Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

Love’s Matter: The Material Culture and Art of Affection, 1700–1900

9th Edition of the Entretiens de la Fondation Maison Borel

University of Neuchâtel and Maison Borel, Switzerland, 12–13 November 2026

Organized by Henriette Marsden and Lara Pitteloud

Proposals due by 20 March 2026

International Workshop for PhD Students and Early Career Researchers

From the early 18th century onwards, the material qualities of love were explored as a cultural technique and an artistic practice transformed by the onset of modernity. Young lovers courted their sweethearts by sending mass-produced valentine cards, friends filled each other’s albums with carte de visite photographs and industrially made paper scraps, husbands romanced their wives through the gifting of colonial luxuries, and sisters used embroidery patterns circulated through the periodical press to stitch presents with and for one another. Evidently, love, as a practice of affection between family members, romantic partners and friends, became deeply embroiled in the material conditions of global trade, colonial expansion, nation-building, and the advance of industrialised commerce.

This workshop will explore how the affective properties of love shaped and were shaped by the material conditions of modernity from the early 18th to the end of the 19th century. It takes as a starting point the claim that modernity is characterised by a shift away from older understandings of transcendental love and toward a notion of love that is qualified by immanent, sensorial, and interpersonal experiences (Hanley, 4–5). Building on the conceptual framework of the “co-constitutive nature of things and emotions,” as demonstrated in recent scholarship (Downes/Holloway/Randles, 9), we invite doctoral and postdoctoral researchers to examine not only the use of objects and artworks in the performance of love but also how their materiality (size, shape, material construction, other sensorial qualities) impacted the experience of love. By investigating how love’s affective potential was navigated in the particular aesthetic constitution of objects, this workshop will explore different facets of love, such as the feeling of romantic desire, a wish for amicable companionship, a charitable responsibility, etc.

We invite papers by doctoral students and early career researchers that examine this diversity of love in the breadth of its aesthetic functioning as material culture, as art, and as cultural performance. The workshop also encourages comparative and cross-cultural perspectives, looking beyond Western Europe to consider how love was materially performed in the modern contexts of empire, global trade, and colonialism. The workshop is committed to fostering an open discussion between researchers at any stage of their project. We welcome submissions for papers covering both early-stage work and substantive original research on the art and material culture of love, as well as theoretical and methodological discussions problematising the state of love studies within art history.

Topics might include, but are not confined to
• personal gifts as expressions of hetero- and homo-romantic, familial, and amicable love
• material culture of heartbreak, loss, and/or separation
• commercialisation of love tokens; affection and consumer culture
• collaborative artistic production amongst friends
• material bonds between parents and children
• sexual self-identification and pictorial self-representation
• art as an affective instrument for nation-building and colonial expansion
• materiality of divine love in ecclesiastical, missionary, and charitable contexts

The workshop is organised in the context of the 9th edition of the Entretiens de la Fondation Maison Borel, held by the Institute of Art History and Museology at the University of Neuchâtel. These study days aim to foster the exchange of ideas and perspectives on methodological issues across the various disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences. As in previous editions, the workshop will take place in the historic 17th-century Maison Borel near Neuchâtel (Auvernier), a setting that offers an informal yet stimulating environment for scholarly exchange. The workshop may result in a publication. Accommodation, and, where possible, full coverage of travel costs will be provided by the organisers.

Please send a 300-word abstract, in English for 20-minute presentations, as well as a 100-word CV to Henriette Marsden (hm772@cam.ac.uk) and Lara Pitteloud (lara.pitteloud@unine.ch) by 20 March 2026. We look forward to reading your proposals.

–Henriette Marsden (University of Cambridge) and Lara Pitteloud (University of Neuchâtel)

s e l e c t i v e  b i b l i o g r a p h y

Barclay, Katie and Sally Holloway, eds. A Cultural History of Love in the Age of Enlightenment. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

Dolan, Alice and Sally Holloway. “Emotional Textiles: An Introduction.” Textile: Cloth and Culture 14.2 (2016): 152–59.

