[1] Embodied Practices for Decolonisation: Research, Education, and Display
From: Alexandra Flagg
Date: 25.09.26

While decolonisation is today a central focus across academic disciplines, many discourses adopt methodologies which have long relied on strict classification of experiences. This process enforces epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), actively discriminating against communities by maintaining epistemic hierarchies in mainstream scholarship. Instead, reflecting a process increasingly common in art and activism but still under-utilised in academia – itself still rigidly encased in inherited Cartesian and Linnaean models – this session looks to explore the ways in which embodied practice can dismantle asymmetric power in art history and museum research, education, and practices of display.

Within this discussion, we define ‘embodied practice’ as practices connecting mind and body, which centre experiences and sensation to develop knowledge. Accordingly, we understand decolonisation broadly and intersectionally: not only referring to former colonies but to all communities historically relegated to the margins of knowledge construction, including due to gender, race, and ability. Originating from approaches spanning across decolonial and disability studies, this session is indebted to foundational concepts like the ‘Sensescape’ (Classen and Howes 2006), and more recent scholarship like ‘Knowing as Moving’ (Foster 2025).

We are particularly interested in papers which incorporate multisensory engagements; which consider modalities other than sight; or that reconsider the visual in a new way. We also invite papers that use embodied practice in practical ways to challenge established dominant epistemic paradigms of power.

Themes: decolonisation, embodied practice, research practices

Additional format comment: The panel will follow a standard format, featuring four 20-minute papers, allowing 5 minutes each for Q&A; traditional papers are welcome, but we also encourage creative presentations.

Lead Convenor: Alexandra Flagg, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, asf9st-andrews.ac.uk
Co-convenors: Renato Trotta, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, rt98st-andrews.ac.uk

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[2] Art, its History and (no) Working Class?
From: Seda Pesen
Date: 25.09.26

Class, as bell hooks observed, remains the subject we are most reluctant to tackle; a category often dismissed (hooks 2000). Art history is no exception. Class keeps slipping from view, though it is inscribed in art itself: as a possession of the ruling class, as a question for the working class. This session examines the past and present of the working class in art and its history, looking for it not only as an object of representation but as an agent.

Asking how this relation is shaped and read, the session takes up three aspects to bring class back into view – the very subject hooks found hardest to name. The first is historiographical: the legacies of Marxist art history (Max Raphael) and its feminist readings (Griselda Pollock). The second is institutional: the museum, from the civilizing institution (Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan) and site of distinction (Pierre Bourdieu) to its reinvention as a popular space, such as Lina Bo Bardi’s São Paulo museum. The third turns from analysis to agency, foregrounding art for, with and by the working class and its intersections with migration and gender: from the Hackney Flashers’ photography on work as a gendered and racialized matter to exhibitions such as Marta Herford’s Annem işçi – Who Sews the Red Flags?, on migrant workers in 1970s West Germany, especially Turkish women.

The session welcomes contributions across periods and geographies, reading class alongside race and gender, from researchers, curators, artists, and practitioners, including reflections on our discipline’s class conditions.

Planned for four to six 20-minute papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions, concluding with a shared discussion. For the third aspect of the proposal (agency / art for, with, by working class, migrants and women), contributions from artists and practitioners in other forms, such as a lecture performance or a short provocation, are specifically welcome, provided they fit the 20+5-minute slot. Full day session.

Lead Convenor: Seda Pesen, University of Vienna, Department of Art History, Vienna, Austria

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[3] Up North! Provincializing British Art History in the 1980s
From: Alice Correia
Date: 25.09.26

This panel will examine the artistic ecosystems of Northern England during the 1980s. During that decade, Northern England experienced profound social, political and economic upheavals that deepened regional North / South inequalities. Amidst these challenges, artistic and exhibition cultures in the region flourished: locally situated creative practitioners reacted to a collapsing society, creating pockets of energy and experimentation. Artists including Conrad Atkinson, Rita Donagh, John Hyatt and Lubaina Himid, and grassroots collectives including Welfare State International, Basement Group and Black Artists Alliance, created work and staged events that offered socio-political critique rooted in feminist, anti-racist and socialist discourses. While artists developed DIY venues and infrastructures (e.g. Abbey Mill, Cumbria; the Black E, Liverpool), within municipal galleries (e.g. Rochdale Art Gallery, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield), there was a changed understanding of what and who those institutions were for: innovative exhibition officers developed programmes that actively engaged with local audiences.

