[1] Slow Sculpture: Materials, Methods and Making
From: Lynn M Somers
Date: Sep 29, 2026
This panel invites contributions from artists and scholars who work on/with late modern and contemporary sculpture associated with slowness, conceived as labour-intensive, processual, temporal, or land-based practices. Slowness encompasses forms of making associated with post-minimalism or process art, for example, the weaving, wrapping, binding, and looping techniques of Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse, Sheila Hicks, Lee Bontecou, Maren Hassinger, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and earlier, Ruth Asawa. Fiber, rope, wood, wire, and canvas afforded an ambiguity, malleability, and intimacy conducive to handmade, even meditative, making. Slowness also suggests time- and labour-intensive methods evident in affective, multi-sensory objects by Michelle Stuart, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Senga Nengudi, Robert Gober, Martin Puryear, and others. Although by no means exclusive to women artists, at mid-century, non-traditional methods—twisting, weaving, binding, wrapping, stacking—were associated with repetitive, quotidian, and so-called domestic labour, as well as craft-based materials and practices, which critics often gendered as “feminine,” reproductive, and bodily, even when rigorously conceptual. Contemporary ecocritical approaches to sculpture seen in site-specific works made with plant, animal, or earthen matter by Delcy Morelos, Meg Webster, Wolfgang Laib, and Andy Goldsworthy draw upon slowness as not only a method, but a concept, theory, and ecological philosophy.

This panel seeks intersectional approaches to “slow sculpture” that focus on feminist, queer, race, disability, and ecocritical theories; and, specifically, artists whose work speaks to embodied encounters and critical reflections upon ideas and forms that stray from canonical narratives, queer our sense of direction and understanding through material investigations of (dis)location, (dis)continuity, impermanence, and loss.

Panel is open to art historians, artists, critics, and any scholars working on sculpture with emphasis on 20th and 21st century art from around the globe.

250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers are due 25 October 2026 to Lynn M. Somers lmsomersmac.com. See the AAH link for conference details: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[2] What Can Minor Materialities Do to the Histories of Contemporary Art?
From: Clara Zarza and Yuji Kawasima
Date: Sep 29, 2026
Over the past six decades, contemporary art has witnessed the growing visibility of materials, objects and practices long positioned at the margins of dominant artistic and cultural value. We use the term minor materialities to describe materials, objects and practices —including domestic objects, discarded matter, bodily traces and vernacular forms of making— historically excluded from dominant artistic and cultural hierarchies. Through the work of artists such as Faith Ringgold, Félix González-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Feliciano Centurión and Mari Katayama, these materialities have challenged the boundaries between art and everyday life while prompting museums and scholarship to reconsider artistic value and the writing of art history.

Building on feminist, postcolonial and decolonial art histories, material culture studies, critical museum studies and contemporary historiography, the panel adopts an intersectional perspective to ask not only how minor materialities have entered contemporary art since the 1960s, but also what they do to contemporary art history. Rather than treating them as neglected media awaiting inclusion, the panel asks how minor materialities become historiographical agents capable of reshaping artistic value, museum narratives and the writing of contemporary art history.

We welcome papers from any geographical context, particularly those that challenge Euro-American narratives of contemporary art. We are especially interested in contributions examining the use or institutional recuperation of everyday, vernacular or abject materials and exploring how objects become sites where intersecting histories of gender, race, disability, sexuality, labour, migration and colonialism are materially sedimented and historically negotiated. Accepted papers will conclude with a provocation and roundtable discussion on how minor materialities might shape future histories of contemporary art.

Please submit your proposal for this session here: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[3] Positionality of Art History in Time of Conflict in Myanmar
From: Phyo Wai
Date: Sep 29, 2026
In an era defined by geopolitical fractures, art history is rarely a neutral bystander. In Myanmar, where protracted conflict disrupts institutional structures, the study, preservation, and translation of visual culture and material heritage have become highly contested terrains. This session examines what art history does when it is undertaken under duress, considering the shifting “positionality” of art history during active crises and how the documentation and curation of art act as both tools of political legitimacy and vehicles for social resilience.

