Enfilade

From the Call for Papers for round 3 (abstracts due by Friday) . . . and please be sure to consult the full list of panel offerings:

2025 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Online, 55th Annual Meeting, 28–29 March and 4–5 April 2025

Proposals due by 20 September 2024

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) is pleased to announce our Call for Papers for the 55th Annual Meeting, to be held virtually over two weekends in 2025: March 28–29 and April 4–5. The Society, established in 1969, is the foremost learned society in the United States for the study of all aspects of the period from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Round 3 (Submissions to Sessions) is open for submissions to panels, roundtables, and special sessions.

More information is available here»

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Africans and Africa in Italy (Italian Studies Caucus)
Chair: Wendy Wassyng Roworth (University of Rhode Island), wroworth@gmail.com [ID 51 / March 28–29]

Given the interest generated by the “Africans and Africa in Italy” panel at the 2024 ASECS meeting, the Italian caucus proposes another panel on the same topic for the 2025 online meeting. This session is dedicated to the realities and representations of African peoples and their homelands in the various Italian States, be they economic, political, religious, artistic, social, educational, etc. Papers may examine the lived experiences of Africans in rural and city environments, among nobility and other classes, and in relation to a variety of public entities. Portrayals of Africa and Africans may come from literary, theatrical, figurative, ceremonial, academic, etc. sources. Examples include but are not limited to: Africans featured in portrait and other figurative arts genres, treatment of/reference to Africans in historical, scientific, medical, ethnographic, encyclopedic and travel narratives; Africa as protagonist and/or setting in fictional, scientific, poetic, or dramatic literature. Papers may also interpret “Africans in Italy” in an indirect sense, i.e., to include the heated debates taking place in Italy (in person and in print) on the experiences of Africans outside of Italy. Chief among those discussion topics would be Africans’ experience of the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent enslavement in the Americas.

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Anne Schroder New Scholars Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)
Chair: Laurel Peterson (Yale Center for British Art), laurel.peterson@yale.edu [ID 53 / April 4-5]

The Anne Schroder New Scholars Panel, sponsored by HECAA, seeks to promote scholarship that represents the future of eighteenth-century art and architectural studies. We invite proposals from advanced graduate students and early-career scholars working in the academy or museums. We welcome submissions that explore topics across the cultures, spaces, and materials that are related to art and architectural history globally over the long eighteenth century. We seek papers that reflect new approaches to both long-standing and under-studied issues and methods in eighteenth-century studies broadly, including but not limited to: critical race art history; Disability studies; ecocriticism and environmental studies; empire, colonization, and decolonial theory; gender and queer theory; global diasporic histories; Indigeneity; and material culture studies. Papers can be based on dissertations, book or article manuscripts in progress, Digital Humanities collaborations, or curatorial projects. We encourage scholars from underrepresented communities, contingent or independent scholars, and those working outside of North America to apply.

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‘Bad’ Art of the Long Eighteenth Century
Chair: Katherine Iselin (Emporia State University), kiselin@emporia.edu [ID 109 / April 4–5]

What constitutes ‘bad’ art? In art history, we often focus on surviving works that are unique or masterful in some way; works that epitomize the major interests of the period or works that exemplify the skill of the maker. But many other examples of art survive that do not qualify for any of these descriptions, or are perhaps even as far from them as possible. This panel looks to highlight these oft-forgotten pieces that occasionally sit in museum storage or private collections, hidden away from public eyes because they are considered unworthy of display. Yet we can learn much from such works: they can tell us a great deal of the levels of artistic production and appreciation, the accessibility of art to the non-elite, or artistic tastes outside the well-renowned. This panel seeks papers that examine works of art that might be construed as ‘bad’ in some way, exploring their place within the history of art in the long eighteenth century. Papers might also consider the role of accessibility for the artist, patron, or owner, as well as how works may have been displayed or viewed during their initial creation and by later collectors or owners.

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Bodies of Thought: Re-conceptualizations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
Chair: Dorothy Johnson (University of Iowa), dorothy-johnson@uiowa.edu [ID 130 / April 4–5]

The Enlightenment in Europe witnessed radical shifts in the representation of the human figure in art and visual culture from the Rococo period to Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Transformations in the typology of the body in art can be best understood in the context of changing aesthetic, social, cultural, and political ideas and ideals that inflected the eighteenth century. The rise in prominence and prestige of the natural sciences during this period, which interrogated human origins and evolution, corporeal structures, biological, physiological, social and cultural identity and behavior, were ineluctably intertwined with artistic transformations in style and meaning. This panel invites papers that investigate the new meanings that accrued to the body as sign and signifier of cultural evolutions and revolutions.

