[1] Curating as an Act of Translation
From: Emily Butler
Date: Sep 21, 2026

Since the late 1980s, the proliferation of global biennials and transnational curatorial projects – from Okwui Enwezor’s postcolonial constellations in Documenta 11 to Koyo Kouoh’s posthumous Venice Biennale in 2026 – has positioned curators as translators, moving across languages, borders, and sign systems. As exhibitions increasingly become one of the faces of globalisation and digital infrastructure, what curating translates, and at what or whose cost, has acquired new urgency.

This panel asks whether – and if so, how – curating is an act of translation. In its wider semiotic sense, translation is a creative, transformative process of transfer, bound by social and political consequences. Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s account of translation as a “necessary yet impossible act” (2000), we ask what is gained and lost as artworks, archives, and audiences move across institutional, linguistic, and epistemic borders. Bringing comparative literature into dialogue with curatorial and exhibition studies, we build on Homi Bhabha’s account of the Third Space (1994) and Barbara Cassin’s theorisation of the untranslatables (2014) to ask whether curatorial encounters, including those in which artists, artworks or meanings resist translation, can generate new languages and relationships that decolonise knowledge production. What new methodologies and meanings might emerge from this ‘mixedness’, opacity (Glissant) or interstice (Eva von Redecker, 2021; Maria Hlavajova)?

We welcome papers addressing curatorial projects, exhibitions, and institutions that use translation as a critical method. What might (mis)translation offer curatorial practice as a deliberate strategy to rethink socio-political relations? We are particularly interested in papers on modes of address in transnational exhibition-making, and on practices that sustain untranslatability and opacity rather than striving for equivalence.

Themes: Curating, translation, contemporary art

Additional format comment: Proposed format: three 20-minute papers, followed by a 15-minute panel discussion between the convenor and presenters, and a 5-minute audience Q&A.

Lead Convenor: Emily Butler, PHD in Practice in Curating, University of Reading / Teaching Fellow, Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Sophie Mak-Schram, Cardiff Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

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[2] New Tools for the Study of Building Migrations: The Case of Ticinese Architects and Craftsmen 1500–1914
From: Alberto Pérez Negrete, Archivio del Moderno
Date: Sep 21, 2026

The migration of architects and building workers from what is now the Canton of Ticino, who between the sixteenth century and the first decade of the 20th century moved to Italy, continental Europe, the United Kingdom, North Africa and the Americas, is a well-known phenomenon and has been the subject of numerous studies, approached from different perspectives.

Rather than focusing on the phenomenon itself, this session centres on the historiographical approaches that have emerged in recent years and, above all, on the new digital tools that can broaden and deepen our understanding of Ticinese building migration.

The session asks how digital resources, innovative archival practices, the rereading of known documents, newly identified sources and collaborative forms of knowledge production can transform research and its dissemination.

Building on the projects L’impresa Fontana tra XVI e XVII secolo: modalità operative, tecniche e ruolo delle maestranze(Swiss National Science Foundation grant no. 150268) and Cantieri della migrazione. Co-costruzione di un archivio digitale sulla migrazione edile ticinese XVI–XX secolo (Swiss National Science Foundation Agora grant no. 231123), both initiated by the Archivio del Moderno at the Università della Svizzera italiana, the session aims to promote dialogue among scholars by encouraging new methodological approaches and research tools for the study of architecture, construction history, professional mobility and the circulation of expertise across borders.

