2026 Programme At A Glance
Wednesday 8 April
All Day
08.30-onwards: Registration
10.00-17.30: Bookfair
10.00-12.00: Morning Sessions
- AI and the Artworld: Art History and the Generative Imagination
- Always Connect? Relational Paradigms in Art History
- Art History: Facts and Fiction?
- Art Writing: Beyond the Crisis?
- Beyond Barbie: Queer, Crip, Feminist and Anti-Racist Approaches to Pink
- Carrying Across: Translation as Material Practice in the Pre-/Early Modern World
- Decolonising Art History – Continuing the Conversation (pt.1)
- Eighteenth-Century Italian Art and Artists in Global Contexts
- Empire, Art, and Nature: Specimens and their Proxies
- Esotericism, Creativity, and Artistic Practice
- Facing the Mongol Empire: The Role of Art History (pt.1)
- Gender and South Asian Visual Cultures in the Twentieth Century
- Jews and Heritage in Twentieth-Century Britain: Collections, Aesthetics, Narratives
- Local Studies (pt.1)
- Questioning the Illusion/Materiality Polemics in a Transcultural Art History
- Reimagining the fragment
- Rethinking History in Modernism
- Sound, Vision, and the Spatial Imagination
- Uncovering the Victorian Art-Workman (session in the morning and visits to David Parr house in the afternoon)
- Where Photography Happened: Sites of Photographic Experimentation and Pedagogy, 1950–1980
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-15.00: Afternoon Sessions
- Art History Warmed up?
- Art is Dead: Long Live the Artist – Creativity in the Times of AI
- At the Service of Art: Domestic Servants and Their Artists
- Concepts of Nature in German Art at the Intersection of Colonialism, Lebensreform, and Evolutionary Theory
- Contemporary Proto-Feminisms: Reclaiming Historical Femininity in Practice and Criticism
- Critique, Homage, Iconoclasm? The reuse of 19th-Century Photography in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture
- Decolonising Art History – Continuing the Conversation (pt.2)
- Early Modern Caribbean Material Culture, c.1600-1830
- Facing the Mongol Empire: The Role of Art History (pt 2.)
- Horizontal Art History in Global Context: East Central Europe in the Present
- How British is British Surrealism, 1936-2026?
- Images and Pictures
- Intermedia Dialogues in Art and Architecture
- Local Studies (pt 2.)
- Reforms, revivals and returns revisited
- Reimagining the fragment
- Rethinking History in Modernism
- Technical Art History: Integrating Art History with Scientific Inquiry
- The History of Museum Access
- Visual Art and South Asian Textiles
15:00-15:30: Break
15.30-17.00: Workshops, Tours and Events
17.15-18.45: Keynote Speeches
19.30-21.00: Drinks Reception
Thursday 9 April
All Day
08.30-onwards: Registration
10.00-17.30: Bookfair
10.00-12.00: Morning Sessions
- A Call to Action: Transnational Artistic Solidarities and Decolonial Alliances, 1960s–1970s (pt.1)
- AI in the Art History Classroom (pt.1)
- Archive as Method: Rewriting the Self in East Asian Art Practices
- Blue Aesthetics: Art and Aquatic Life
- Confounding Images: Frustration as Art Historical Method
- Connecting Ecocritical Art Histories within the Discipline(s) (pt.1)
- Curating with AI: Risks and Opportunities
- Errors, Glitches, Blurs: The Art of Failure
- Feminism in the Art Institution
- Feminism, Art, and Politics: Critical Engagements with Heresies (1977-1993)
- How to Research Tapestries
- Materiality of the Unseen in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Reassessing Heroism in Medieval Art
- The Contemporary Turn in Historical Collections: Postcolonial Geographies
- The Proclivities of Pleasure in Early Modern Art
- This Must Be The Place: Beyond local/global binaries in ecocritical art history
- Trans (In)visibility in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Cultures
- Transcultural Abstraction, Colonial Histories
- Transcultural Mobilities: People, Artifacts, Materials, 1300-1750
- Unstable Monuments. Nation, States, Spaces, and Conflicts in Public Sculpture, 1811-1947