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Eighteenth-Century Cats! (ASECS Graduate and Early Career Caucus)
Chair: Taylin Nelson (Rice University), tpn2@rice.edu [ID 68 / March 28–29]

What is an internet-based conference without addressing the internet’s favorite topic: cats!? This panel seeks papers interested in exploring eighteenth-century cats in their many facets and figurations. Cats abound during this period: from big cats in the natural histories, moralizing cats in fables and children’s stories, mysterious and symbolic cats in the art of Fragonard or Chardin, to real-life cats in the lives of Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole.

Cats posed a challenge to Enlightenment thinking and represented diverse modes of existence during the period. It was Rousseau who claimed “the cat, enemy of all constraint, [a]s useful for characterising liberty.” From cultural perspectives, cats could represent a variety of topics, such as: domesticated pets, objects of torture, experimentation, and amusement, materially useful mousers, symbolic free agents, as street food, muses of philosophy and poetry, or dangerous predators from the ‘New World’.

This open-ended panel challenges panelists to tackle topics such as, but not limited to:
• Cats and Gender (associations with women and children, old maid tropes, sexuality and fertility, female subjectivity/objectivity)
• Cats and revolution (liberty, slavery, obedience, domestication, freedom versus torture)
• Cats and labor (skills, jobs, use-value, luxury versus labor, class)
• Cats and Science (vivisection and other experiments such as Lunardi’s balloon flight)
• Cats and the Atlantic World (predators, mousers on ships, posing threats/aids to colonists)
• Cats as vermin (massacres or street clearings)
• Thomas Gray’s “On the Death of a Favourite Cat” and any other artistic iterations of the poem
• Cats in fables (morality, education, kindness, pain, religion, transmutation)
• Author cats (Walpole, Johnson, Christopher Smart, and so on)

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Gifts from Flowers: Pollen, Fruit, Honey, Vegetables, Bouquets, Ceremonies, and More (South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Chair: Kevin Cope (Louisiana State University), encope@lsu.edu [ID 83 / April 4–5]

Floral elements abound in long eighteenth-century culture. Still life paintings include or feature flowers; speculators plunge into the tulip market; posies and bouquets ornament every ceremony. Scientific concern for flowers reached a high pitch, whether in Thomas Jefferson’s pea-breeding program or among the growing ranks of botanical illustrators. Poets from John Philips to William Cowper celebrated all the members of the blooming tribe; travelers, fiction writers, and even musicians encounter or deploy the denizens of the vase. This panel is open to papers on all aspects of flower culture and activity, whether flowers themselves in art, literature, science, or philosophy or whether flowers as producers or sources of other cherished materials, whether the fruits and vegetables that swell from the bloom or the sweetening honey that competed with new-world sugar or even the icons that adorn heraldic devices. Papers from all disciplines, whether art history or botany or literature, are welcome.

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Hygge: The Visual and Material Culture of Coziness and Comfort
Chair: Kaitlin Grimes (Flagler College), KGrimes@flagler.edu [ID 150 / April 4–5]

Hygge, a Dano-Norwegian word, evokes the notions of comfortability and coziness that comes from the creation of a relaxing environment with specific creature comforts. Think of thick socks, a warm and fluffy blanket, a soft fire, a lovely cup filled with tea, and a good book all of which illustrate the simple and quiet pleasures of life away from the outside world. As we conference remotely, let us think about how those in the eighteenth century brought themselves comfort, both in childhood and adulthood. How did they create a cozy environment at home after a long day? What material objects did they turn to during the cold winters or the hot summers? And how was this idea depicted in eighteenth-century visual culture? Potential topics for this panel could include: blankets/textiles, fireplaces, tea and or coffee sets/services, beds/furniture, books (as a physical object), clothing, foodstuffs, children’s toy, interior decoration, family traditions, etc. This panel invites papers from all disciplines and as well as papers outside the potential topics listed above.