How to set out your abstract:
Please include this key information in your paper proposal response:
Select title of the Session responding to
Title of Abstract (avoid long titles, max. 20 words)
Brief abstract (max. 250 words)
Name of submitter (author) – please note there must be at least one presenting author per submission (there is a small tick box in the author information section). You can add multiple authors.
Affiliations (or if independent/freelance)
Residing Country of submitter
Telephone number of submitter
Social media handles of speakers and affiliated departments
Any additional assistance required for participating as a speaker at the conference
For further details please visit: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2027-exeter/

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[3] Maternity in Feminist Art Practices
From: Brenda Schmahmann
Date: Sep 19, 2026

Maternity is of interest to feminist artists in not only the Global North but also the Global South. The catalogue for an exhibition titled “Motherhood: Paradox and Duality” at the South African National Gallery in 2025, while featuring engagements with the theme by South African artists alone, suggested some reasons for its wide interest: “motherhood is both a site of strength and a battleground of expectation” as well as “both a personal journey and a collective force shaping society”. Representations of motherhood also provide opportunities for critical engagements with relations of power and the politics of labour. In a contemporary world where liberal democracy is under threat and where traditionalist understandings of maternal roles may be deployed to counter women’s and LGBTQI+ rights, motherhood is a particularly relevant topic.

Focusing on art from the last two decades, made in any media and from any geography, this session asks how feminist visual practices challenge inherited or traditionalist understandings of mothering. Papers could feature works that address the uneven conditions under which mothering is demanded, withheld, exploited, mourned or refused. Among many other possibilities, contributions could consider reproductive labour, maternal grief, childlessness, reproductive technologies, queer maternity, mother/child relationships or the ways in which experiences of, for instance, migration, nationalism or gendered violence may shape maternal imaginaries. We welcome papers that engage with activist, Indigenous, Black, diasporic or postcolonial histories, or with other contextual factors shaping images of maternity

Papers should be 20 minutes in duration.
To submit a paper proposal, please follow the guidelines on the AAH website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal.

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[4] Material Matters: Reshaping the Country House, 1650–1850
From: Daniela Roberts
Date: 16.09.2026

Between 1650 and 1850, the country house emerged as a leading site of artistic innovation, and stylistic experimentation. As a principal expression of familial status, identity, and social ambition, it underwent continual transformation in response to changing socio-cultural expectations. Art historical scholarship has traditionally interpreted these developments through the lenses of artistic achievements, aesthetic theory, and historical context. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to the ways technological advances and novel materials informed decorative practices, enabled new formal solutions, and reshaped perceptions of space, surface, structure, and ornament. Similarly, the material examination and analysis of these new decorative methods have often been overlooked.

This session examines the relationship between materials, techniques, and the formation of aesthetic concepts in the evolution of country house interiors. It asks how innovations such as ornamental plaster, papier-mâché, wallpaper and cast iron fostered emerging tastes and transformed the visual language of domestic architecture. Particular attention will be given to the cultural value of these materials and processes, shifting notions of fashion and taste, and the evolving roles of patrons, designers, craftsmen, and manufacturers. The session also explores how the temporality of materials, the diversification of product ranges, and the growing possibilities of industrial manufacture and reproduction affected decorative practice and consumption. These developments will be considered alongside contemporary debates on decorum, novelty, simulation, authenticity, material propriety, and sustainability within the frameworks of classical aesthetics, historicism, and emerging conservation concepts. Contributions examining production and craftsmanship are especially welcome, illuminating how material qualities were created, manipulated, and employed, and how they shaped contemporary perceptions of materials and their use.

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words along with a brief CV to the session convenors
daniela.robertsuni-wuerzburg.de and gerry.alabonenationaltrust.org.uk by 26 October 2026.

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[5] The Genre of Funerary Sculpture: Continuity and Modernity in the 18th and 19th Centuries
From: Eric Sergent
Date: 22.09.26

While the turning point associated with the “Sattelzeit” is central in the historiography of funerary sculpture in Europe, this panel seeks to explore continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fundamental studies have focused either on eighteenth-century funerary monuments within buildings such as churches or chapels (Craske, 2008; Baker, 1995; Penny, 1977) or nineteenth-century sculpture in urban cemeteries (Mauro, Sborgi, 2012; Le Normand-Romain, 1995; Berresford, 2004). To go beyond that, our particular attention will be paid to the displacement of the funerary monument from the church to the cemetery, as well as to the development of large urban cemeteries, viewed as structuring mechanisms that transformed monumental forms, social practices and modes of reception.