Supported by the Myanmar Institute for Education and Research (MIER), whose mission bridges local expertise with global scholarship, we invite papers that explore how independent researchers, curators, and local knowledge networks navigate art-historical practice under conditions of censorship, displacement, and material destruction. Potential topics include: the co-optation of historical art narratives—such as Bagan’s temple murals, Konbaung court textiles, or Buddhist temple architecture—to forge state identities; the role of visual culture in local and transnational resistance movements; and the linguistic and cultural translation of indigenous art-historical concepts into the global academic discourse.

By centring Myanmar’s current climate, this session confronts how the discipline adapts when its subjects—and its practitioners—are under existential threat. Ultimately, we ask: How does conflict reshape the ethical responsibility of the researcher and the methods of the art historian? We welcome diverse methodologies across art history, archaeology, and material culture studies. We encourage submissions from early career scholars, and independent regional practitioners navigating underrepresented histories of art from the ground in the Southeast Asia region.

Themes: art history, conflict, displacement

Lead Convenor: Melissa Carlson, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Phyo Wai, Myanmar Institute for Education and Research & SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom

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://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter

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[4] Affective Provocations: Conserving and caring for worlds in the Americas through Latin American Contemporary Art
From: Victoria Vargas Downing
Date: Sep 29, 2026
In recent years, growing scholarly and institutional interest in decolonial methodologies and more-than-human ethics has opened spaces for questioning what conservation and care mean, who defines them, which worlds they sustain, and what futures they seek to preserve. The works of indigenous artists such as Santiago Yahuarcani reflect on affective worlds obscured by dominant knowledge regimes, while embedding forms of knowledge, conservation, and care grounded in their worldviews. Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios, objects made to affect the present rather than an imagined future, challenge future-oriented conservation logics.

Questioning hegemonic conservation frameworks amid ecological and extractive crisis, this panel signals the need for alternative concepts of care and invites participants to reconsider conservation as an ongoing affective practice of sustaining, renewing, and giving life to territories, relatives, and objects. Understanding care as a nurturing collective responsibility, and engaging with relational ontologies articulated by thinkers such as Krenak, Bispo dos Santos, and Escobar, the session asks about forms of challenging dominant conservation paradigms to express care through a range of embodied and affective practices, including shamanic dreaming, singing, dance, and ritual action, functioning as sensory and spiritual world-balancing gestures, where knowledge is transmitted and territories are cared for, surpassing preservation frameworks.

We welcome critical contributions in dialogue with these concerns, particularly around how indigenous, Quilombola, Afro, and riverine communities’ ontologies activate collective knowledges through artistic practices and territorial relations, and how artist-community collaborations transform conservation through poetics and care. What methodological approaches do these works demand from scholars, curators, and institutions? We also warmly welcome provocations engaging specific artworks, territories, sensory experiences, and/or knowledge traditions beyond hegemonic paradigms.

The provocation slot is an open-format intervention, including non-conventional scholarly contributions such as performance, song, oral narration, ritual, or s…The provocation slot is an open-format intervention, including non-conventional scholarly contributions such as performance, song, oral narration, ritual, or sensory engagement, alongside paper presentations or visual art. The framing invites participants to enact and present alternative conservation logics that resonate with these questions and formats, new methodologies in art history, more-than-human relations, and other forms of care in the arts.