12.00-13.00: Lunch
13.00-15.00: Afternoon Sessions
- A Call to Action: Transnational Artistic Solidarities and Decolonial Alliances, 1960s–1970s (pt.2)
- AI in the Art History Classroom (pt.2)
- Animal Representation in the Global Middle Ages: Bridging the Natural and Social Worlds
- British Art, Incorporated
- Connecting Ecocritical Art Histories beyond Academia (pt.2)
- Curating as Pedagogy
- Eco-art-histories: Plants and Paintings in the Arts of Asia
- Embracing the World: East European Women Art Collectors as Social Influencers (19th-21st Century)
- Every Fiber of Our Being: Textile Traditions, Ethnonationalism, and Exclusion
- Irish Women Artists and their International Networks, 1870 – Present
- Laughing From all Our Mouths
- Looking to Learn: The Power of Observation
- Mapping Human and Non-Human Migration in Contemporary Art
- Premodern Portraits: New Approaches to Identity and Patronage
- Private Collecting into Public Collection
- Re-contextualising Steles: Media, Memory, and Materiality
- Situated Feminisms: Rethinking Art, Gender, and History in China
- The essay-film, then and now
- Transcultural Mobilities: People, Artifacts, Materials, 1300-1750
- Victorian Art after Trans Studies
15:00-15:30: Break
15.30-17.00: Workshops, Tours and Events
17.15-18.45: Keynote Speeches
19.30-21.00: Drinks Reception
Friday 10 April
09.00-16.30: Registration
10.00-14.30: Bookfair
10.00-12.00: Morning Sessions
- Archiving the Women Artist: Historiographic Negotiations in the Global South
- Artistic Exchanges during the Global Cold War: Eastern Bloc, Northern Africa and West Asia
- Britishness, Empire & the Picturesque
- Chinatowns in Global Imagination
- Co-creation: Human and non-human making processes and their environmental entanglements
- Creative Resistance: Responding to Protracted Violence Through Art
- Early Modern Artists’ Signatures
- Fashionability and the Art Market
- Feminist Art History Now (pt.1)
- Indigenous Subversions: Counter/Retrocolonization in Artistic Practice
- Islands in Relation: Art, Memory, and Environment
- Landscapes of Extraction: Colonial and Industrial Histories of British Landscapes, 1700-1900 (pt.1)
- Patterning Worlds: Non-Figurative Art in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- Print in the Expanded Field
- Prototypes: Artist Information Strategies
- Reimagining the Posthuman Body in the Digital Age
- The Internationalisation of Spanish and Latin American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century
- This was Tomorrow: Reframing Pop
- Transparent Flesh: Reimagining the Medical Image in Contemporary Art
- Word Acts: Text in Visual Art at the Intersection of Histories and Geographies
12.00-13.30: Keynote Speeches
13.30-14.30: Lunch & Refreshments
14.30-16.30: Afternoon Sessions:
- Africa, Art History, and the (University) Museum: approaches to object-led teaching and display
- Aqueous Worlds: Art, Fluidity and Empire c.1600-1900
- Art, Activism, and Power in the Contemporary Post-Soviet Space
- Book-objects: Bookness and artmaking
- Dis-ease: Art, Illness, and Abstraction
- Embodied Histories, Dislocated Objects: Creative Practice and the Legacies of Empire in South Asia and its Diasporas
- Environmental Approaches to the Eastern Mediterranean Landscape
- Feminist Art History Now (pt. 2)
- Jungle Ruins and Sacred Forests: Ecologies of the Forgotten Monument
- Landscapes of Extraction: Colonial and Industrial Histories of British Landscapes, 1700-1900 (pt 2.)
- Narrative Plasterwork in the Early Modern World
- Performing Otherness in Contemporary Art
- Recentering Central Asia in Postwar Art Exchange
- Reclaiming Craft: Decolonial Perspectives on Heritage and Innovation in the Islamic World
- South American Biennials: Dispositifs of Resistance and Diplomacy
- The Epic as Form in Modern and Contemporary Art
- The Product Worlds of Art
- Wildfires in Contemporary Art: New Directions for Eco-Aesthetics
- Women in printing before 1800
16.30: Conference ends
(Programme subject to change)