The new placement of monuments outside churches enabled, on the one hand, the emergence of a freer iconography, while on the other, long-standing sacred motifs persisted. By highlighting these continuities, it becomes possible to consider them as driving forces behind the transformations that led to the emergence of the modern monument. Although removed from their traditional religious context, funerary monuments did not abandon the sacred; rather, they contributed to its reconfiguration within new spatial and social frameworks. The session therefore places the question of genre at its core, both in terms of iconographic categories — between sacred and secular — and in terms of art historical classification.

These developments must also be understood in relation to the conditions of production. The session will therefore examine the processes of industrialisation and mass production, as well as the emergence of a genuine “sepulchral market.” In doing so, it aims to question the place of funerary sculpture within the “genres” of art history and to reassess its long-standing historiographical marginalisation, linked to its association with serial production, industrial techniques, and its displacement beyond traditional ecclesiastical contexts.

Themes: funerary sculpture; artistic genre; historiography

Lead Convenor: Eric Sergent, Université de Haute-Alsace, Cresat, France

Co-convenors: Wiebke Windorf, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Archäologien und Klassische Altertumswissenschaften, Germany

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on the AAH website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.

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[6] Femme as Method: Reimagining Feminine Aesthetics in Contemporary Art
From: Elisabetta Garletti
Date: 22.09.2026

We are pleased to share the Call for Papers for our session at AAH 2027 and invite submissions from those of you working across contemporary art, visual culture, feminist, queer and trans studies, and related fields.

Co-convenors: Elisabetta Garletti & Amy Tobin

Over the past decade, femininity has re-emerged as a central concern within contemporary art and visual culture. Once positioned as either a patriarchal construction to be rejected or a superficial aesthetic, femininity has increasingly been rearticulated within feminist, queer and trans scholarship as a performative and politically productive mode of being (Dahl, 2012; Hoskin & Hirschfeld, 2018; McCann, 2018; Schwartz, 2020; Raha and van der Drift, 2024).

As hyperfeminine aesthetics proliferate across popular culture, advertising, social media and AI-generated imagery, their critical potential has become increasingly contested. Practices of glamour, excess, softness and decoration circulate simultaneously as strategies of resistance, modes of self-fashioning and commodities within platform capitalism. Rather than asking whether femme aesthetics are inherently subversive or complicit, this panel explores how contemporary artists mobilise femme as a critical aesthetic to expose, inhabit and reconfigure dominant regimes of gendered representation.

This panel asks: How do contemporary artists mobilise femme aesthetics as critical strategies to challenge dominant regimes of gender, taste and representation? How do gender, race, class, disability and sexuality shape the possibilities and limitations of femme legibility? What happens when femme aesthetics circulate between queer world-making, mainstream visibility and commercial appropriation? How might contemporary artistic practices reclaim forms of femininity historically dismissed as superficial, excessive or decorative and reframe their place within art histories.

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider femme not simply as an identity category but as a critical aesthetic methodology, engaging with contemporary art, performance, moving image, digital and popular culture and curatorial practice. We also invite reflections on the limitations of femme aesthetics, including questions of commodification, exclusion and the social or institutional constraints that shape its expression.

Format: 20-minute papers followed by a panel discussion/Q&A.

To submit a paper proposal, please follow the guidance on the AAH 2027 conference website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.

