29th January 2026
This session seeks to provoke new questions about postwar photographic history by foregrounding the overlooked and decentralised spaces where photography was taught, made, theorised, and exhibited globally. What happens when we shift our gaze away from familiar narratives centred on... Read More...29th January 2026
A neglected figure, the Victorian ‘art-workman’ worked largely in a trade context, often as part of a firm supplying skills to leading designers. Hidden within the aesthetic, classed and structural hierarchies of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the art-workman is... Read More...29th January 2026
From the resonant acoustics of sacred spaces to the immersive soundscapes of film and digital art, art, architecture and visual culture can connect with, challenge, support or subvert the sonic dimensions of space and experience. Drawing inspiration from scholars such... Read More...29th January 2026
It is a cliché in modernist studies that modernism marked the end of history painting. Theatrical gesture, heroism, and the rendering of the past as legible spectacle were, to quote one authority, ‘displaced, if not deconstructed, by modernism in the... Read More...29th January 2026
It is a cliché in modernist studies that modernism marked the end of history painting. Theatrical gesture, heroism, and the rendering of the past as legible spectacle were, to quote one authority, ‘displaced, if not deconstructed, by modernism in the... 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
Ever since the establishment of the perspectival system in Western art, pictorial illusion has been pitted against materiality. Seminal works such as Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form and Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ have helped to solidify this... 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 panel will interrogate the complex impact of Jews upon the making of national heritage in early twentieth-century Britain (c.1880–1950). It will reflect on how different members of this minority group simultaneously enriched national collections whilst also fostering organisations devoted... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel aims to explore the relationships between women and visual culture in twentieth century South Asia, challenging the oppressive structures that inform postcolonial subjectivities and engaging with practices that inaugurate new visual grammars. Scholarship on visual cultures of South... 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
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...29th January 2026
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 imagery works to blend science and creativity. Historian of science Martin... Read More...29th January 2026
Sponsored by the Italian Art Society This session considers 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 about the wider... 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
This session explores how portable things, such as reliquaries, textiles, books, and tools, are objects of translation. A coconut shell from Ceylon, joined to a Fatimid rock-crystal ewer and refashioned as a Christian reliquary in thirteenth-century Münster, invites us to... Read More...29th January 2026
In the widely declared Year of Pink, thanks to the release of Barbie (2023), Pope.L expanded his iterative performance Eating the Wall Street Journal into Hospital at South London Gallery, an installation of ruined interiors with broken wooden towers, fragments... Read More...29th January 2026
At a time when the discipline of art history is seeking ever greater diversity in both subject matter and practitioners, this same diversity has not penetrated to the level of art writing. As Brad Haylock and Megan Patty (2021), James... Read More...29th January 2026
This panel explores a neglected tradition in art history: the strategic use of fictional elements in art historical writing. It examines the scope of this underexplored practice, considering its benefits, challenges, and intellectual legacies in art history, visual culture, and... Read More...29th January 2026
Art history draws on a host of relational paradigms, from ecologies and networks to systems and webs, to frame its analyses of artistic production, circulation, and reception. Recent studies illuminate, for instance, how artworks have been embedded in systems of... Read More...Copyright 2026. All Rights Reserved