15th December 2022
This session concentrates on modern and contemporary art’s enchantment with magic and esoteric themes. It does so at a moment when a presumed turn towards the numinous is recorded in various aspects of culture, which coalesces with philosophical re-evaluations of... Read More...15th December 2022
Against a backdrop of rapid industrialisation, the Romantic movement that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth-century upheld the fantastical possibilities of the imagination against the hard-edged reason of scientific empiricism, decried the wanton destruction of the natural world, and... Read More...15th December 2022
The ubiquity of sexual violence at times of military conflict has been recognised in a range of geopolitical contexts. Historically, the principal targets of wartime rape have been women and girls, nevertheless, victims can include men and boys or those... Read More...15th December 2022
Art history is, most often, a history of beginnings. Its art historical chronologies invoke a history of firsts: first artists, first artworks, first movements. Classification and periodization often accord with an artist’s life, and acts of initiation and points of... Read More...15th December 2022
Confronted with the televised spectacle of Operation Desert Storm during the American war in Iraq in the early 1990s, Hal Foster described experiencing “a thrill of technomastery.” For the art historian, footage drawn from cameras mounted on missiles and new... Read More...15th December 2022
For The Milk of Dreams (Venice Biennale 2022), curator Cecilia Alemani posed a series of questions about the nature of humanity and ensuing future responsibilities, asking ‘what would life look like without us?’ For the British Art Show 9 2021/22,... Read More...15th December 2022
This session will discuss the benefits and advantages (or disadvantages) modern technology can bring to the field of medieval studies. Digital technologies have created new methodologies for the humanities. With the help of three-dimensional scanning, for example, researchers can “visit”... Read More...15th December 2022
In Imperial Russia, as well as during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, artists from across the empire (and later, the U.S.S.R.) were claimed by centralising state cultural policy as “Russian” with little or no acknowledgment of regional specificity. Yet many... Read More...15th December 2022
From engravings capturing scenes of war and destruction, to posters campaigning for socio-political causes, or even copper plates exchanged between families to settle financial disagreements, this session seeks to explore the full range of scenarios in which the themes of... Read More...15th December 2022
As a political concept, ‘populism’ gained traction over the 2010s to describe governments that reject pluralism and exclude among ethnic, religious and political lines. Yet this discussion has far deeper roots within philosophical debate. Several theorists have offered alternative understandings... Read More...15th December 2022
Instructional forms function surreptitiously, as actors that help determine subjectivity. Yet we rarely think about how ordinary classroom tools actually circumscribe the ideas and practices that come across to students, let alone how these tools convey ideologies or inscribe power... Read More...15th December 2022
This session explores how early modern water enabled and resisted the circulation of objects, makers, and ideas. Recent work across the humanities has highlighted the role of water and, in particular, the sea in history. So-called blue humanities are foregrounding... Read More...15th December 2022
Animal Drag is a proposition for art and design that consciously and critically engages with or performs aspects of nonhuman animals. For example, when the feminist artists and activists, the Guerrilla Girls, adorn their gorilla masks in order to retain their... Read More...15th December 2022
Recently, artists born in Tanzania or with a Tanzanian affiliation have been gaining new levels of recognition in international exhibitions, heritage initiatives and art historical discourse. This includes practitioners from different generations who use diverse visual media, some of whom... Read More...15th December 2022
This panel invited contributions about the different scales —spatial, historical, social —at which landscape representation operated between 1750 and 1900. Natural historical thought in this period transited between, on the one hand, the minute and the infinitely small, and on... Read More...15th December 2022
Since the start of the twenty-first century, there has been a resurgence of interest in participatory textile processes (Shercliff and Holroyd 2020). Needlework groups are emerging as knots in a supranational art movement. A 'textiles turn' has occurred that... Read More...15th December 2022
At the outset of the 1970s, the onset of a global economic downturn, breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and rise of nationalisms among oil-producing Arab states, among other factors, produced a series of crises in... Read More...15th December 2022
Art has often been employed as a means to question (or conversely normalise) latent power relationships in society and to consider how difference is socially constructed. Artists who work from a position of gendered identities in particular have grappled with... Read More...15th December 2022
Unlike the southern portion of its sister borough to the south (Downtown Manhattan), the art and cultural production both created in and associated with New York City’s northern most municipality has gone largely unremarked upon in scholarly discourse. While there... Read More...15th December 2022
History of art and its categories, as a European framing, are being questioned by its insufficiency in addressing works based on distinct traditions and cosmogonies. When it comes to contemporary art production in the global south, history of art is... Read More...Copyright 2026. All Rights Reserved