To submit a paper to this session please complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter

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[5] Artists' Archives and the Making of Art History in the Global South
From: Ayana Bhattacharya
Date: Sep 29, 2026
Art history has traditionally privileged the artwork, the museum and the exhibition as its primary sites of historical inquiry. However, the archival turn in art history and the critical study of archives have increasingly challenged the understanding of archives as repositories supplementing established narratives or sites of preservation, foregrounding instead their role as active frameworks in the production and mediation of historical knowledge. Across diverse geographical and institutional contexts, artist archives have become important sites for extending these discussions. Within the Global South, initiatives such as Ha Bik Chuen Archive, the personal archive of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, Womanifesto Archive, the Roberto Chabet Archive, the Hélio Oiticica Archive, the León Ferrari Archive, and the Uche Okeke Archive, alongside collaborative projects such as Assembling Art Archives, represent only a selection of the many archival practices through which these questions have been explored and continue to evolve. This session proposes to examine how the particular material, relational and custodial conditions of artist archives across the Global South extend and complicate established understandings of archival research and methodology, demanding a reconsideration of the discipline’s evidentiary and methodological foundations.

We propose to examine archiving—rather than the archive itself—as an art historical method. Unlike institutional archives, artist archives emerge from the entanglement of artistic practice and lived experiences, where personal, professional, socio-political, pedagogical and material histories remain inseparable. Their formation is neither neutral, self-interested, nor merely administrative. Decisions of accession, arrangement, metadata construction, preservation, digitisation, and most importantly care, play a key role in visibilising interlacing roots of a practice, and determining the forms of interpretation that then become possible. The central question this session proposes to address, therefore, is: How are artist archives across the Global South shaping, extending, or challenging the methods, infrastructures, and historiographies of art history?

Bringing together case studies from Africa, East, Southeast and West Asia, and Latin America, this session invites panelists to ask how artists’ archives are catalysing epistemic shifts in the writing of intersectional and trans-regional histories of art. With particular attention to inter- and transregional connections, we invite contributions that examine one or more of the following:

• The intellectual labour of archiving as an art-historical method.

• Artists’ and family archives as sites of negotiation between personal, professional and political histories, including questions of identity, care, vulnerability and custodianship.

• Community-led and collectively formed archival initiatives, including their engagement with marginalised, subversive, gendered or vernacular narratives and modes of knowledge formation.

Themes: Archiving, intersectional art histories, vernacular modes of knowledge

Additional format comment: The convenors hope to briefly introduce the conceptual framework of the session through a discussion on South Asian artists’ archives, before inviting panelists to present their papers.

Lead Convenor: Sampurna Chakraborty, Archival and Documentation Officer at the Benode Behari Mukherjee Archives & Research Centre (BBMARC), Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India

Co-convenor: Ayana Bhattacharya, Doctoral researcher, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

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.

https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2027-exeter/

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[6] Sanctuary as Practice: Art, Social Activism, and the Architecture of Conscience
From: Carolyn King
Date: Sep 29, 2026
Sacred and contemplative spaces have re-emerged as significant sites of political urgency (Madoff, 2019). From the Rothko Chapel’s founding mission to support civil and human rights to recent activist gatherings staged inside museums, galleries, and places of worship, artists, curators, and communities increasingly treat the gallery or sanctuary not as a retreat from the world, but as a staging ground for it. This session interrogates what it means for an artwork, or an institution built around one, to hold both contemplative and activist functions at once, and if this dual mandate is a tension to be managed or model from which to learn.

Scholarship on socially engaged art has tended to separate the relational and participatory (Bishop 2004, Bourriaud 1998, 2002) from the devotional and contemplative (Rosenblum’s Abstract Sublime on Rothko and Newman, 1961). This session brings these literatures into conversation, asking how spaces designed for stillness can become spaces for organizing, mourning, and dissent.

We welcome papers addressing histories of chapels, memorials, and meditative spaces founded explicitly to support human rights or social justice work; artists whose practice moves between abstraction and activism; the role of light, scale, and silence in activist and devotional spaces; institutional case studies of museums or foundations navigating political advocacy; and non-Western traditions of sacred space as civic action.

Please submit your abstracts through the official AAH website: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[7] When Did the Contemporary Begin? Thailand, Southeast Asia, and the Problem of Periodisation
From: Adulaya Hoontrakul
Date: Sep 30, 2026
The session will conclude with a moderated roundtable discussion.
Lead Convenor: Adulaya Hoontrakul, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok, Thailand.