We welcome 20 min papers that focus on the artistic and/or exhibition cultures of the North of England in the 1980s; that provide exhibition case studies; or that address “issue-based” work, whether: feminist; Peace activism; workers’ rights; AIDS activism; racial discrimination; or Anti-nuclear and environmental concerns. We seek to advance existing literature on the North and its art histories, and to challenge London-centric narratives that have hitherto overshadowed remarkable, regionally specific artistic creativity.

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[4] Adriatic Encounters: artistic exchanges via the Adriatic sea, c.1200-c.1700
From: Henry Tudor-Pole
Date: 25.09.26

Described by Fernand Braudel as ‘perhaps the most unified of all regions of the Mediterranean’, the Adriatic Sea was a crucial site of artistic encounter across the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Since the end of the Cold War, scholars from Italy and the former Yugoslavia in particular have paid increasing attention to the interconnectedness of artistic production on both coasts of the Adriatic. More recently, prominent scholarship such as Alina Payne’s edited 2022 volume The Land between Two Seas: Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea 1300–1700, has called into question traditional modes of art-historical classification by foregrounding the pronounced mobility and hybridity of maritime regions. While this scholarship productively engages with questions of exchange, identity and geographical boundaries, less attention has been given to how the experience of coastal environments and life at sea was mediated by art.

Spanning traditional categories of periodisation, this panel invites further discussion of the role of the Adriatic Sea in characterising artistic cultures across this geography. How is the sea represented in the art of this region, how was art used at sea, what forms of art did maritime journeys engender? How did artists help construct trans-Adriatic political entities and hegemonies? The panel allows for a reassessment of local and national identities as a constitutive element in the production of art, and how the sea facilitated artistic exchange between different media. It would also welcome theoretical papers that discuss the utility of geographical and maritime framings of art-historical enquiry.

Panel convenors: Isaac Nugent and Henry Tudor-Pole

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[5] Interiors’ Matter: Novel Materials and Decorative Innovations on Furniture in Early Modern Domestic Interiors
From: Vincent Cattersel
Date: 25.09.26

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of materials, artisanal knowledge, and technical innovation in shaping the visual and material culture of early modern domestic interiors (Goodmen & Norberg (eds), 2010; Campbell et.al. (eds), 2013; Anderson & Carroll (eds), 2022)). Yet little attention has been paid to how material experimentation in the applied and decorative arts has transformed domestic interiors, even though new (exotic) materials and novel decorative techniques on furniture shaped and communicated social status, taste, and cultural identity. (Vickery, 2009).

Understanding this contemporary reciprocal interaction requires integrated methodologies that combine written, archival, and material sources that draw upon art history, history, conservation science, and material culture studies.

This session examines materials as active agents and explores how novel materials and decorative innovations contributed to the embodied experience of domestic space in the early modern period. More specifically, it aims to investigate the innovations in materials and making practices that shaped the appearance, perception, and use of these interiors.

The session welcomes both methodological and research papers exploring the relationship between craft knowledge, material experimentation, furniture production (mobile furniture, musical instruments, and non-mobile wallcoverings/paneling…), decorative schemes, and the lived experience of domestic spaces.

By bringing together art historians, historians of design and interiors, conservators, curators, and scholars of material culture, this session seeks to advance new perspectives on the role of material innovation in the making and experience of early domestic modern interiors.

Call for Papers deadline: 23:59 UK, Sunday, 25 October 2026
Themes:
Material experimentation, Early modern interiors, Embodied experience
Additional format comment:
Papers of 15 minutes followed by a panel discussion.
Lead Convenor: Julie De Groot, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Co-convenors: Vincent Cattersel, University of Antwerp/ Royal Museums of Art and History, Belgium

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the provided link in the 'Website address' and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.

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[6] Creative Misreading: Dada, Proto-Dada, and Global Artistic Reinvention
From: Fengyi Guo
Date: 25.09.26

“Misreading” has a long history in literary studies, from Harold Bloom’s theory of creative misprision to reception theory’s emphasis on the reader’s role in producing meaning. In both cases, misreading is not simply an error, but a generative act. This session asks what creative misreading can mean for art history. Artistic concepts do not travel as complete or stable objects. They move through translations, reproductions, exhibitions, archives, teaching, criticism, and personal networks, often arriving in fragmented, delayed, or uneven forms. Misreading, in this sense, becomes a process of reconstruction, through which artists, critics, curators, and institutions adapt historical movements to new creative, political, and institutional contexts.

Dada offers a productive case for this question. Although often historicised through a short chronology beginning in Zurich in 1916, its receptions cannot be contained within a stable temporal or geographical frame. Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Dada has been invoked, translated, exhibited, and reconfigured in relation to Fluxus, Happenings, institutional critique, performance, mail art, conceptual practice, Japanese Neo-Dada, and the Chinese avant-garde of the 1980s. What circulated was not a single Dada, but multiple constructions produced through uneven movements of texts, images, exhibitions, archives, networks, and local experiments.

