and familiar crops that could be scarce, unavailable, or culturally contested in missionary territories. What did it mean to eat in mission territories? What do missionaries eat? Where did food come from, and which food? How did missionary foodways reshape environments, bodies, religious norms, and systems of knowledge? Food was not simply something missionaries consumed; it was one of the material conditions through which missions became possible, unstable, negotiable, and transformative.

The research project PANEM – Pratiques Alimentaires Négociées dans les Écosystèmes Missionnaires / Negotiated Food Practices in Missionary Ecosystems is planning a series of panels for the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Philadelphia, 11–13 March 2027. PANEM approaches missionary food systems as a privileged observatory of the relations between environment, religious practice, material organization, local knowledge, and Roman government. These panels will thus consider alimentation as a threshold of survival, a site of negotiation, a medium of conversion, and an agent of ecological transformation. By studying missionary foodways, we seek to move the history of missions toward the material, ecological, embodied, and negotiated conditions of evangelization.

We invite papers that use food to rethink the history of missions, the first globalization, environmental change, religious discipline, knowledge production, or material culture. We are especially interested in case studies that show how missionary foodways were made through contact: between European norms and local ecologies, between Catholic discipline and embodied necessity, between missionary projects and the knowledge of the people they sought to convert. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Food supply, provisioning, storage, transport, and logistics in mission territories;
- What missionaries ate: daily meals, scarcity, adaptation, disgust, nostalgia, and survival;
- Indigenous and local knowledge of plants, animals, hunting, fishing, farming, cooking, and preservation;
- Gendered labor and the role of women in producing, preparing, transmitting, or transforming missionary foodways;
- Slavery, coercion, work, and food production in mission economies;
- Liturgical food: bread, wine, oil, fasting, abstinence, Eucharist, Lent, and theological accommodation;
- Missionary bodies, health, medicine, dietetics, emotions, and religious discipline;
- Food and conversion: commensality, refusal, hospitality, feasting, prohibition, and ritual conflict;
- Mission gardens, livestock, crops, fishing, water, forests, and environmental transformation;
- Circulations of foodstuffs, recipes, techniques, objects, and tastes between Europe, Rome, and mission territories;
- Sources: missionary dictionaries, grammars, recipes, letters, chronicles, account books, images, and material sources;

We are particularly interested in papers that present new case studies or revisit known missionary contexts through the question of food. Papers should be 15–20 minutes.

Please send your proposal by July 25, 2026, to Isabel Harvey (harvey.isabeluqam.ca) and and Alysée Le Druillenec (alysee.communicationgmail.com), with your full name, current affiliation, and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), and an abstract (150-word maximum).