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‘Local’ Culture and Resistance
Chair: Harvey Shepherd (The Courtauld Institute of Art), hshepherd@courtauld.ac.uk [ID 123 / April 4–5]

This panel invites proposals from scholars studying ‘local’ culture as both a site and a tool of active resistance to conquest and cultural assimilation during the long-eighteenth century. The period of 1660 to 1830 is characterised by the emergence of national identities both in Europe and beyond, and the increase of colonial activity around the globe. These macrohistorical trends resulted in part from many understudied instances of interaction and erasure occurring at a regional level, often in border territories, coastlines, and newly-conquered areas. This discussion aims to complicate the distinction between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ histories of the eighteenth century by considering ‘the local’ as a sphere of resistance to the emergent globalisation of the early modern period. Panellists will consider the ways in which markers of ‘local’ cultural distinction—present in material and visual cultures, linguistics, writing, religious beliefs, or other expressions of identity—were mobilised as active tools of resistance to colonisation or the formation of modern nation states. In addition to considering the stakes involved in utilising ‘local’ identity as a form of resistance, the question of what constitutes our understanding of the term ‘local’ in the eighteenth century is itself a subject which presenters may choose to focus on. The panel welcomes submissions from scholars working in all areas of the humanities, and aims to stimulate conversation across disciplinary distinctions. Similarly, the discussion is not limited to any one geographical space, and papers are invited which examine any aspect of ‘local’ cultural resistance occurring across the eighteenth-century world.

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Sending a Woman to Do What an Army Could Not: Women in Asia
Chair: Samara Cahill (University of North Texas), samara.cahill@unt.edu [ID 46 / March 28–29]

Inspired by the multi-layered relationships among women portrayed in Hiroyuki Sanada et al’s 2024 adaptation of Shogun, James Clavell’s 1975 novel of early modern Japan, this panel invites papers on any aspect of women’s representation, experience, and relationships in long eighteenth-century Asia. Gender is both a mechanism of power and a method of symbolizing power dynamics that greatly influences the production of social institutions, privileges, and expectations. The issue of gender attained unprecedented prominence in early modern Asia, as the regulation and depreciation of women, which had long been shared and practiced, was fundamentally shaken by substantial social, political, and cultural transformations of the period. This panel asks literary scholars, historians, and art historians to investigate how social perceptions of gender were shaped and reshaped in diverse Asian cultures during the long eighteenth century.

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The Aesthetics of Chance, Risk, and Contingency
Chairs: Joseph Litts (Princeton University), jlitts@princeton.edu; and Erin Hein (University of Delaware), erinhein@udel.edu [ID 119 / March 28–29]

Being an artist is—and has been—risky business. Increased attention to and anxiety about uncertainty coincides with a period of increased transit, globalization, and industrialization from around 1650 to 1850. Fires and shipwrecks upended workshops and destroyed finished artworks, while open art markets led to financial instability. New and old media behaved unpredictably: marble cracked, oil paints did not cure, printmaking inks and acids went rogue, early photography capriciously captured and lost images. How did artists negotiate the unexpected? Amidst growing global trade, makers struggled to understand and manipulate new materials and subject matter. Printing errors paradoxically increased the value of impressions in Paris art markets. British and Dutch painters depicted maritime disasters for merchants whose treacherous voyages put lives and their own profits at stake. Artists from Giovanni Battista Piranesi to Alexander Cozens encouraged looking to random blots, tangled lines, and stains for inspiration. How did artists, collectors, and artworks convert chance, failures, mistakes, and risk into profits of all kinds?

Modern insurance, the stock market, and art itself converted loss into reward. For example, even the catastrophic financial losses of the South Sea Bubble became profitable for satirical artists who capitalized on the sudden inversion of fortune. Building on recent scholarship by Nina Dubin, Meredith Martin, and Madeleine Viljoen, as well as Charlotte Guichard and Matthew Hunter, how were artists visualizing and participating in systems of uncertainty? And how were art objects entangled in these networks? Attention to chance, risk, loss, and profit unsettles the fixedness of eighteenth century history and aesthetics. While this panel takes the Atlantic as its point of departure, we encourage contributions on a broad geographic range of materials and makers. We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages.

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The Art of Balance: Concepts of Equality and Democracy in Art and Visual Culture (Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts)
Chairs: Iris Brahms (Universität Tübingen), iris.brahms@fu-berlin.de; and Elisabeth Fritz (Freie Universität Berlin), elisabeth.fritz@fu-berlin.de [ID 78 / March 28–29]

In Western politics and philosophy of the eighteenth century, concepts of balance, equality, and democracy experienced a groundbreaking contouring that continues to have an impact until today (see McMahon 2023). These issues were negotiated not least in the arts. Our thesis is that the parallelism and simultaneity of opposing views and ideologies led to a striving for equilibrium and harmony, and was articulated, for example, within the ideas of social justice and political equality, or the goal of levelling extreme economic and financial differences, an idealistic balance that ultimately paved the way for new concepts of societal order, respectively democracy.