Downes, Stephanie, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles, eds. Feelings Things: Objects and Emotions through History. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Hanley, Ryan Patrick, ed. Love: A History. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Holloway Sally, ed. The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material Culture. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Labanyi, Jo. “Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11 (2010): 223–44.

Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya. A Cultural History of Love in the Age of Empire. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

Moran, Anna and Sorcha O’Brien, eds. Love Objects: Emotion, Design, and Material Culture. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Pellegry, Florence, Sandra Saayman, and Françoise Sylvos, eds. Gages d’affection, culture matérielle et domaine de l’intime dans les sociétés d’Europe et de l’océan Indien. Presses Universitaires
Indianocéaniques, 2020.

Staremberg, Nicole, ed. Et plus si affinités … Amour et sexualité au XVIIIe siècle. Musée national suisse, Antipodes, 2020.

Sheer, Monique, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (2010): 193–220.

Fanny Blake, A Rainbow over Patterdale Churchyard, Cumbria, 1849, watercolour and opaque watercolour over graphite, with scratching out, on wove paper (Jointly owned by the Samuel Courtauld Trust and The Wordsworth Trust, Gift from a private collection in memory of W. W. Spooner, 2025).

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From The Courtauld:

Views of Their Own: Rediscovering and Re-presenting the Work of Women Artists

The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 13 March 2026

Organized by Rachel Sloan

Proposals due by 6 February 2026

Timed to coincide with the Courtauld Gallery’s current exhibition, A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860, this conference aims to investigate the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery and re-presentation of historic women artists whose work and reputations have fallen out of art historical narratives.

Bringing together art historians and curators, this conference will explore various approaches to the complexities of bringing to light artists long overlooked by art history, whether via exhibition (permanent or temporary) or through the written word. Although the exhibition focuses on British artists, working both at home and abroad, from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, we welcome papers that move beyond these chronological and geographical boundaries. The conference seeks to examine how attitudes and approaches to restoring to view the lives and work of women lost to art history have evolved, and continue to evolve, over recent decades, and the complexities, discoveries and rewards of charting overlooked artists and their work.

We would particularly welcome submissions in the following areas:
• Negotiating the grey area between the categories of ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ in women artists’ careers
• The presentation of women artists’ work in settings other than temporary exhibitions
• Institutions and networks that fostered and supported the work of women artists
• Women artists’ strategies for publicising their work

Please submit an abstract of 300–500 words for a 20-minute paper, with a title, your affiliation (if any), and a short biographical summary to Rachel.Sloan@courtauld.ac.uk by 6 February 2026. Selected papers will be confirmed by 10 February.

Organised by The Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art.

From ArtHist.net:

Women Conservators between Europe and Italy, 1750–1970

Sapienza University of Rome, 14–15 May 2026

Proposals due by 15 February 2026

In recent years, gender studies have profoundly reshaped the historiography of art and heritage preservation, bringing renewed attention to the role of women as key protagonists in the culture of heritage and expanding scholarly perspectives beyond the limits imposed by traditional narratives. The contribution of women to the history of conservation and restoration, however, remains largely understudied and only fragmentarily documented.

The earliest women active in collecting, museum, and private contexts can be traced back to the eighteenth century in Italy and across Europe. Figures now better known, such as Margherita Bernini, documented in Rome in the service of major aristocratic families, or Marie-Éléonore Godefroid, involved in the restoration of paintings for the collections of the Musée du Louvre and other Parisian institutions, stand alongside many other professionals whose work is only now being brought to light by recent research. In many cases, their activity emerges in connection with that of their husbands, whom they often succeeded in the management of workshops and restoration sites, assuming significant technical and administrative responsibilities that nevertheless remained largely invisible in historical sources. During the twentieth century, women’s presence became increasingly established within public institutions responsible for heritage protection, contributing substantially to the definition of the professional identity of the conservator at a time of profound transformation in the discipline. In this period, restoration gradually developed into a critically structured practice, grounded in technical, methodological, and historical expertise and embedded within an increasingly complex institutional framework, in which women played a far from marginal role.

