Art History Within the Environmental Humanities: Exploring Liminal Spaces Between Land and Sea
Call for Papers – Session at the 6th Swiss Congress for Art History – University of Geneva – 7-9 September 2026
Deadline for proposals: 12 September 2025
Session conveners: Juliette Bessette, Desmond-Bryan Kraege, Maria Stavrinaki (University of Lausanne)
What can art history contribute to the field of environmental humanities? In other words, what specific insights do art historical methods offer into the past and present relationships between human beings and their environment? Within the European academic context, environmental art history has been slowly emerging in recent years, striking a balance between the well-established fields of environmental history and literary ecocriticism. Yet the visual and spatial arts constitute one of the major nodal points in societies’ relation to their environment, providing a privileged area of inquiry for these methods: art history can offer impactful understandings of these relationships, particularly when combined with the life and earth sciences.
This session aims to investigate potential theoretical frameworks for an environmental art history, examining the aforementioned questions through the case of land-sea interfaces, liminal areas that mediate the most significant environmental division on our planet, opposing liquid worlds to the dry land we inhabit. While these intermediate zones have rarely been conceptualized as a field of research within art history, artists
– including architects and landscape designers – have frequently engaged with their extremely varied landscapes and ecosystems, which encompass cliffs, beaches, estuaries, lagoons, tidal marshes, intertidal zones, and islands. Besides representational issues (including art’s interactions with scientific imagery and cartography) and artistic engagement with living organisms and ecosystems, this session is interested in human consciousness – and exertion – of change within the land-sea interface. Whether variations and displacements of the latter be natural in origin (erosion, volcanic activity, sedimentation – including the Neptunist theory that mountains were formed by the sea) or due to human intervention (constructions, integrations of the shoreline into designed landscapes, territorial planning including reclaimed land, art installations, or other forms of human impact), they indicate the full complexity of these spaces of constant change and precariousness.
Topics can cover any period from Early Modernity to the present, any geographical area, and any medium (including new technologies). We aim for an epistemological reflexivity on the field of art history and its positioning vis-à-vis environmental studies: how can art history take part in the latter, whether by integrating epistemologies from other disciplines to renew our own field or by making use of art history’s own tools to develop novel approaches?
The 6th Swiss Congress for Art History will be held in Geneva from 7 to 9 September 2026. Organised jointly by the Swiss Association of Art Historians (VKKS | ASHHA | ASSSA) and the Division of Art History at the University of Geneva, the congress is aimed at art historians, art researchers and experts from all fields (including both practice and theory), and all institutions. You are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers within one of the ten sessions. Acceptance decisions will be made by the conveners of the individual sessions, supervised by the advisory board of the 6th Swiss Congress for Art History.
Please send an abstract (1 page, max. 3ʹ000 characters) and a short curriculum vitae including institutional affiliation and contact details to the relevant session conveners by 12 September 2025 (juliette.bessette@unil.ch, desmond-bryan.kraege@unil.ch, maria.stavrinaki@unil.ch). Please also CC the Congress Bureau of the 6th Swiss Congress for Art History in Geneva at vkks2026@unige.ch. All speakers will receive a contribution to their travel and accommodation costs and will be exempt from the congress registration fee.