
2025 Annual Conference
9–11 April 2025
University of York
The 2025 conference will be held in partnership with the History of Art department at the University of York, in their jubilee year.
The Association for Art History’s Annual Conference brings together international research and critical debate about art history and visual culture. A key annual event, the conference is an opportunity to keep up to date with new research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas.
The 2025 Annual Conference is open to all, members and non-members of the Association for Art History. Members of the Association get reduced conference rates, and concessionary tickets are also available.
Tickets for the Conference can be purchased here
Details on all Conference sessions are available below, and further information on the Conference Schedule can be found in the Programme at a Glance.
KEYNOTES
We are delighted to announce our three keynote speakers for 2025:
Wednesday 9 April: Museums and methodologies: how can exhibitions make art history?
Caroline Campbell, National Gallery of Ireland
Thursday 10 April: Case Notes: On Art History’s Medical Imaginarie
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University
Friday 11 April: Can Art History be Applied?
Joan Kee, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
For all Conference queries, please contact Conference2025@forarthistory.org.uk
Image: University of York; Campus West photo by Mark Woodward.
SESSIONS
Wednesday 9th April
- After Turner
- Architecture’s Unsung Institutions
- Art Histories of the Urban
- Art, Esotericism and the Ecological Imagination
- Attention in Pre-Modern Art and Visual Culture
- Being Present: Art, Work and Wellness
- Burning Matters: The Limits of the Image in a “World on Fire”
- Community and Activism in the Global South
- Contextual Temporalities: Time and space in museums, galleries and archives
- Expressing Divinity, Evoking Devotion: Interweaving Networks surrounding Chinese Buddhist Artifacts
- Museum Exhibitions and the Political Economy of Exchange
- Poles apart – reclaiming Polish lives and visual arts in British art history
- Resistance Through Absence: Strategies of deculturalization, separatism, refusal and withdrawal
- The CAyC network revisited: Archives, methodologies, and critical perspectives on Argentina’s Centre for Art and Communication
- The Infrastructural Turn? Alternative Infrastructural Imaginaries of/through art and curatorial practices
- The Politics of the Handmade: Textures, Feelings, and the Matter of Trans Art History
Thursday 10th April
- Art and Rights
- Art Histories of Experience
- Disruption and Progress: Reflecting on Digital Art Practice
- Elemental Thinking: New Approaches to Art and Landscape
- From Local to Global: Feminist Activism and Documentary Photography
- How was it made? How interdisciplinary collaborations in Material Culture Studies and Art History can unlock new avenues of knowledge
- Illuminating Shadows: The Contributions of Women in Chinese Art History
- More Than Words: Text as Visual Form in Artistic Practices
- Opulent Lives and the Trans Everyday (1880-1930)
- Places and Spaces: The Architectures of Art and Design Education
- Presencing absence: The media afterlife of lost objects
- Race was Elsewhere: The Politics of Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe
- Sensing, Perceiving, and Knowing in Modernism
- Social Science Frameworks for Looking at Art since 1960
- The Art of a Nation – British Culture on the Continent, 1625-1900
- The impact of past and present conflict on Middle Eastern art and art history
- The Visual Display of Art Historical Information
- The Work of Sculpture: Object Encounters within Art History and Everyday Life
- To Show One’s Hand: Effort in Practice and Reception
- Who makes fashion? Reframing the creative labour of fashion production
Friday 11th April
- Abstraction, Artisanal Knowledge and Craft Epistemologies
- Accessible Buildings, Inaccessible Artworks
- Art and Politics in the Early Cold War: The Americas and Beyond
- For a history of artists’ models
- Images of Disability
- Images through words: the ethics of “reading”
- Modernism’s Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in ‘East-Central Europe’, 1910–1930s
- More-than-human worlds on the move: reframing and exploring migration from a multispecies perspective in art
- Pre-Raphaelite Networks
- Queer Spaces in Art and Architecture
- Reading Letters in Paintings
- Reading the work of Griselda Pollock
- Reassessing Collage and Photo-collage: from Avant-gardes towards Artificial Intelligence
- Regionalist and other decolonising perspectives: Honouring T.K. Sabapathy’s ideas and lifework
- The Artist as Art Historian
- The “Misunderstood Artist”: Artistic Explorations of a not yet Obsolete Trope
- The Multimedial Early Modern Workshop
- Visualising Human-Animal Relations: Animals in Visual and Material Culture 1750-1900
- What is Architectural Sceonography?
- Who Owns Antiquities?