29th January 2026
This panel explores how transregional cultural exchanges between the Arab world and the former Eastern Bloc shaped artistic and creative practices during the Global Cold War. The transregional encounters of artists, architects, curators, and archaeologists ensured the transfer of ideas... Read More...29th January 2026
Famed for their techniques, materials, processes of making, and the symbolism they evoke, textiles from South Asia have amassed significant connoisseurship owing to their value, collectability, and desirability. Textiles from the region are often couched within circuits of trade and... Read More...29th January 2026
In the late 20th century, museum spaces underwent significant changes as a result of the United States’ Rehabilitation Act of 1954, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. These laws sought to combat discrimination... Read More...29th January 2026
Scientific and technical inquiry has transformed the way we see artworks and has helped challenge established narratives of authorship, dating, and studio practice. Yet these studies too often unfold in disciplinary silos: scientists generate data without sufficient (art)-historical framing, while... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel seeks to explore the fragment broadly construed as both a physical entity and a methodological approach. In the discipline of art history, the fragment calls to mind ancient marble bodies, like the Belvedere Torso, and the ways in... Read More...29th January 2026
Reforms, revivals and returns in the visual arts have taken many avenues and have had many departure and end points. By seeking an alternative path, they often promised a distinctive departure from the powers of capitalism. For instance, calls for... Read More...29th January 2026
In recent decades, scholars have increasingly challenged the dominance of canonical centres in art historical narratives. Yet the frameworks of centre and periphery continue to shape how local art histories are researched, written and valued. Too often, studies of regional... Read More...29th January 2026
This session explores intermedia practices in art, where “the life of the (moving) image,” as Ethel-Ruth Tawe (2025) notes, follows the movement of people and communities, forced or otherwise. It draws on postcolonial and decolonial theory to interrogate the displacement... Read More...29th January 2026
The relationship between pictures and images – not only the retinal images processed in visual perception but also the mental images of memories, dreams and visualisations – has been an object of scientific investigation since the late nineteenth century, and... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel invites analysis of the histories of British Surrealism between its arrival on British shores as marked by the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London and its recent mapping on the national and international stage in centenary exhibitions of... Read More...29th January 2026
In 2008, the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski published “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” critiquing the marginalization of modern east-central Europe in art history. Since then, international scholarship on the art of, for example, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland... Read More...29th January 2026
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...29th January 2026
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 objects... Read More...29th January 2026
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...29th January 2026
Since its invention, photography has undergone continual redefinition, reshaping what we understand the medium to be—technologically, materially, and conceptually. As photography evolves, artists and others frequently return to early photographic technologies and image practices. This session explores how 19th-century photography... Read More...29th January 2026
This session invites presentations on contemporary visual art and recent art histories (post-1960) that revise and iterate upon proto-feminism. It asks: how might we extend and revise the term ‘proto-feminism’ beyond its conventional grounding in literary and art historical discourse... Read More...29th January 2026
Discourses of nature and culture were central to German society and formulations of national identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was fuelled by the rise of the Lebensreform movement and the popularity of homoeopathy, the embrace... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel examines the pivotal role played by an unexpected figure in the lives of artists: the domestic servant. Most artists employed domestic help: they belonged to the higher classes or to the bourgeoisie, for whom having domestic servants was... Read More...29th January 2026
For over a century, the “death of art” has been repeatedly anticipated. From the invention of photography in the late 19th century to the rise of mass printing, digital illustration, NFTs, and now artificial intelligence, each wave of technological innovation... Read More...29th January 2026
How can art history respond to the heat of the present? Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot (2025) proposes temperature as a conceptual framework for understanding art’s entanglement in planetary-scale crises, infrastructures and networks. Rather than stable categories or binaries (hot/cold, digital/analogue,... Read More...Copyright 2026. All Rights Reserved