AAH 2027 Call for Papers
University of Exeter, 7-9 April 2027
Call for Papers deadline: 23:59 UK, Sunday, 25 October 2026
The 2027 Annual Conference is open to all, members and non-members of the Association for Art History. Anyone can submit a Paper. Please note that speakers, session convenors and delegates must pay to attend. Registration details will be announced in December.
We’ve had an unprecedented number of excellent Session proposals.
A complete list of Sessions to which to submit a Paper can be found below and downloaded here, together with information on how to submit a Paper directly to the Session Convenor(s) of your chosen Session. Papers will be shared with the relevant Session Convenor(s) after the deadline and via our new abstract management platform, Oxford Abstracts.
Form and information
Please complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form by 23:59 UK, Sunday, 25 October 2026.
This year we are using an abstract management platform system; Oxford Abstracts so please bear with us as we navigate the platform for the first time. In previous years, the Convenor(s)’ email addresses were listed against each Session, this year the email addresses are not provided in the public domain, you will need to remember the title and number of the session you wish to submit a paper to and select this from the “Session Name” dropdown list when submitting the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form. After the Call for Papers deadline, your Convenor(s) will be sent your Paper for review and will get in touch with you via the contact details you provided in the form with their decision either via email or the platform directly.
How to set out your abstract
Please include this key information in your paper proposal response:
- Select title of the Session responding to
- Title of Abstract (avoid long titles, max 20 words)
- Brief abstract (max 250 words)
- Name of submitter (author) – please note their must be at least one presenting author per submission (there is a small tick box in the author information section).
- Affiliations (or if independent/freelance)
- Residing Country of submitter
- Telephone number of submitter
- Social media handles of speakers and affiliated departments:
- Any additional assistance required for participating as a speaker at the conference
Guidelines
Proposals are reviewed and received by our Session Convenors after the Call for Papers deadline.
Paper formats
The majority of our Sessions are made up of between three and eight 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions. The minimum number of papers per session is three, and eight is the maximum number of papers per session. Sessions run for a half or full day only.
Please read the Session description and format (if applicable) carefully before submitting a Paper proposal to the Session. A Session may include a mix of formats – e.g. 3 papers followed by a facilitated debate, and this will be clearly described in the Session description.
Tickets and funding
Please note that convenors only convene one session and speakers must only speak in one session.
Convenors and speakers are required to purchase conference tickets. Tickets will be available via our registration platform in December 2026.
Early-bird tickets will be available until 6 February 2027 as well as a limited number of bursaries for doctoral and early-career researchers. Speakers may also apply for an AAH grant to help cover costs of attending. Please note we are reviewing our grant scheme in the Autumn.
How to set out your abstract
Please see our Guidelines for Writing a Paper Abstract, and set out your abstract as per the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form. Please use clear, straight forward language, avoiding jargon and acronyms. and ensure that your abstract accurately reflects the content of your Paper.
Submit your proposals via the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form by 23:59 UK, Sunday, 25 October 2026.
Any questions, please contact conference2027@forarthistory.org.uk
Sessions:
1. A little ‘artistic’: The politics and ethics of outing in cultural history (Full day)
2. Adriatic Encounters: artistic exchanges via the Adriatic Sea, c.1200-c.1700
4. African Modernism and Alternative Systems of Mediation and Valuation
5. Along the Ecological Grain: Art and Empire in Southeast Asia
6. Animal Voices, Art History, and More-than-Human Aesthetics: Listening Beyond the Human
7. Archiving Loss: Reconstruction, Simulation, and Historical Value
8. Art and the Altered Earth: Landscape Practices in a Changing Climate (Full day)
9. Art History and Its Published Objects
10. Art in the Age of Air-Travel
11. Art Institutions Under Pressure: How Funding Structures Shape Exhibition Programmes
12. Art, its History and (No) Working Class? (Full day)
13. Art, Synthetics, and the Global Majority
15. Artist-in-Residence Programmes in Academic Settings
16. Artists’ Archives and the making of Art History in the Global South
18. Ascesis as performance – from antiquity to the present
19. Before Moody: Black Artists and British Art History Before 1923
21. Beyond Binaries: Navigating Ambivalence in Abstraction
22. Beyond Imperial Gazes: Postcolonialisms across Post-Soviet Art Histories
23. Beyond the Hand: Re-considering Authorship through Disability
24. Bodies, Ecologies, Networks: Reclaiming Agency in the Technoscientific Complex
25. Call for a New Pre-Raphaelite Studies
26. Cast and Impression: Sculpture and Print in Dialogue
