The Epic as Form in Modern and Contemporary Art

This panel addresses the critical and conceptual potential of the epic as form in modern and contemporary art practices. At a time of converging and interconnected crises – climate, fascist, humanitarian – this panel asks how – and why – modern and contemporary artists rethink the geographies, temporalities, and scales of the epic. Can the form of the epic make possible artistic projects that confront the past, reconfigure the present, or imagine possible futures? What kind of affect and public address does the epic enable?

From Homer’s The Odyssey to Derek Walcott’s Omeros (a postcolonial Caribbean reimagining of the former), epics are commonly structured as non-linear, episodic, and polyvocal narratives. They can be written, recited, or reenacted. They may grapple with themes of heroism, migration and displacement, home and community, history and memory, in miniature or monumental scale. Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, Shahzia Sikander’s The Scroll, Hew Locke’s The Procession, Kent Monkman’s mistikôwsiwak (Wooden Boat People), or Athi-Patra Ruga’s Future White Women of Azania are but a few examples of projects operating with the epic in mind.

We encourage interdisciplinary papers that engage with artistic practices across media and geographies, particularly from Global South and diasporic contexts.

Proposals are invited to consider specific topics in relation to the epic such as allegory, narrative, intermediality, seriality, temporality, fragmentation, iteration, the speculative, futurity, polyvocality, and antiphony.

Elizabeth Harney will be the respondent to four papers, with a panel discussion to follow. We request that accepted papers are submitted to the respondent in advance.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Elizabeth Harney, University of Toronto, e.harney@utoronto.ca

Ashley K. Raghubir, University of Toronto, ashley.raghubir@mail.utoronto.ca