"When Did the Contemporary Begin? Thailand, Southeast Asia, and the Problem of Periodisation"

The 1990s are frequently described as the decade in which Thailand and Southeast Asia entered the contemporary. Across the region, this period witnessed the emergence of independent art spaces, new curatorial platforms, regional exhibition networks, and increasing international visibility. Yet the assumptions underpinning this periodisation have rarely been examined directly. Why have particular decades, events, and institutions come to signify the beginning of the contemporary? How have these narratives shaped the writing of art histories in Thailand and across Southeast Asia?

Recent scholarship on multiple modernities, global art history, and the contemporary has challenged linear models of artistic development derived from European and North American experiences. Scholars, including John Clark, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Terry Smith, and Okwui Enwezor, have demonstrated the need to account for diverse historical trajectories and regional formations. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the processes through which particular decades, events, institutions, and artistic practices come to be identified as the beginning of the contemporary itself. This session takes Thailand as an important point of departure while inviting comparative perspectives from across Southeast Asia.

Contributors are encouraged to examine artists, exhibitions, curatorial projects, archives, independent spaces, biennales, and critical texts that have shaped understandings of historical change. Papers might reconsider the significance of political and economic transformations, regional networks, or alternative temporal frameworks that complicate established narratives of transition from modernity to the contemporary. Through Thailand and Southeast Asia, the session seeks to open a broader discussion on how art histories are periodised, narrated, and revised.

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.
Please find our Call for Papers here for the AAH 2027 Annual Conference, 7- 9 April 2027, taking place at the University of Exeter and hosted in partnership with its Department of Art History and Visual Culture: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah.../
The deadline for Paper proposals is 23:59 UK time on Sunday, 25 October 2026.
This year, AAH is using an abstract management platform, Oxford Abstracts, so please bear with us as we navigate the platform for the first time. In previous years, the Convenor(s)’ email addresses were listed against each Session. This year, the email addresses are not provided in the public domain on the AAH website. You will need to remember the title and number of the session you wish to submit a paper to (or add the number and name of your Session here) and select this from the “Session Name” dropdown list when submitting the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form. After the Call for Papers deadline, your paper will be assigned to the conference organisers for review, and we will get in touch with you using the contact details you provided in the form with our decision, either via email or directly on the platform. Please note that when completing the form, you will be invited to sign up for Oxford Abstracts to submit your Paper via the form.
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.

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[8] Practice as research: intersectional methods responding to art history and collections
From: Cam Williamson
Date: Sep 30, 2026
We are looking for papers to take part in the Association for Art History annual conference, taking part at the University of Exeter in April 2027. This session will bring together papers and a workshop that discusses creative practice as a methodological tool for new research into existing art historical collections and institutions in accessible and critical ways. Artistic practice can democratise and explore the intersectionality of collections through multiple lenses, including but not limited to: auto-ethnographic practices, gender-based intervention, anti-colonial and decolonial approaches, and queering the archive. Researchers and practitioners will be invited to discuss how creative practices allow audiences to understand collections that are burdened by colonialist and capitalist histories, as well as methods of reimagining access to collections to those that find them inaccessible – for example, due to social class and/or disabilities.

Creative practitioners are often brought into institutions via curatorial and community engagement programming with aims asking them to democratise institutional spaces, add more diverse and missing voices, and encourage wider participation and enquiry. What are the legacies of these creative interventions? How can contemporary artistic practice activate spaces and/or collections? What is the legacy of this making? How can practice as research be utilised not only by creative practitioners but also other roles within heritage and art history-based institutions? How is this new knowledge shared and applied?

To further discuss the importance of creative practice when exploring art history, this hybrid session will start with papers and culminate in a collaborative creative workshop. This workshop will provide the attendees with opportunities to experiment with practice-based research methods that encourage the synthesis of new knowledge within the sector.

