
2025 Annual Conference Keynote Speakers
We are thrilled to announce our 2025 keynotes:
- Caroline Campbell, National Gallery of Ireland
- Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University
- Joan Kee, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Wed 9 April: Caroline Campbell
Caroline Campbell is Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Previously she was Director of Collections and Research at The National Gallery, London. Caroline has also held curatorial positions at The Courtauld Gallery, London and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Born and raised in Belfast, and educated at University College, Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, Caroline has curated and co-curated many exhibitions in the UK and internationally. These include Bellini and the East (2005–2006), Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (2009), Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting (2014), Duccio/Caro: In Dialogue (2015) and Mantegna and Bellini (2018-19). Her first non-exhibition related book, The Power of Art, was published in 2023.
Museums and methodologies: how can exhibitions make art history?
More people arguably experience art history on visits to museums and galleries, physical or virtual, than through the written word. Often this takes place through the medium of exhibitions. Yet. through what is created visually and ephemerally in a particular space, and through related writing and publications, exhibitions also make art history, shaping our discipline in ways that can be surprising and unexpected. Focussing on several projects, including my work on Siena 1300-1350: The Rise of Painting for the National Gallery, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2024-2025), in this talk, I will draw on my experience of curating exhibitions, and of working with others on their exhibition ideas, to discuss how exhibitions are not only about consuming and enjoying art.
This keynote is sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA).
Thu 10 April: Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Associate Professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She practiced as a Registered Nurse before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her prizewinning monograph is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). She is author of a monograph on the intersection of art and medicine in plantation imagery called Empire States of Mind with Duke University Press and directs the research hub Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism.
Case Notes: On Art History’s Medical Imaginaries
From observation to diagnosis, from close looking to interpretation, the stages of knowledge production in both art and medicine, have often converged. This talk considers the ways art and medicine have been historically connected, and why these connections matter for us now. It asks how these narratives, and their coalescence could help us to see differently both across the field, and beyond it, and explores what conditions of possibility a history of convergence might cultivate in support of more collaborative, sustainable, modes of art historical scholarship.
Fri11 April: Joan Kee, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Joan Kee is Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her books include Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019) and The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity (2023). A contributing editor at Artforum, she has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, including the impact of legal jurisdiction on post-1979 Chinese art and how photography problematizes the concept of ‘peacetime’. Her work has been supported by the Clark Art Institute, the Kresge Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Hyundai Tate Research Center and MoMA. Current projects include informal art histories in Central Asia and a very short book on emojis.
Can Art History be Applied?
In a time marked by the perceived ‘crisis’ of the humanities, art history faces pressure to align itself with the frameworks of social sciences or STEM disciplines. Yet, while art history may not lend itself to the same kind of measurable applications as the sciences, it has an intrinsic ability to attract, shape, and channel one of the world’s scarcest resources: attention. From legal observation to human rights, art historical thinking informs, enriches, and even potentially restructures other domains of activity for which the questions of what and how to see (and not see) possess real urgency. Beyond interdisciplinarity, art historical thinking expands our understanding of applicability beyond the immediate, intentional, and quantifiable, thus putting pressure on what having utility means. Conceived as a provisional outline rather than a manifesto, this talk asks whether art history might claim its own ‘rights’ to intellectual sovereignty, including the right of its constituents to refuse their instrumentalization as quantifiable outcomes and the right to define its own key conflicts.
This keynote is sponsored by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Image credit: Caroline Campbell, Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Joan Kee (supplied photographs).