27. Colonizing Decolonization: The Invention of Indigenous Contemporary Art
28. Creative Misreading: Dada, Proto-Dada, and Global Artistic Reinvention
29. Critical fortunes of the catalogue raisonné
30. Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access: Visibility, Agency, and Interpretation (Full day)
31. Curating as an Act of Translation
32. De-Erasing Connections between Kyivan Rus’ and the Rest of Medieval Europe
33. Decolonising Art History: Methods, Practices and Epistemologies (Full day)
34. Decolonising Lace: Histories, Materials, Motifs and Making
35. Documenting Fashion Otherwise: Archives, Absence, and the Politics of Evidence
36. Early Modern Interiors: Aesthetic practices, Representation and Sensorial Experience
37. Embodied Practices for Decolonisation: Research, Education, and Display
40. Falling from Suspension: Chiaroscuro and the Unstable Body in Early Modern Images
41. Feminist and Queer Reception of Classical Greco-Roman Corporeality
42. Feminist Art Histories Out of London (Full day)
43. Femme as Method: Reimagining Feminine Aesthetics in Contemporary Art
44. Fluid Bodies / Women in Flux
45. From Atelier to Artist Residency: Care, Access, and Exclusion
46. Gender, Faith, and Artistic Patronage in Japanese Buddhism and the Ottoman Empire
47. Gifts to the Sacred: Portable Objects and Material Patronage Across Religious Traditions
48. Global Histories of Lithography
49. Global Modernism and the Hydrocarbon Economy: Pipelines, Tankers and Artistic Imaginaries
50. How Does Art Register Ecological Change? Rethinking Stability in the History of Representation
51. Hybrid Bodies in Early Modern Art
52. Immersive Realism and its Audiences in the Nineteenth Century
53. In the Viewer’s World: Images as Indices to Phenomenological Experience
55. Invasives at Home: Plants, Borders & Belonging in Contemporary Art
56. (In)visible Hands and City-Making: Art Education, Labour, and Modernities in the Global South
58. Making Exhibitions: Institutions, Networks and Exhibition Practices in Europe, 1850–1914
59. Many Middle Ages: Exhibitions of Medieval Art in Perspective
60. Marginal Art-histories of Safavid Isfahan
61. Material Culture and the Anglo-Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1700
62. Material Matters: Reshaping the Country House, 1650–1850
63. Materiam superbat opus:’ playing with material limitations in the medieval world, c.1100-1500
64. Maternity in Feminist Art Practices
68. Old Women: Representations, Resistances, Reasonings.
69. Performance Art and Digital Cultures
70. Political Violence and the Limits of Representation
71. Port Cities in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Full day)
72. Positionality of Art History in time of Conflict in Myanmar
73. Practice as research: intersectional methods responding to art history and collections
74. Prophetic Temporalities: Visualising Futures in Southeast Asia
75. Provincialising Art History: Rethinking Art Historiography in the Postcolonial World
76. Public Art in Transformation: Mediation, Materiality and Value
78. Reconstituting the Histories of Modern Art: Exhibitions, Infrastructure, and Historiography
79. Representations of Old Age and the Elderly in Art
80. Sanctuary as Practice: Art, Social Activism, and the Architecture of Conscience
81. Sculptural Guts: Statues and their Insides
82. Sea Creatures in Art History
84. Sights of Abolition: Art Against Borders, Militarism, and Incarceration
85. Slow Sculpture: Materials, Methods, and Making
86. Strange Days: Surrealism and Psychoanalysis in the 1960s
87. The Album as Archive – photography, materiality and colonialism.
88. The Art of Hosting: Creative labour, artmaking, and social networks
89. The Exhibition as Embassy: Art, Mobility, and Media between the Arab and the Socialist World
91. The Genre of Funerary Sculpture: Continuity and Modernity in the 18th and 19th Centuries
92. The Labour of Participation: Socially Engaged Practice, Publics and Institutional Responsibility
93. The Medical Nude in the Long Nineteenth Century
94. The Medium is the Method: Critical Digital Art History
96. The Modern Politics of Classical Architecture (Full day)
97. The Once and Future Rebellion: Echoes of the 1857 Indian Uprising
98. The postdigital book(work): surveying contemporary artists’ publishing
99. The surge in white supremacy: upholding racial justice in art and design history
100. The Territorial Trap—When “Being Local” Becomes a New Essentialism in Southeast Asian Art
101. Theorizing Photography from Global South Asia
102. Ugliness in the Archive: Art Historical Approaches to Racialised Imagery (Full day)
103. Up North! Provincializing British Art History in the 1980s (Full day)
104. Video Art and Moving Image in the former socialist world, c. 1968-present
105. Visual Arts in Translation
106 .What Can Minor Materialities Do to the Histories of Contemporary Art?
107. What Fun!: Play, Participation, and Joy across Transnational Intermedia Networks
108. When Did the Contemporary Begin? Thailand, Southeast Asia, and the Problem of Periodisation
109. When the Image Fails: Understanding Ephemeral Manifestations in Premodern Indian Deities.
110. Who Gets Collected? Corporate Collections and Gendered Exclusion in Art History
112. Writing the History of Conservation: Expertise and the Care of Asian Objects, 1800s–1950s
Please keep an eye on our website for further updates on the conference.
Any questions, please contact: conference2027@forarthistory.org.uk
Photograph credit: Case Eames