Please submit your paper proposal here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter

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[9] The Exhibition as Embassy: Art, Mobility, and Media between the Arab and the Socialist World
From: Hala Ghoname
Date: Sep 30, 2026
How might exhibitions reshape the cultural geographies through which we understand the Global Cold War?
This session approaches the exhibition not simply as an event contained within the museum or gallery, but as a mobile diplomatic medium—one that connected socialist Europe, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and the Arab world through artistic mobility, visual communication, cultural diplomacy, and media.
We are particularly interested in the networks that stretched between cities such as Moscow, Dresden, Warsaw, Prague, Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Algiers, Tunis, and Beirut, and in the ways exhibitions and their afterlives in illustrated magazines, photography, film, television, catalogues, artists’ residencies, cultural missions, and educational exchanges produced transnational narratives across political and ideological boundaries.
We especially welcome contributions addressing women artists within these networks and the ways they navigated the intersecting languages of emancipation, internationalism, socialist modernity, local artistic practices, and political expectations.
Possible approaches include exhibition histories, artistic mobility, museums and biennials, illustrated magazines, photography and film, media rhetoric, feminist art history, Arab modernism, Soviet and East European art, curatorial practice, cultural diplomacy, and transnational or postcolonial approaches to Cold War visual culture.
Convenors
Dr Hala Ghoname — 4A_Lab Fellow, Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics, Berlin
Dr Maria Mileeva — The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Place: University of Exeter
Date: 7–9 April 2027
Proposal deadline: 23:59 UK, Sunday, 25 October 2026
Submitting a proposal
Paper proposals should include an abstract of no more than 250 words and an abstract title of no more than 20 words. When submitting through the AAH proposal platform, please select Session 89: “The Exhibition as Embassy: Art, Mobility, and Media between the Arab and the Socialist World.”
For the submission procedure, required information, eligibility, paper format, and other practical details, please follow the AAH 2027 Call for Papers — official information and submission details on the Association for Art History website.
We warmly welcome proposals that open new archives, geographies, media, and methodological perspectives on these interconnected histories.
Please share widely with colleagues, researchers, doctoral candidates, curators, and others whose work speaks to these questions.
submission details
https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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[10] Sights of Abolition: Art Against Borders, Militarism, and Incarceration
From: Mirra-Margarita Ianeva
Date: Sep 30, 2026
Where discussions about abolition within the arts have primarily focused on prisons (often from a North American perspective), this panel asks what it would mean to also bring an abolitionist lens to detention centres, borders, and military sites, both within the UK and across other geographies.

As Michelle Brown (2013) observes, “we live our lives amid complex, but often fleeting, anecdotal appearances of the penal, even as punishment emerges as a structuring force in globalising frameworks.” Abolition, then, must contend not only with institutions but with deeply embedded ways of seeing, sensing, and organizing lifeways. Drawing on abolition studies and art history, this panel adopts an expansive understanding of abolition, attending both to visual records of the concrete struggles for decarceration and demilitarization and to the work of artists who engage in the speculative project of imagining the world otherwise.

We invite submissions from artists, curators, and scholars who are engaging with abolition as creation. If we have been taught to “see like a cop,” how can artworks help us see otherwise? What material, social, and affective transformations does abolition promise and require, and what is the role of the arts in these transformations? What do ethical and meaningful futures for former spaces of incarceration look like? Topics could include: visual cultures of decarceration and demilitarization; documentary and fictional portrayals of the resistance to prisons, detention centres, or military sites; and artistic engagements with concepts of justice and safety beyond incarceration and borders.

Please submit your paper proposal here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter

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[11] Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access: Visibility, Agency, and Interpretation
From: Amanda Cachia
Date: Sep 30, 2026
From Nnena Kalu’s Turner Prize win to Design and Disability (Victoria & Albert) and Christine Sun Kim’s All Day All Night (Whitney Museum), the growing visibility of disabled artists within major exhibitions prompts critical attention to disability in art history and curatorial practice. Yet increased visibility also raises complex questions about agency and interpretation.