There is no glossing over the fact that a certain degree of difference and hierarchy to guarantee the aesthetically ‘harmonic’ order and balance was a persistent and prevailing ideal of the eighteenth century. Just as much, while aspiring for a newly balanced order within society, the dynamics of the socio-cultural developments of this period kept contributing to ongoing social injustices such as slavery or gender inequality. We decisively want include and discuss problematic strategies of appropriation and hegemonic agency and their paradoxical agenda in the names of equalization, modulation, normality, or assimilation, as well as non-Western concepts of equilibrium and collectivity. Our goal is to enter a fruitful debate and to develop a critical methodological approach, when we ask in which ways and to which ends the visual arts and their discourses helped to shape and spread the understanding of balance, equality, and democracy in the long eighteenth century.

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The Art of the Table: Dining and Desire in the Early Modern Period
Chair: Esther Gabel (Washington University in Saint Louis), esther.gabel@wustl.edu [ID 138 / March 28–29]

The early modern period saw a substantial shift in the preparation and presentation of food. Focus shifted from spice to ingredient, from captured to cultivated. New culinary techniques required new implements, and new methods of serving led to innovative porcelain and silver designs. Dining became more intimate, yet more elegant. Colonial drinks were the height of fashion. This panel seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine the complexities of ‘setting the table’ in the early modern period. Potential topics include (but are not limited to): print, cooks and cookbooks; porcelain and the art of presentation; the garnish; gardening; indulgence and intimacy in the dining room; food in art, or food as art; butter and sugar; and food or fiction (or melons made of sausage).

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The Historical Geographies of the Churrigueresque in the Iberian World
Chairs: Luis Gordo Peláez (California State University, Fresno), luisgordopelaez@csufresno.edu; and Cody Barteet (UWO), cbarteet@uwo.ca [ID 145 / April 4–5]

Spanish art historiography of the late 1700s (Llaguno and Ceán Bermúdez), favored Juan de Herrera’s sixteenth-century classical architecture and Bourbon-era architects Ventura Rodríguez and Juan de Villanueva. The latter architects were credited with restoring canonical models and shaping a national artistic identity by some historical and modern writers. This narrative castigates other ornamental architectural styles that developed after the mid-1600s, that were described as decorative fantasies and their designers, like Hurtado, Churriguera, and Ribera, labeled as ‘heretics’. In juxtaposition, the early 1900s American architects viewed Spanish architecture linearly, recognizing that Herrera’s work was in response to existing ornamental styles (like the Plateresque), and his ‘pure Classicism’ gave way to Churriguera’s ornamental creations. While vilified in Spain, Churriguera was celebrated in America, and Herrera criticized for adopting an ‘unrooted’ style deemed ‘out of key with the Spanish character’, unlike the ornamental styles that preceded or post-dated including the Churrigueresque. Few modern scholars have reconsidered this historiography by analyzing the exuberant aesthetic dominating Hispanic architecture in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The Churrigueresque and its transoceanic interpretations remain understudied in English scholarship. This panel aims to further examine the Churrigueresque through textual analyses and studies of its relationship to the Hispanic world’s built environment, including architectural, sculptural, and ephemeral elements. Proposals may address various aspects:
• Churrigueresque historiography and taxonomy, including the influence of other ‘decorative fantasies’ or styles
• Influence of other cultures and their technologies
• Intersection of race and built environment, sensorial studies, and digital humanities
• Center and Periphery Methodologies concerning the Churrigueresque in the broader Iberian world

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Women Artists: Emulation, Collaboration, Innovation
Chair: Christina Lindeman (University of South Alabama), clindeman@southalabama.edu [ID 99 / April 4–5]

In recent years, scholars have focused increased attention on women artists in the long eighteenth century. From watershed exhibitions including Making Her Mark in North America and Geniale Frauen in Europe, to publications on women artists by Spies-Gans (2022), Strobel (2023), and Quinn (2024). Taking advantage of this new research and artworks emerging on the market opens more opportunities to study women artists in various geographical areas and working in multifarious mediums. This panel seeks papers proposing new perspectives on women artists engaged in emulation, collaboration, and innovation from diverse regions and cultural settings.