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[7] Immersive Realism and its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century
From: Patricia Smyth
Date: 22.09.2026

This session considers immersive realism and spectatorship practices as a transmedial nineteenth-century phenomenon evident across painting, theatrical spectacle, prints, and popular exhibitions such as panoramas, dioramas, peep media, stereoscopy and magic lantern projection. This immersive aesthetic sought to create the sensation of ‘being there’, collapsing the distance between the viewing subject and the image, which nevertheless remains tantalizingly beyond reach. There has been important scholarship in this field (Grau 2002; Huhtamo 2013; Barringer and Trumpener 2020); however, parallel developments in art history, theatre history, and media archaeology remain fragmented across disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, engagement within fine art and cultural heritage sectors has tended to operate independently of academic discussions. The session seeks to bring together insights from these diverse fields.

Immersive realism has often been implicated in the ‘disciplining’ of modern subjectivity, a position exemplified in the work of Jonathan Crary. According to this view, the new visual technologies trained the sensorium into industrialised spectacle and disembodiment (Crary,1999). However, recent studies emphasise its experimental nature and potential for play (Barnaby, 2017), counternarratives, and co-creation (Smyth, 2022; Newey, 2026), while drawing attention to the regional, gender, and class differences that shaped the experience of spectators (Plunkett and Kember, 2025). The session has a twofold focus. It seeks to recover the distinct range of nineteenth-century immersive arts, but also focuses on questions of affect, agency, and identity, asking how these might complicate our understanding of immersive realism, a discussion fittingly located in proximity to the Bill Douglas Cinema museum.

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[8] Writing the History of Conservation: Expertise and the Care of Asian Objects, 1800s–1950s
From: Fletcher Coleman
Date: 22.09.2026

I’m pleased to share a call for papers for a session at the UK Association for Art History (AAH) Annual Conference 2027, taking place at the University of Exeter from 7–9 April 2027. This session aims to bring together art historians, historians, and conservators in related fields to explore questions of expertise and the care of Asian objects during the formative period in the history of conservation. The session will consist of four 20-minute papers. Please see the panel description below and information regarding proposal submissions at the link above.

Panel convener: Helena Chen-Abair, Lecturer in History of Art, Materials and Technology, University College London
helena.chen-abairucl.ac.uk

Panel co-convener: Fletcher Coleman, Associate Chair and Professor of Art History, University of Texas at Arlington
fletcher.colemanuta.edu

Writing the History of Conservation: Expertise and the Care of Asian Objects, 1800s–1950s

Conservation shapes how objects appear, function, and are understood. As part of the biography of objects, it constitutes an important dimension of art history. Although contemporary conservation theory increasingly acknowledges cultural variation in values (Muñoz Viñas, 2004; Hatchfield, 2013), its history during the formative period is still largely written through a Euro-American narrative that emphasizes increasing scientificization and institutionalisation (Pye, 2001; Bewer, 2010; Dupré, 2022). Laboratories, instruments, and professional trainings become the primary sites through which knowledge is authorized and transmitted, while other forms of expertise and authority often remain peripheral to the narrative.

Histories involving the care of Asian objects, whether in workshops, collections, or museums within and beyond Asia, offer an opportunity to reconsider this narrative. Rather than appearing merely as illustrations of the global spread of scientific conservation, they reveal forms of knowledge, authority, and value that complicate dominant narratives of the discipline’s formative period. Taking a broad view of conservation that encompasses preservation and restoration, the panel asks: What forms of knowledge, explicit or tacit, informed practices of caring for Asian objects within and outside modern institutions? How was expertise cultivated among artisans, dealers, and other actors who operated beyond “formal” training? How did collecting and the art market shape understandings of authenticity and authority and influence conservation ethics? We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to, local conservation knowledge and its circulation, workshop and museum practices, colonial encounters, collecting cultures, and the ways expertise and value shaped conservation choices.

