26th September 2025
Art histories of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque have all witnessed a global turn in recent decades. This full-day session seeks to bring together case studies from a wide variety of geographies and time periods to investigate... Read More...26th September 2025
Bringing together scholars across geographic subfields, this panel seeks to develop more expansive histories and methodologies for abstract art, centred on the intersections between abstraction, nationalism, colonialism, and coloniality. Focused particularly on the formative decades of the practice’s “invention,” we... Read More...26th September 2025
Text has become a familiar presence in contemporary art, in various media and forms, yet its function often goes under-discussed. Historical frameworks, including modern and pre-modern art, offer important references, and can help to understand the complexity of how language... Read More...26th September 2025
Temporal dynamics of rise and decline are key drivers in the art world as a marketplace, and they often impact on art production, too. In his 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, Walter Benjamin agreed with Fuchs’ critique that... Read More...26th September 2025
In the vibrant field of Middle Period art history, the study of cultures across Northeast Asia, the region from the Korean peninsula to the edges of the Taklamakan desert, is beginning to stand out. In this area Kitan/Liao, Tangut/Xia, Jurchen/Jin,... Read More...26th September 2025
From the revival of ikat weaving as a national brand in Uzbekistan to the appropriation of embroidered folk costumes by extremist politicians in Eastern Europe, traditional textiles are often employed as effective visual representations of national identity. Premised on claims... Read More...26th September 2025
The academic study of esotericism is undergoing a phase of expansion and diversification, and its intersections with art are awakening wider interest. However, many efforts remain superficial, such as attempts to incorporate Hilma af Klint into the canon of abstract... Read More...26th September 2025
Across the histories of photography, film, and media art, moments of failure—whether mechanical, optical, chemical, or digital—have played a generative role in shaping aesthetic experimentation and critical inquiry. Blurred exposures, light leaks, scratched film stock, corrupted files, or distorted video... Read More...26th September 2025
For centuries, the territories of the eastern Mediterranean were home to the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse communities that comprised the Ottoman Empire. These territories simultaneously served as travel destinations for artists, antiquarians, and archaeologists seeking out the region’s ancient... Read More...26th September 2025
Natural history specimens—such as fossils, preserved plants, or taxidermy—serve as tangible evidence of past life while also inspiring the imagination to revive what is irrecoverably lost. Similarly, natural history art works to blend science and creativity. Historian of science Martin... Read More...26th September 2025
Women art collectors have frequently been overshadowed by their husbands or fathers, with their contributions relegated to a lesser-known aspect of a shared familial pursuit. The proposed session seeks to transcend mere acknowledgement of female contributions to the history of... Read More...26th September 2025
This session invites contributions that critically engage the enduring impacts of British colonialism on cultural heritage in South Asia and its diasporas, with a specific focus on how creative practice - particularly performance and other embodied or participatory forms -... Read More...26th September 2025
Sponsored by the Italian Art Society This session invites papers that consider the work of eighteenth-century Italian artists and artists living in Italy, in the context of newly available trans-cultural influences and sources of visual and material culture. As curiosity... Read More...26th September 2025
This panel explores eco-art-historical analysis to re-evaluate received knowledge about the place of plant lives in painting in Asia. Moving away from the art historical tradition of reading ‘iconographically’ into plants in paintings, we turn attention to the acknowledgment that... Read More...26th September 2025
Ranging from earthenware ceramics to mahogany furniture, textiles, metalwork, oil paintings, architecture, maps, and prints -- the material world of the early modern British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Afro- Caribbean (c.1600-1830) was richly layered, dynamic, and vast. Many of these... Read More...26th September 2025
Today, artistic identity is central to many of the most active avenues of inquiry. In many ways, signatures are the gateway to those inquiries. Some recently unearthed signatures have shifted attributions to women and under-studied minority artists. This has enabled... Read More...26th September 2025
This session will consider the complex engagements between art, illness, and abstraction. Visual culture has been a catalytic force in the anxieties and obsessions elicited by novel illnesses, from the emergence of HIV to the rapid spread of Covid-19 and... Read More...26th September 2025
The AAH's dedicated resource portal on antiracism and decolonial approaches, established in 2020 during the global pandemic in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, represents a key milestone in our collective efforts. Formed by Higher Education Committee (HEC) members... Read More...26th September 2025
Technologies falling under the umbrella term ‘artificial intelligence’ have been embraced and critiqued by art practitioners and cultural institutions around the world. This session explores the potential uses and risks of incorporating AI into the curation of art exhibitions. The... Read More...26th September 2025
Papers are invited to explore curating as a symbiotic coproduction of research and discursive convenings with knowledge sharing outputs that include exhibitions, Researcher and Artist Residencies, Public Events, and Academic Partnerships, Affiliated Teaching posts, and more, with a focus on... Read More...Copyright 2026. All Rights Reserved