The session welcomes papers on Dada, proto-Dada, Neo-Dada, and related experimental practices, especially those addressing translation, partial reception, publications, exhibitions, archives, pedagogy, artist networks, non-Western or socialist modernisms, and anti-art under different political and institutional conditions.

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[7] Material Culture and the Anglo-Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1700
From: Meredith Hale
Date: 25.09.26

This session invites contributions that examine the material culture of New Amsterdam (present-day New York) within a broader Anglo-Dutch Atlantic framework. The only Dutch colony on the North American mainland, it emerged as a trading hub for American goods and served as a key site for Dutch mercantile expansion and cross-cultural exchange. Within this colonial environment, Dutch settlers, Indigenous communities, and enslaved Africans lived in proximity, shaping a shared yet unequal social and material landscape. From 1664, following its seizure under Charles II, the colony became a site of English rule and imperial ambition, incorporating New York into a growing number of English settlements which began with the establishment of Virginia in 1607. These two phases of the colony’s history have long been considered as separate cultural-historical moments.

We will consider the colony in the context of Anglo-Dutch relations throughout the 17th Century, a period in which Low Countries artistic leadership was increasingly dominant in England, but which also saw three Anglo-Dutch wars (1652-74) and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688) which led to the transfer of political, naval and mercantile power from Amsterdam to London. We will bring together studies of visual and material culture in the Anglo-Dutch sphere and the colonies to consider how they might inform one another, what light they shed on shared colonial practices, and ways in which they resist easy definition. We invite papers that consider artists, objects, and artworks as primary sources for understanding processes of exchange and the formation of entangled Anglo-Dutch and Atlantic histories.

Format: The session will consist of four 20-minute papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions. Given our goal of bringing together areas of research that have long been considered to be separate, we will prioritise papers proposing new approaches to this material.

Lead Convenor: Meredith Hale, Art History & Visual Culture, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Tamar van Riessen, PhD-Candidate, Art History & Visual Culture, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

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[8] Old Women: Representations, Resistances, Reasonings
From: Hilary Robinson
Date: 25.09.26

Just before AAH2025, a tiny Gwen Raverat woodcut appeared at auction: Old Women. The auctioneer presenting the lot said as an aside before opening bidding: ‘You would think they could have given it a better title.’ Close inspection shows the title written by Raverat, under the image, with her signature. In 1974, when a journalist said she did not look so old, Gloria Steinem said, ‘this is what 40 looks like’. In 1982 Louise Bourgeois had her first major solo exhibition, aged 70, inaugurating her 70s/80s/90s as an internationally exhibiting artist. These observations highlight the disjuncture between western culture’s assumptions about what constitutes an old woman, women’s experiences as artists, and representations of old women.

The panel will explore the representation of old women as practitioners, images in artworks, objects of curation; as structural, institutional, presences and absences. What, where, and how does an old woman (artist, image, concept, curator, teacher) look like as post-menopausal life expectancy increases? The panel provides breadth of understanding of what is at stake through selecting diverse 20-minute papers with sharp focus, followed by discussion among panellists and audience.

Speakers should explore particular art works, representational tropes, individual artists of any gender or culture, or specific events. Papers may recognise that artists who were in their 20s during the feminist 1960s-70s are now in their 70s/80s/90s; may focus on contemporary, modern, or earlier images; they may explore the impacts of feminist thinking and politics; contributions may be autoethnographic; they may note the rise of academic interest in witches; or use other pertinent contextualisation.

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[9] Creative Misreading: Dada, Proto-Dada, and Global Artistic Reinvention
From: Katt Hui Wang
Date: 25.09.26

Artistic concepts do not travel intact. They are translated, selectively received, reconstructed, and reinvented as they move across different historical, geographical, political, and institutional contexts.

This session considers “creative misreading” as a generative process in the circulation and transformation of artistic ideas. Rather than treating partial reception, mistranslation, or conceptual displacement simply as failures of understanding, we ask how such processes have enabled new artistic practices, critical vocabularies, networks, and institutional formations.

We welcome proposals addressing Dada, proto-Dada, Neo-Dada, and related experimental practices. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

translation, adaptation, and partial reception;
publications, exhibitions, and archives;
artistic pedagogy and knowledge transmission;
transnational artist networks;
non-Western and socialist modernisms;
the reinvention of anti-art across different contexts;
and more.