The session understands disability in expansive and inclusive terms, encompassing a wide range of lived experiences, including but not limited to physical, learning, sensory, neurodivergent, mental health, and chronic illness. Building on emerging scholarship, it approaches disability not as a marginal identity but as a critical cultural position. Rather than framing access as accommodation, participants consider access as an epistemological framework capable of transforming the infrastructures of art history, curatorial method, and artistic practice.

This session is inspired by the series Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access (Manchester University Press), co-edited by session co-chairs, foregrounding disability and access as vital frameworks to rethink the field. The session asks: when does a disability-centred lens expand artistic agency, and when might it risk overdetermining interpretation? As institutions increasingly foreground disability and access, how can the art world advocate for disabled artists while resisting interpretive frameworks that can be reductive? How might disability-centred approaches also generate practical and methodological solutions for transforming institutional structures, curatorial practices, and modes of interpretation?

The session seeks to hold such tensions productively open to consider how disability might function not simply as an inclusive category but as a generative force for rethinking agency, interpretation, and the conditions through which art becomes knowable. Through a combination of longer scholarly papers, shorter provocations, and co-produced or collaborative presentations, the session will bring together case studies and forward-looking approaches that explore how art history and curatorial practice might change.

We welcome co-produced papers foregrounding learning disabled voices and collaborative reflections. Contributions might address exhibitions, artists, collections, or institutional practices, while also proposing new methodologies, interpretive strategies, or models of access that can be adapted across the field.

Please submit your paper proposal here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter

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[12] The Modern Politics of Classical Architecture
From: Federico Marcomini, Faraz Olfat, Rebecca Yuste
Date: Oct 1, 2026
This panel explores how the classical language of architecture has been deployed to serve a wide range of political projects worldwide, from the late-nineteenth century to the present. The rise of nationalistic movements globally from Asia to Europe and North America has renewed attention to the political stakes of architectural form, illustrated by the political endorsement of classical architecture within the United States’ government. Dell Upton (2023) has argued that classical architecture, intended as a reference to the democratic values of Ancient Greece and Rome, ultimately embodied the ‘dominance of male elites, rulers, and whites generally.’ While long associated with republican ideals, democratic governance, and equality, it has equally been deployed to articulate imperial power, white supremacy, national ideology, and authoritarianism.

How does the same architectural vocabulary come to serve such divergent, even opposing, political projects? Contributors are invited to explore specific moments when classical architecture has been instrumentalised by the state, appropriated by political movements, or reinterpreted by architects and publics amid shifting political conditions. We seek papers emphasising the political plurality of classical architecture, complicating reductive readings of its meaning. Possible topics include classicism in imperial or postcolonial contexts; its role in revolutionary, nationalist, or authoritarian regimes; its application in democratic civic architecture; and its reception, critique, or rejection amid political transition. Papers may focus on buildings, monuments, professional discourse, or pedagogy.

To submit a paper proposal, please complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference-2027-exeter-aah-2027-call-for-papers/

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[13] Publishing Art History in the Age of AI: Editorial Ethics, Authorship, and the Future of Scholarly Communication
From: Jessica Braum
Date: Oct 1, 2026
The Journal for Digital Art History is pleased to solicit submissions for our session at the Association of Art History 2027 Annual Conference.

Publishing Art History in the Age of AI: Editorial Ethics, Authorship, and the Future of Scholarly Communication

Generative artificial intelligence is transforming every stage of art-historical research, from the analysis of artworks and archives to writing, exhibition-making, editorial practice, and publication. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into the production and dissemination of knowledge, it raises fundamental questions about authorship, interpretation, originality, transparency, and the evidentiary status of both texts and images. While many disciplines are establishing policies governing AI-assisted scholarship, art history remains at a moment of negotiation, where disciplinary expectations and editorial standards are still taking shape.