Emulation was understood as a virtuous practice that led to innovation. However, as Laura Auricchio noted in her research on Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, that emulation was “necessary for female artists’ careers but dangerous for their reputations.” Emulating artworks deemed inappropriate could potentially damage a woman’s social standing even being judged unnatural. Moreover, a woman could be deemed a ‘copyist’ and lacking the intellectual breadth for history painting. How did women artists engage with artworks from the historical past or their contemporaries?

Taking collaboration as a focus, this panel invites new pathways to analyze the dynamic and gendered relationships in the studio. Papers that address how women collaborated with other artists, whether family members or contemporaries, are welcomed. How did women assert themselves in collaborative professional relationships? In what instances did collaborative working relationships run counter to established gender roles? How was the division of labor and responsibilities divided?

Finally, where can we see women innovating? Which women artists invented new methods of making art? How did they engage the materiality of their art by, for example, creating new formulas in pigments, brushes, pastels, or paper? How did women artists engage with natural philosophy and/or laboratory practices in the studio?

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Roundtable | Material Methods
Chair: Sal Nicolazzo (UC Davis), snicolazzo@ucdavis.edu [ID 118 / March 28–29]

We have long known that the eighteenth century was profoundly shaped by both materials and theories of materiality itself. From metallurgy to textiles, from ceramics to foods, scholars of eighteenth-century literature, the arts, history, economy, and governance have contributed to a rich and multifaceted understanding of how specific materials both acquired profound socio-cultural meaning and shaped human and ecological relations through their material properties.

This roundtable seeks to convene an interdisciplinary discussion of material methods for understanding the eighteenth century in the present. What kind of knowledge-production is entailed in cooking, fermenting, sewing, sculpting, binding, printing, growing, harvesting, or amalgamating the materials either represented or elided in the primary sources more traditionally employed in our disciplines for historical inquiry? How might we engage methodologically with contemporary artists like Candice Lin, Kara Walker, and Joscelyn Gardner, who devise artistic methods for reanimating eighteenth-century materials and histories? How might material methods transform, rather than simply re-enact, the material histories that shaped the eighteenth century, or push us to find terms other than ‘the eighteenth century’ for understanding the temporalities of our research or teaching? What material methods are necessary for engaging transformatively with the planetary material “duress” (Ann Stoler) of eighteenth-century capitalism and empire in which we all live? A wide array of formats, genres, and creative interpretations of the topic are welcomed, as is creative engagement with the unique affordances of the virtual format.

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Roundtable | The Legacies of Morris Eaves
Chairs: Wayne Ripley (Winona State University), wripley@winona.edu; and Tom Hothem (University of California, Merced), thothem@ucmerced.edu [ID 116 / March 28–29]

This panel invites participants to reflect on the life and work of the William Blake and Romanticism scholar Morris Eaves, who passed away in the spring of 2024. Eaves was the co-editor of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly and a co-founder of the William Blake Archive as well as the author of books and articles on Blake, art history, technologies of visual reproduction, digital humanities, and editorial theory.

Eaves opened new interdisciplinary vistas of scholarly inquiry that were attuned to the relationship of print production, visual culture, and changing modes of technology. His book The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (1992) positioned Blake in a variety of interrelated contexts—aesthetic, chalcographic, technological, religious, economic, and political—to show that Blake was engaged with debates that were both central to the eighteenth century and, as it happens, newly pertinent to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Eaves similarly understood how changes in technology demanded, in his phrase, a new “editorial settlement.” By helping to create and maintain the Blake Archive, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025, Eaves posited a new model of the scholarly edition for the digital age and helped to advance the idea of the digital humanities.

Contributors to this panel are welcome to explore any aspect of Eaves’s thought in relation to the eighteenth century, and/or to offer personal reflections. We appeal especially to Eaves’s students, colleagues, and readers in asking participants to examine our field’s current interdisciplinary trajectory in relief of given work(s) from the Age of Blake. Participants should engage cultural production as rigorously and specifically as possible, certainly in the spirit with which Eaves approached such work.

A selection of AAH panels of potential interest for dixhuitièmistes, though please also consult the full Call for Papers:

Association for Art Historians Annual Conference
University of York, 9–11 April 2025

Proposals due by 1 November 2024

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 conference attracts around 400 attendees each year and is popular with academics, curators, practitioners, PhD students, early career researchers, and anyone engaged with art history research. Members of the Association get reduced conference rates, but non-members are welcome to attend and propose sessions and papers. We actively encourage applications from candidates who are Black, Asian, minority ethnic, or from other groups traditionally underrepresented within art historical roles in the UK, as well as new partnerships from those representing these groups.

To offer a paper, please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s). You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any). Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media, and in the digital programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.