Conference: 7–9 April 2027
Venue: University of Exeter, UK
Proposal length: Maximum 250 words
Submission deadline: 25 October 2026, 23:59 UK time

Please consult the full Call for Papers and submit your proposal through the official conference website, selecting “Session 28”:

https://forarthistory.org.uk/28-creative-misreading-dada-proto-dada-and-global-artistic-reinvention/

Session convenors:
Fengyi Guo (University of York) Katt Hui Wang (Heidelberg University) Lu Bai (University of Regensburg)

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[10] Documenting Fashion Otherwise: Archives, Absence, and the Politics of Evidence
From: Alba Sanz Alvarez
Date: 25.10.26

What counts as evidence in fashion history? This session aims to interrogate authoritative sources, including patents, contracts, photographs, and press materials. Drawing on Ernst van Alphen’s question, “What history, whose history, history to what purpose?”, we recognise that sources are often biased and shaped by systems that reinforce certain narratives while obscuring others. Scholars such as Estrella de Diego, who have championed the significance of “what was there and we did not see”, inspire us to explore the potential for fashion historians to work critically with the official record while attending to what it leaves out, suppresses, or renders difficult to see.
Acknowledging the biases produced and encountered in the archive, this panel proposes to explore both the contributions and the challenges of defying official evidence. In some cases, primary sources have been available yet overlooked, thereby preventing the unsettling of established narratives favouring the individual male genius. The authorship of the Delphos gown, traditionally attributed to Mariano Fortuny despite archival evidence of Henriette Negrin’s role as inventor and co-creator, offers one such example. In other cases, particularly those involving sexuality and queer relationships, they often lack conventional documentation, limiting the scope of historical inquiry, as seen in the historiography surrounding Cristóbal Balenciaga.
We encourage papers that approach fashion history through archival theory, visual and material culture, queer studies, gender studies, museum studies, legal history, oral history or affect studies. Possible topics include disputed authorship, invisible collaborators, patents, cataloguing practices, gossip, archival silence, attribution and the politics of naming.

Themes: Fashion history, politics of evidence, archive

Additional format comment: Session of four 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions.

Lead Convenor: Alba Sanz Álvarez. The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Co-convenors: Danny Cruz Pérez, Universidad de Murcia, Spain

[11] Performance Art and Digital Cultures
From: Miguel Arrais Pacheco
Date: 25.09.26

As algorithms, virality, and platform economies structure contemporary modes of viewing, performance art finds itself caught increasingly difficult entanglements with digital media. This session explores how performance art – a genre long concerned with temporality, presence, and documentation – contends with artistic production, circulation, and reception in our screen-saturated, algorithm-led “digital age”.

In ‘Disordered Attention’ (2024), Claire Bishop describes not only contemporary performance strategies that adopt the temporal logics of digital systems (looping, refreshing, long-duration), but also hybrid spectatorial modes such as scrolling, (live-)streaming, and skimming. From Lynn Herschman Leeson to Candela Capitan and Nina Davies, numerous artists have considered screen technologies and networked systems as they complicate issues of identity, virtuality, and embodiment in performance practices.

Attuned to the necessity of historicising performance art’s convergences with digital technologies, this session welcomes papers that address any of the following: how performance artists and audiences appropriate, subvert, or yield to digital media and its logics; how the material conditions of bodies and screens collide with, transform, or confront each other; how performance strategies variously resist, or become imbricated in, profit-generating digital platforms; how performance art mobilises digital forms to articulate marginalised or non-hegemonic subjectivities; and other related topics. We also invite discussions of performance art that utilises screenshots, hyperlinks, gifs, memes, and other visual motifs scattered across digital interfaces. Contributions may take the form of research papers, performance-lectures, performances, or video works.

Themes: Performance, digital, body

Additional format comment: We would like to invite research papers, but also performance-lectures, performances, and video works in the session.

Lead Convenor: Anja Segmueller, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Co-convenors: Miguel Arrais Pacheco, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom;
Tiffany Wu, Yale University, USA.

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[12] From Atelier to Artist Residency: Care, Access, and Exclusion
From: Elena Konyushikhina
Date: 25.09.26

The panel examines how artist residencies and atelier-based communities shape access to career opportunities, recognition and professional networks. More than places where artists work, they are also sites where decisions are made about who gains access to resources and opportunities. The panel therefore asks who is included or excluded from these processes, what influences these decisions, and how they shape the distribution of different forms of capital within the art world.

We invite papers addressing residency selection processes, self-representation, care and precarity, collective studio communities. Contributions from scholars and practitioners, including artists and residency organisers, are especially welcome.