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[9] Feminist Art Histories Outside of London
From: Ana Baeza Ruiz and Amy Tobin
Date: 23.09.26

Awareness of the histories of feminist-informed art of the 1970s, 80s and 90s in Britain and Ireland has significantly expanded over the past decade, evidencing the rich networks and practices of artists, alternative periodical publications, collective structures and cultural activism in London and other major cities. This panel seeks to expand these histories, which often privilege the English capital, inviting contributions which address feminist art activity – between 1970 and 2000 – in, of, and from other parts of the Britian and Ireland, as well as regional, cross-regional, transnational and decolonial relations or tensions. We understand Ireland (both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) as integral to grasping the historical and ongoing entanglements of British art and encourage speakers to reflect on how feminist artistic practices across the island unsettle received, Anglocentric narratives of cultural and art-historical development.

Drawing on the recent work of scholars interrogating the idea of the ‘regional’ in a British context (e.g. Barber; Butt; Correia; Russell; Cornford and Beck), and our own experience of working on the oral history project Feminist Art Making Histories (famh.art), we seek contributions that decentralise the study of feminist art histories and their networks, the local ecologies of different regions, their engagement with international and transnational debates, and the practices, ideological and aesthetic discourses that were cultivated during this period of activity (1970–2000). How did the decentralised organisation of the Women’s Liberation Movement impact on art making and encounters? What are the different spatialities and temporalities of this feminist art organising?

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[10] Decolonising Art History: Methods, Practices and Epistemologies
From: Amanda Sciampacone
Date: 23.09.2026

Decolonisation has become an influential framework within art history, visual culture, museum studies, and related disciplines and we, as AAH’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) held a successful session at the 2026 Conference focused on case studies. While considerable attention has been devoted to identifying what should be decolonised, less attention has been paid to the methods through which decolonising work is undertaken and the epistemological assumptions that underpin it.

This session shifts the conversation towards questions of method, practice, and knowledge production. What methodological frameworks underpin decolonising art historical research? How do scholars, curators, artists, educators, and practitioners negotiate questions of authority, interpretation, and representation? What forms of knowledge are privileged, excluded, or recovered through different methodological approaches? How might methodological reflection help us better understand both the possibilities and limitations of decolonising projects?

We welcome proposals that engage critically and constructively with questions of method and epistemology across a broad range of contexts. Contributions might include:
- Decolonial, postcolonial, indigenous, feminist, critical race, or intersectional methodologies;
- Archival interventions and alternative forms of knowledge production;
- Community-engaged, collaborative, or participatory research practices;
- Curatorial and exhibition-making methodologies;
- Pedagogical approaches to decolonising art history and visual culture;
- Methodological challenges in researching, teaching, and interpreting global art histories;
- Practice-based and creative methodologies;
- Institutional, disciplinary, and epistemological critiques;
- Reflections on the successes, tensions, contradictions, and unintended consequences of decolonising approaches.

We welcome presentations of 8 or 20 minutes or an artistic showcase of 8 minutes (indicate preference with submission).

Themes: decolonization, methods, practice

Additional format comment: Full day session.

Lead Convenor: Rina Arya, University of Hull, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Sophie Kazan Makhlouf, University of Notre Dame USA, London, United Kingdom,

Claire Moran, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland,

Ceren Özpınar University of Brighton, United Kingdom,

Amanda Sciampacone, The Open University

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[11] In the Viewer’s World: Images as Indices to Phenomenological Experience
From: Michael Grillo
Date: 23.09.2026

Please consider submitting a paper for the session “In the Viewer’s World: Images as Indices to Phenomenological Experience” at the Association for Art History conference at Exeter University, 7-9 April 2027. The session welcomes papers centred on any period or culture that consider how:

History of Art has focused primarily on two of the semeiotic typologies identified by Charles Saunders Peirce: the mimetic, linking image to subject through verisimilitude, and the symbol, attaining meaning through abstract language. Peirce’s third typology, the indexical, opens up another affordance of conveying meaning by directing viewers’ attention away from the object to their personally experienced world. Studying artworks for resemblance or symbolism focuses on the object itself, while the indexical dissolves any boundaries between it and the world it points to.
This session seeks papers on artefacts from any cultural period exploring the myriad ways in which audiences phenomenologically construct meaning from the relationships between artworks and familiar places marked by direct pointers to the viewer’s world, and how this relationship opens up new interpretive understandings of how they functioned for their original audiences. Indexical works can function in a variety of ways, via mimesis, as in the Piazza della Signoria setting in Ghirlandaio’s Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule, mapping, as in Matthew Paris’ Chronica Majora, metonymy, as in the plaid blanket and fan in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Birth of the Virgin marking the manufacturing world of Siena, iconic embodiment, as in Jasper John’s flag paintings, or aesthetics, as in the Classical vision of Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion.
Papers should seek to restore how artworks indexically functioned in their spectators’ world as integral parts of their environments, reopening meanings too typically obscured by their removal from their original sites and isolated through photographic reproductions.

For more information, please visit https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/ and https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/.

Thank you, Michael Grillo, University of Maine, grillomaine.edu

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[12] The Medical Nude in the Long Nineteenth Century
From: Rebecca Whiteley
Date: 24.09.26

Dr Hannah Halliwell and Dr Rebecca Whiteley invite proposals for their AAH panel 'The Medical Nude in the Long Nineteenth Century'.

The nude is an art-historical stress test. As Lynda Nead tells us, it stands at the pinnacle of fine art and yet is always in danger of slipping into the unacceptable, the obscene. This dual identity has made it of central importance to the methodological development of aesthetics and connoisseurship in the nineteenth century, and feminist art history in the late twentieth. This panel proposes that the nude is once again needed as art historians test the capacities of a new methodological approach: the medical humanities.

The nineteenth century saw science and medicine radically reshape understandings of the body and its relation to identity. The nude, science and medicine were deeply entangled in fine art, in epistemic images, and in print cultures. But only recently have art historians and historians of science and medicine considered these interactions. How can the medical humanities reframe our understanding of the age-old art-historical concept of the nude? In what ways did science and medicine make use of the nude in constructing notions of race, class, gender, sexuality, morality and beauty?

This session will explore the extent and importance of the overdue conversation between the idealised body in fine art and the scientised body in medicine. We welcome papers on any aspect of the medical nude in the long nineteenth century. We are especially interested in constructing an interdisciplinary and global narrative, exploring all kinds of visual material of the medical nude from a range of perspectives.

For information on how to apply, see here: https://forarthistory.org.uk/93-the-medical-nude-in-the-long-nineteenth-century/
If you have any questions please contact Rebecca at r.k.whiteleybham.ac.uk

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[13] Public Art in Transformation: Mediation, Materiality and Value
From: Katarina Mohar
Date: 24.09.2026

Public art seeks “permanence in impermanent time” (Cartiere, 2022). The intended public, institutions and environments that sustain its relevance may change profoundly, making its value difficult to evaluate and mediate. This session asks how the artistic, art-historical and social value of commissioned artworks is mediated when the institutional, architectural and political frames of reference which first shaped their public role are transformed.

The issue is especially visible in socialist and post-socialist contexts, where works made for collective spaces and with ideological intent may remain extant after regime change while becoming socially, politically, materially or spatially displaced. A mural in a school, a relief in a civic interior or an artwork embedded in a public building may occupy its original site, but the public it once addressed, the institution it served and the values around it has changed. These cases open onto wider histories of publicly funded and state-supported art, including percent-for-art schemes and institutional commissions in which permanence was imagined more readily than later use.

Building on work in public art studies, design history and heritage studies, the session asks how such works are interpreted, evaluated and mediated under altered conditions. On what grounds are they preserved as “heritage”, neglected, or removed? How can art history reconstruct unstable public roles while considering artistic form, material presence and art-historical value?

We invite case studies and comparative papers on the afterlives of commissioned works in public or semi-public settings. The session aims to rethink public art through change, ambiguity, mediation, and value.

Lead Convenor: Katarina Mohar, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia
Co-convenors: Jessica Jenkins, Falmouth University, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website (https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2027-exeter) and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.