This session invites papers examining the editorial, ethical, and methodological challenges posed by AI through an art-historical lens. We welcome contributions that consider how AI is reshaping how art-historical knowledge is researched, interpreted, written, exhibited, reviewed, and published. Rather than approaching AI as either opportunity or threat, the session explores how these technologies are redefining scholarly practice while prompting renewed consideration of expertise, critical interpretation, visual evidence, and academic integrity.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– AI-assisted visual analysis and interpretation of artworks
– Computer vision, image recognition, and digital methodologies
– AI in archival research, cataloguing, and collections documentation
– Authorship, attribution, originality, and transparency
– Editorial practice, peer review, and scholarly publishing
– Copyright, intellectual property, and image rights
– AI-generated images and their relationship to visual evidence
– Museum interpretation and curatorial practice
– The future of scholarly communication in art history

Papers may address historical, theoretical, methodological, or practice-based perspectives and are welcome from scholars, curators, museum professionals, editors, publishers, librarians, artists, conservators, and digital humanities practitioners. Contributions grounded in case studies, exhibitions, digital projects, collections, or publishing initiatives are especially encouraged

Themes: Artificial Intelligence, Art History, Digital Humanities

Additional format comment: The session will consist of 15-minute paper presentations followed by five minutes of Q&A, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue about how AI is reshaping the production, interpretation, and communication of art-historical knowledge.ssion with a brief introduction by the convenors, four or five papers (each 20/15 minutes, depending on the number/quality of the proposals received), followed by a moderated discussion.

Co-convenors: Kaylee Alexander, The Journal for Digital Art History, USA

Francesca Albrezzi, The Platform for Digital Art History; UCLA, USA,

Gabriela Chitwood, International Journal for Digital Art History, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please find the CFP here: https://forarthistory.org.uk/77-publishing-art-history-in-the-age-of-ai-editorial-ethics-authorship-and-the-future-of-scholarly-communication/ and submit your paper proposal here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter

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[14] Beyond Imperial Gazes: Postcolonialisms across Post-Soviet Art Histories
From: Mira Kozhanova
Date: Oct 1, 2026
“Are You Postcolonial?” In 2005 Gayatri Spivak provocatively posed that question to teachers of “Slavic and Eastern European literatures.” Two decades later, the question feels as relevant as ever for anyone studying post-Soviet cultures of the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Europe, along with Indigenous and other non-hegemonic cultures within the Russian Federation. Shaped by various forms of imperial rule, these distinct geopolitical and transcultural formations have all experienced Russian and/or Soviet colonialism and cultural hegemony. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has lent new urgency to studying existing epistemological gaps and structural inequalities, prompting significant methodological interventions in the field of art history within the national context of Ukraine (Biedarieva 2025; Demchenko 2024; Denysova 2022). Yet, postcolonial approaches to art-historical narratives and methods are limited across other post-Soviet spaces (with important exceptions such as Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen 2016; Tlostanova 2018; Michalska and Zboralska, 2026) and remain particularly lacking in comparative and cross-cultural perspectives.

To understand the various historical conditions and current forms of postcolonialisms in post-Soviet art histories across the former Russian/Soviet regions, this panel invites contributions that engage with urgent methodological questions in comparative, regional, or local contexts, such as: What challenges arise from the differing histories of Russification? To what extent are decolonial, pluricentric, and horizontal art histories possible when various forms of epistemological violence, from Russocentrism to Eurocentrism and self-colonialism continue to shape knowledge production? We are especially keen to explore how imperial legacies persist in art historical narratives, for instance through the continued dominance of the Russian language, gatekeeping at key archives located in Russian metropolitan centres, as well as political repression, censorship, and safety concerns confronting scholars challenging Russian dominance.

Themes: Postcolonialism, post-Soviet, critical methodology

Lead Convenor: Adrienn Kácsor, The Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom
Co-convenors: Mira Kozhanova, University of Bamberg, Germany

Please submit your paper proposal here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirect=/stages/82494/submitter