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Art Histories of Experience
Stephen Whiteman (Courtauld Institute of Art), stephen.whiteman@courtauld.ac.uk; and Peyvand Firouzeh (University of Sydney), peyvand.firouzeh@sydney.edu.au

This panel explores the experience of spatial environments as an art historical question. Experience is multivalent, subjective, and above all ephemeral. Our experience of the built environment, designed landscapes, and the world at large is highly mediated and contingent, connected to both individual perspectives and cultural framing. It is, moreover, a subject that lies at the complex intersection of the humanities and the sciences, as the senses, emotions, perception, and memory incorporate objective and subjective elements of cognition. What contributes to our experience of a site or space? How do textual, visual, spatial, and cognitive elements interact to create experience? What sources can help reconstruct that experience? How does experience change across different cultural contexts, and how should our methods change in response? How can digital tools, such as mapping, 3-D modelling, or augmented reality, aid our understanding of experience?

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore historical experience of landscape and the built environment through art historical and interdisciplinary means. Papers may focus on experience of a specific site, take up a range of examples, address broader methodological issues, or pursue other approaches. We welcome submissions employing analog and/or digital methods and are eager to create conversation across the two. We also warmly encourage proposals from scholars working on pre-modern materials, and outside Euramerican contexts.

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Burning Matters: The Limits of the Image in a ‘World on Fire’
Elsa Perryman Owens (University College London), elsa.owens.15@ucl.ac.uk; and Jacob Badcock (University College London), jacob.badcock@ucl.ac.uk

In the context of rising global temperatures, raging wildfires, blazing conflict in the Middle East, and ever more incendiary political speech in Western liberal democracies, the politics and aesthetics of fire have become an increasingly important area of study, crucial to understanding a world caught in the throes of environmental crisis and unrest. This panel considers the role of representation in a ‘world on fire’. When the flames abate, they leave behind a world changed, but this change needs nuance. How are images of fire deployed in art and media and what are the limits of these images in representing this new reality? How do the frames of art and artworks conflict with and appease the boundaries of representation? Is it possible for burning to be a generative and transformative process, as well as a destructive one? What does studying burnt matter and fire-affected objects reveal about the wider social causes of disaster, both contemporary and historical, and what challenges do they present to the art historical method?

We invite papers addressing modern and contemporary or historical topics (we encourage those concerning pre-1900 material) including but not limited to the aesthetic politics of fire, fire and non-human agency, fire and environmental politics, fire and conflict, the language of fire and burning, burnt matter as art and/or testimony, and the conservation and care of fire-affected objects within the archive.

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For a History of Artists’ Models
Raisa Rexer, Vanderbilt University, Raisa.Rexer@Vanderbilt.edu; and Colette Morel (Université de Grenoble-Alpes / LARHRA (Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes), colette.jeanne.morel@gmail.com

In his Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Pierre Larousse wrote that the model must “contribute to the perfection of the work.” Yet despite the model’s implied significance, the terms of their contribution to art, and the toll it exacted on the men and women who made it, have remained shrouded in controversy and anonymity. This panel seeks to confront the history of the model by exploring both the conditions of their contribution to creative work and their personal agency.

The history of the model is fundamentally rooted in a feminist history of art, even as methodological approaches have shifted over time. Early scholarship focused on the invention of the ‘sexually available’ model as a social type (Waller 2006; Lathers, 2001), access to live models as fundamental to the training of 19th-century artists (Nochlin 1977) and tracing the biographical paths of these female contributors (Seibert 1986, Lipton 1992). More recent historiography has shifted towards empowering the model, moving beyond the modernist myth of the ‘muse’ and the artist. These approaches have situated the model within the study of the live model and the anatomy courses given in art academies and drawing schools since the 17th century (Lahalle 2006; Brugerolles 2009; Guedron 2003); coexisting studio trades (Fugier 2007; Nerlich 2013), the history of the body and of gender (Solomon-Godeau 1997; Comar 2008), colonisation (Murell 2018), networks of sociability (Marsch 2019; Robert 2023; Morel 2023), and early photography (Rexer, 2021, 2023).

Building on these historiographical shifts, the panel solicits contributions exploring the methodological challenges of writing the history of models. Proposals may include:
• Typology of the model and its representation
• Epistemological issues raised by biographical/prosopographical approaches (anonymity, identification, sources)
• Social and economic history of work (precariousness, working conditions, interconnected socio-professional worlds: theatre, dance, prostitution, etc.)
• Networks of sociability framing the profession (modelling agencies, collective action, circulation between workshops, etc.)
• Production and circulation of photographs of models (marketing of images produced for artists, studio collections, nude magazines, library and university collections, overlap with pornography, etc.)