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[14] Art in the Age of Air Travel
From: Weerada Muangsook
Date: 25.09.26

This session invites paper proposals that consider what air travel has meant for art and art history. The phenomenon of human flight has generated profound transformations in our social and cultural landscape. It has altered the way we see and interpret the environments in which we live, igniting new imaginative geographies. Artists have been inspired by the experience of flight and the visual effects that it produces; they have considered the power and potential of technologies of flight to both forge and destroy. Air travel has also redefined the scope of our movements – the places we may go and the networks we may form. FESMAN was made possible by jet technology, which enabled the large scale ‘returns’ of diasporic artists to the African continent and facilitated a new discourse of global Blackness (Wofford 2018). At the same time, jets bearing the Stars and Stripes carried American art and culture around the world in unprecedented volumes, augmenting the nation’s global influence.

Air travel is, in many ways, responsible for our modern condition and imagination, and recent disruptions in global airspace have only served as powerful reminders of this. This prompts a re-evaluation of the underexplored relationship between art and air travel. This session asks, for example: How have developments in flight technologies reshaped the experience of art and artmaking? What kinds of spaces and subjectivities are made or ruptured by air travel? How has air travel functioned as a site of colonial/postcolonial/anticolonial creativity? How has air travel altered the way we understand and write about art?

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[15] Art History and Its Published Objects
From: Samuel Bibby
Date: 25.09.26

This session seeks to consider what is at stake in writing art histories of printed things. Increasingly, published material has become the primary focus of much scholarly endeavour, and we want to understand how – and why – art historians look at these objects. Papers are solicited that explicitly reflect on the methodological concerns and challenges of looking at – and art-historicising – published objects (according to the widest definition). How, for example, do we marry the disciplinary tenets of art history with those of fields such as periodical studies, book history, and digital humanities? What are the relationships between printed publications (which more often than not circulate as multiples) and archives, museums, and libraries as repositories of knowledge? Do published objects better lend themselves to micro- or macro-histories? Are diachronic or synchronic approaches to studying them more effective? Do such objects, long relegated to the margins of our subject, particularly lend themselves to helping produce histories of marginalised makers and readers? What might it mean to entwine attention to publishing labour into political accounts of artistic practice? Submissions that engage with feminist, queer, and postcolonial material and approaches are especially encouraged. We welcome proposals addressing published objects from any period or place, and that in their approach foreground the consequences of making an expanded field of published objects the subject of art history.

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The 2027 Association for Art History Annual Conference is open to all, and anyone may submit a paper to one of the existing 112 sessions highlighting a broad range of the latest scholarship in art history.

Submitting a Paper
Submit via the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form by 23:59 UK, Sunday 25 October 2026: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/
Submissions are managed through Oxford Abstracts.
Select your chosen session from the Session Name dropdown list.
After the deadline, papers will be shared with convenors via the platform, and convenors will contact you with their decision.

What to Include in Your Proposal
Session title
Abstract title (max 20 words)
Abstract (max 250 words)
Author name(s) and presenting author
Affiliation (or independent/freelance)
Country of residence
Telephone number
Social media handles (optional)
Any access requirements

Please use clear, straightforward language, avoiding jargon and acronyms. UK English please.

Session Formats
Sessions typically include 3–8 papers, each 20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A.
Sessions may mix formats (papers, discussions, debates).
Sessions run for half or full days.

Tickets & Funding
All convenors and speakers must purchase conference tickets.(available December 2026). Registration details will be announced in December.
Convenors may convene one session only; speakers may speak in one session only.
Early‑bird tickets available until 6 February 2027.
Bursaries available for doctoral and early‑career researchers.
Speakers may apply for an AAH grant (scheme under review in Autumn).

Full List of Sessions (1–112)
Full session abstracts are available on the conference website: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

Any questions, please contact conference2027forarthistory.org.uk