Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

One and Done: Single Object Studies

Art & Architectural History Graduate Symposium

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 25–26 March 2026

Proposals due by 1 December 2025

The Art History Graduate Association (AHGA) at the University of Virginia is excited to announce our upcoming graduate research symposium titled One and Done: Single Object Studies.

Keynote Speaker
Jennifer Raab, Professor of History of Art at Yale University and author of Relics of War: The History of a Photograph (Princeton University Press, 2024)

​​This is a symposium about single objects. Dr. Jennifer Raab’s recent monograph, Relics of War: The History of a Photograph, examines how one photograph—carefully staged by Clara Barton through acts of collecting, naming, and labeling—transformed salvaged artifacts from a Civil War prison camp into material testimony, serving as both evidence of absence and witness to wartime suffering. Inspired by her methodological commitment to writing about a single photograph, this symposium turns to the potential of singularity.

One and Done: Single Object Studies invites graduate students across disciplines to share the intellectual, methodological, and narrative possibilities of centering a singular object of study—whether an artifact, image, monument, architectural structure, manuscript, or unique material form. In turning to the singular, this interdisciplinary symposium asks: How does a focused examination of one object–or one object type–open up expansive questions and stimulate critical discussion? What sorts of approaches can be taken when we examine an object? What roles do materiality, affect, or embodied engagement play when our research dwells with a single object over time? How do practices of display, collection, and conservation shape our understanding of singularity and its interpretation? And what are the rewards–or the risks–of asking one object to stand in for many?

We welcome submissions from graduate students at all stages whose work engages with visual, material, spatial, or object-centered inquiry across discipline, time, and geography. Paper presentations should be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a Q&A session. Submissions should be original but may include previously published/written material that has been substantially reframed to focus on a single object.

Possible approaches include, but are not limited to:
• Object’s biography and afterlives
• Techniques of making and materials analysis
• Social, cultural, and/or ritual contexts
• Relationships between individuals and objects (makers, patrons, viewers, collectors)
• Mobility and circulation
• Spatial/Distribution analysis
• Categorization and decategorization of a particular form

Please submit a CV and a 250-word abstract along with an image of the studied object (with full caption) as a single PDF to uvagradsymposium2026@virginia.edu by 1 December 2025. Applicants will be notified by 20 December 2025. Limited funds will be available to help cover expenses associated with presenting at the symposium.

From ArtHist.net:

‘Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups’: Hauntings, Afterlives, and Reawakenings

Washington University in St. Louis, 13–14 February 2026

Proposals due by 8 December 2025

The Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis is seeking papers for its 2026 Graduate Student Art History Symposium (GSAHS). The theme of the symposium is ‘Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups’: Hauntings, Afterlives, and Reawakenings, and the event will be held in-person on our campus in St. Louis 13–14 February 2026.

While working on the Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–29), Aby Warburg characterized his art historical practice as a “ghost story for grown-ups.” As scholars, we are often all too familiar with recurring images, motifs, and ideas that persist in the canon or emerge from the archive as if of their own volition. Similarly, many communities have their own traditions and tales of spirits or spectral encounters that linger in visual culture. Many studies across the humanities have attended to the culture of the afterlife, both literally and figuratively. In his book Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida introduced the theoretical framework of “hauntology” to consider elements of the social and cultural past that endure and reappear in a manner of ghostliness. Furthermore, sociologist Avery Gordon contends that such hauntings are an index of “dispossession, exploitation, and repression” that reemerge in order to demand being addressed. This symposium seeks to lift the veil by critically engaging with hauntings, afterlives, and ghostliness as both cultural phenomena and a conceptual model for art historical inquiry.

We invite current and recent graduate students in art history, archaeology, visual culture and related disciplines to submit abstracts for this symposium. Submissions may explore aspects of this theme as manifested in any medium, historical period, cultural, and geographical context. We welcome potential topics from any time period/geographical area that contend with ghosts, phantoms, spirits, or hauntings, including but not limited to:
• Spirit photography
• Ghosts, spirits, and demons in historical folk and religious art
• Spectral images in theatre and cabaret performances
• Paranormal and horror cinema
• The afterlives of artworks, motifs, notable figures, or ideas
• The persistence and/or reemergence of repressed peoples, beliefs, and images
• Art made in the wake of war, genocide, or tragedy
• Mausoleums, tombs, memorials, or other elements of the built environment connecting the living with the dead
• The display of human remains, sacred relics, and objects that house spirits in museums, cultural institutions, and tourist attractions

To apply, please submit a 350-word abstract and a CV in a single PDF file by Monday, 8 December 2025, to Jillian Lepek and Hannah Wier at gsahs@wustl.edu. Selected speakers will be notified by Friday, January 2. Paper presentations must not exceed 18 minutes in length and should be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The symposium will be held entirely in-person at Washington University in St. Louis. Modest honoraria will be provided to student speakers to offset the cost of travel and accommodation.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Patrick R. Crowley, Associate Curator of European art at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University