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How Was It Made? How Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Material Culture Studies and Art History Can Unlock New Avenues of Knowledge
Rebecca Klarner (University of Leeds), fhrlmk@leeds.ac.uk; and Julia Tuveri (University of Leeds), ml17jm@leeds.ac.uk

Traditionally in art history, the study of material culture and decorative arts has been relegated to a subordinate role. Only more recently, objects and their materiality have received more rigorous attention: from Smith’s interdisciplinary project ‘Making and Knowing’ to work by e.g. Yonan, Adamson, Scott, etc.
While object-based and technical art history approaches do consider the material knowledge of curators, conservators, heritage scientists, and others, rarely is the knowledge and material intelligence of makers considered through this art historical lens.

‘How was it made?’ With this question as our starting point, this panel argues that material literacy should be an art historical priority. New avenues of knowledge can be unlocked through interdisciplinary collaboration when we consider the material processes of an object, combining the unique and often tacit knowledge of craftspeople and artists with the knowledge of conservators, art historians, heritage scientists, and curators. As such this panel will demonstrate how historic objects in art history can be further interrogated by extending the object biography approach and by also encompassing an even earlier point of material processes and specialist knowledge leading up to the object’s very creation.

As professional curators and conservators we invite professionals of various disciplines, including the above, working with and in various media, across all time periods to explore the question ‘How does our understanding of material and manufacturing processes enhance our understanding of an object’s historical value?’ and ‘What can material literacy and material intelligence offer the study of art history today?’

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The Art of a Nation: British Culture on the Continent, 1625–1900
Daniela Roberts (Institute of Art History, University of Würzburg), daniela.roberts@uni-wuerzburg.de; and Gerry Alabone (National Trust Knole / City Guilds of London Art School)

For decades, the state of self-reflection about English or British identity and cultural values had not reached such heights as it did during the Brexit referendum, reinforcing a feeling of national belonging in an entire nation. This provides the occasion to reappraise how Englishness or Britishness in terms of artistic innovations has been understood and defined in the past and has contributed to European culture. There is generally no doubt that the English landscape garden, Gothic Revival or the Arts and Crafts Movement have had a great impact on the artistic evolution and on aesthetic ideas in Europe. However, we know far less about the recognition of British art, the extent of its influence, the mechanisms of contribution, the processes of appropriation and the intentions or motivations behind them.

This session aims to explore continental engagement with British art and architecture through their processes of transfer, adaptation, and interaction with local art production. To this end, we seek to examine how British art was conceived and understood as foreign innovation, and for which qualities and cultural attribution it was selected. How did contemporary reviews judge on the significance and status of British Art? What role did aristocratic networks, politics, economic ties, the art market, and Grand Tour tourism play as decisive factors in activating the transfer process. To discuss these topics, we welcome case studies on understudied examples of artistic transfers including interior design, furniture, and ceramics as well as studies on collecting British art and art historiography.

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The Artist as Art Historian
Melissa L Gustin (National Museums Liverpool), melissa.gustin@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk; and Susie Beckham (University of York), susie.beckham@york.ac.uk

The earliest art historians were also artists, or perhaps rather artists who were also art historians. The relationship between theory, historiography, and practice is often led and taught from the historian’s perspective, rather than artists’. This panel considers the multivalent approaches to art history by artists/practitioners, from Vasari, to Ruskin, to contemporary artists and exhibitions. While the expression of an art historical perspective across media and methods has changed in response to contemporary pressures, art history within artmaking has been a consistent practice for centuries. This panel invites contributions for 20-minute papers that ask what relevance historic art and historiography have to the past and present. We especially welcome artists whose practice incorporates art historical research. How have artists used art history to better understand their practice and thus engaged in art history across media? How have artists used their practice to teach or better understand art history to contextualise their work and that of others? How can these art historical manoeuvres activate new understanding of historical contexts including colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, or more? What do recent exhibitions such as Entangled Pasts or I Preraffaeliti: un Rinascimento Moderno and the works therein offer for this kind of art historical-artist perspective? How have art historical artists been involved in creating a ‘canon’ or ideas of ‘canonicity’ in the first place through their valorisation of certain names and involvement in institutions like the Royal Academy, or in reaction against it? How does art history cross borders and temporality for artists? This session invites papers from the Renaissance to the present day and expects to include a wide range of historical and geographic areas.