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[13] Hybrid Bodies in Early Modern Art
From: Mathilde Mioche
Date: 25.09.26

This session welcomes proposals on hybridity in early modern art from Europe and beyond, with the aim of reassessing the term’s visual and epistemological connotations. We will focus on hybrid bodies―dynamic forms that resist categorisation.

In nineteenth-century imperial discourse, the concept of hybridity carried derogatory connotations of racial and cultural mixing. The term ‘hybrid’ has historically been used to impose hierarchies on disparate elements of a whole, which, at best, fail to grasp their coherence, or, at worst, replicate patterns of political oppression. Driven by Homi Bhabha’s theory of the ‘Third Space’ (1994), postcolonial studies have rehabilitated the term to argue that cultural identities are not fixed but constantly being negotiated.

Although the concept of hybridity has since generated considerable critical engagement in the humanities and social sciences, art history still downplays its complexity. The conventions of visual analysis which underpin our discipline encourage binary simplification. For example, the field of Monster Studies frequently reduces hybrid creatures to a human-animal dichotomy. This session advocates for interstitial thinking that recognises the dynamic encounters between demarcated binaries.

We invite historians of early modern art to reconsider the concept of ‘hybridity’ in relation to the body, by exploring themes like monstrosity, gender and race. In a world of fractured identities, we believe that the ambiguity of the ‘hybrid’ is something for art historians to urgently build on, rather than break down.

Convenors: Kathryn Ffion Davies and Mathilde Mioche, Courtauld Institute of Art

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[14] Falling from Suspension: Chiaroscuro and the Unstable Body in Early Modern Images
From: Minqian Pan
Date: 25.09.26

This session examines “falling from suspension” in early modern images: the moment when a body that seems to rise, fly, or levitate is recalled by shadow, flesh, and weight. Recent work on descent, embodiment, and verticality has renewed attention to the body’s relation to earth, air, and sky. Yet the antinomy within suspension itself remains less explored. Suspension is not always a stable passage toward transcendence rather it may contain its own fall. Meanwhile the failure of ascent may open a renewed proximity to the ground.

The session asks how this instability becomes visible. What roles do chiaroscuro, posture, color, and unfinished form play in making falling perceptible? How do images of levitation, flight and fall challenge accounts of early modern bodies as substance? Rather than treating chiaroscuro as a secondary effect of modelling, the session considers it as an unstable boundary through which bodies pass between light and shadow, ascent and descent, vision and material weight.

Building on Horst Bredekamp’s work on Michelangelo, especially his argument of the connections between The Last Judgment, The Fall of Phaeton, The Rape of Ganymede, and Tityus, this session asks how suspension itself can be made to fall. We invite papers that investigate how chiaroscuro, bodily torsion, and other pictorial devices render forces perceptible as sensible forms.

Themes: Chiaroscuro; falling; Michelangelo

Additional format comment: The session will take the form of a panel with a respondent and time reserved for discussion.

Lead Convenor: Minqian Pan, University of Fribourg (CH), Switzerland

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[15] Beryl Cook at 100
From: Terah Lynle Walkup
Date: 25.09.26

Beryl Cook (1926-2008) was a British self-taught painter who though widely popular in her own lifetime was largely, and vehemently, dismissed by art critics. 100 years after her birth and 50 years since she skyrocketed to national fame after her first exhibition in 1975, the moment is ripe for reassessing her career and place within art history.

Recent institutional presentations have offered new approaches to her work. In 2024 Studio Voltaire in London paired Beryl Cook with another self-taught artist, Tom of Finland. Then, in 2026, her centenary year, The Box in Plymouth staged a monumental survey of her work that became the most reviewed and attended exhibition in institutional history drawing record-breaking audiences from around the UK resulting in what the press coined ‘Beryl-mania’. By contextualising her practice within the socio-economic climate of 1970s-00s Britain, presenting new research drawn from the artist’s archive and evidencing her artistic process for the first time, that exhibition presented a needed reappraisal of Cook’s career.

Despite hundreds of press articles written about Cook over the past 5 decades, research on Cook is largely absent from the scholarly record. However, new perspectives and approaches are emerging, and this session offers the opportunity to build a scholarly discourse around Cook. We invite papers that offer fresh insights into this understudied artist especially those offering understandings of her work through lenses of class, gender, sexuality, and place.

Papers will be followed by a roundtable discussion with curator of The Box exhibition, 'Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy' Terah Walkup, and author of Beryl Cook’s new biography, Hilary Bracegirdle.

Additional format comment: Papers will be followed by a roundtable discussion with curator of The Box exhibition, Terah Walkup, and author of Beryl Cook’s new biography, Hilary Bracegirdle.

Lead Convenor: Terah Walkup, The Box, Plymouth, United Kingdom

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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