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The Visual Display of Art Historical Information
Allison Stielau (University College London), a.stielau@ucl.ac.uk

The translation of visual and material phenomena into verbal form is usually framed as the central challenge of art historical method. Yet this translation often takes place alongside visual forms of description, quantification, and analysis. Models, didactic drawings, graphs, tables, reconstructions: such visual displays of art historical information (to paraphrase Edward Tufte’s classic study of data visualisation) have played a central, if underexamined role in the formation of the discipline. They include ‘family trees’ of artistic schools, graphic analyses of composition, diagrams identifying iconography and explaining perspectival systems, among other formats. Building on a recent interest in the diagram as image across art historical fields, this session turns to art historians’ own use of graphic elements to communicate information seemingly unavailable in reproductive illustration. How have these contributed to, or undermined, the scientistic underpinnings of art history and mediated its vexed relationship to “objectivity”? How do diagrams or schematic drawings allow for different modes of analysis, synthesis or criticism? The expanding use of big data in the humanities has brought with it new visual models. What might the longer history of the discipline’s relationship to ‘data visualization’ teach us about the affordances and pitfalls of these analytic forms?

Papers exploring these and other questions should focus primarily on a single example and be 10 minutes in length. Pairs of papers will be followed by a 5-minute response, ending with a 25-minute panel discussion. Ideally contributions will consider art historical practice in a wide range of fields and across geographies, from prehistory to the present.

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Visualising Human-Animal Relations: Animals in Visual and Material Culture, 1750–1900
Luba Kozak (University of Regina), kozak20l@uregina.ca; and Kate Nichols (University of Birmingham), e.k.nichols@bham.ac.uk

The ‘animal turn’ has gained traction in the humanities and social sciences, bringing animals to the forefront of academic discourses. Visual culture can offer new insights into the animal turn, opening up new ways of reading animals in art, and revealing nuanced human-animal relations. 1750–1900 was a crucial period in human-animal relations, yet representations of animals in both visual and material culture remain underexplored. This session aims to reevaluate animals in 18th and 19th-century artworks to shed light on human-animal relations through interdisciplinary perspectives. It encourages papers which integrate perspectives from the animal turn to critically rethink how animals are represented, understood, and treated. We invite art historians, researchers and museum professionals to explore ways of challenging anthropocentric perspectives and empowering animal narratives.

Papers might consider:
• Animals as art materials
• Trade and mobility of animals across global networks
• Pet culture and pet-owner relationships
• Conflicting categories of animals (ie. pets vs. pests or livestock)
• Menageries and animal collecting practices
• Animals and science
• Anthropomorphism and blurring human-animal identities
• Recognizing animal individuality, subjectivity and agency
• Moral and ethical shifts in attitudes towards animals, including animal welfare
• Visual cultures of meat and/or vegetarianism
• Animal cruelty and suffering
• Religious and spiritual beliefs on shaping human-animal relations
• Connections between nationalism and attitudes towards animals
• Methodological reflections on animal studies and art history

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What Is Architectural Scenography?
Paul Ranogajec (Independent), pranogajec@gmail.com

Can scenography be a generative category for studying the history of architecture and urban design? As a descriptive term, scenography concerns the design of framed views and raises questions of spectatorship and public ceremonial. In a more interactive sense, it also identifies the choreography of space, the ways in which architectural and urban forms foster distinctive bodily and somatic experiences. While architectural writers including Rudolf Wittkower, Michael Fried, and Kenneth Frampton have occasionally invoked scenography, there are no shared understandings about its definition or scope in the literature. In fact, there have been few sustained studies of architectural scenography as a design mode in specific historical circumstances. Does the theatrical understanding of scenography as ‘setting the scene’, of staging the fictional within a performance space, translate to architectural scenography?

Two touchstones will help orient the panel’s scope. One is Daniel Savoy’s Venice from the Water (Yale, 2012), a book analysing ‘water-oriented urbanistic practices’ as part of the city’s civic ceremonial and contributing to the symbolic construction of the ‘myth of Venice’. Another, A Civic Utopia (Drawing Matter Studies, 2016), identifies scenography in 18th- and 19th-century France as related to the “very fabric [of cities], so that … the sight of the town itself would provide pleasures in its aspects and a ready awareness of its civic, social and commercial life.” This panel invites papers exploring the design elements, spatial dynamics, and historical significance—social, political, or economic—of architectural scenography from the early modern period to the present.