This conference aims to offer a first systematic survey of women active in the field of heritage conservation and restoration between the mid-eighteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, not only from the perspective of gender studies, but more broadly within the history of preservation and conservation in Italy and Europe.
The conference will explore the relationships between:
• restoration practices and techniques in different European contexts
• institutional transformations (museums, heritage authorities, conservation bodies)
• individual and collective careers, professional networks, and regional contexts
• diverse geographies and chronologies of restoration
• relationships between theory, practice, and training
• phenomena of family continuity and ‘professional inheritance’
• material, documentary, and photographic sources relevant to reconstructing women’s professional profiles

We invite proposals addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:
• studies on women conservators active in Italy or Europe between 1750 and 1970
• workshops, laboratories, restoration sites, museums, or archival institutions where women conservators worked
• restoration of paintings, works on paper, textiles, decorative arts, frescoes, sculpture, and architectural heritage
• patronage networks, professional collaborations, and working relationships with senior figures within state heritage institutions
• conservation methodologies, diagnostic practices, and operational protocols
• family-based transmission of skills and professional knowledge, continuity of practice, and workshop inheritance
• comparative and transnational perspectives.

Submission Guidelines
Abstract: maximum of 300 words
Short bio: maximum of 150 words
Languages: Italian and English
Submission address: convegnorestauratrici@gmail.com
Deadline: 15 February 2026
Notification of acceptance: 10 March 2026
Conference dates: 14–15 May 2026

Conference papers will be published. Further information regarding editorial arrangements and publication timelines will be provided in due course. Speakers selected through the call are kindly asked to note that the conference organization will not be able to cover travel and accommodation expenses.

Scientific Committee
Eliana Billi (Sapienza University of Rome)
Giuseppina Perusini (formerly University of Udine)
Simona Rinaldi (University of Tuscia)
Martina Visentin (University of Udine)

Organising Secretariat
Laura D’Angelo (University of Arkansas, Rome Center)

From ArtHist.net:

Revolutions, Art, and the Market

Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, 4–5 June 2026

Proposals due by 1 March 2026

Art market trends and practices, whether historical or contemporary, are affected by networks of complex and often competing forces. As moments of political, economic, intellectual or technological rupture, revolutions have significantly shaped art market systems and fortunes, refracting and redirecting collecting ambitions, displacing existing markets and creating new ones, and promoting novel modes of commercialisation of art.

Embracing wide chronological and geographical spans, this conference will consider how revolutions have inflected the circulation and consumption of art and facilitated the emergence of new art market practices and collecting paradigms. The conference is deliberately adopting a broad definition of the term Revolution, intending to encompass its political, cultural, intellectual, economic, and technological incarnations.

Interdisciplinary proposals and methodological approaches including empirical evaluations, economic analyses, and studies from the digital humanities are welcome. The conference is intended to foster rich discussions at the intersection of academic scholarship and professional practices, and contributions from both academics and art market professionals are actively sought. Papers addressing contemporary perspectives and practices, as well as under-represented regions of the art market and the Global South are particularly encouraged.

Proposals offering critical perspectives may consider (but are not limited to) the following themes:
• Political revolutions and shifting art market geographies
• The dispersal and looting of collections
• Revolutions and markets for luxury goods
• Political revolutions and artistic migrations
• The markets for revolutionary art
• The American Revolutionary War and transatlantic artistic exchanges
• The Russian Revolutions
• The aftermath of PCR’s Cultural Revolution
• Iran’s White and Islamic Revolutions and the national and international markets for Iranian art.
• The artistic expressions of the Arab Springs
• The Scientific Revolution and its new collecting paradigms
• The Printing Revolution and the markets for prints
• The digital revolution and the emergence of new art market commercial platforms
• Technological revolutions and innovations: NFTs, Blockchain, AR, VR, AI-generated art

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words for a 25-minute paper, along with a brief biography to Barbara Lasic, b.lasic@sia.edu, by 1 March 2026. Successful papers will be notified by 15 March.

From the Call for Papers:

Journal18, Issue #23 (Spring 2027) — Untitled

Issue edited by Catherine Girard, Sylvia Houghteling, Meredith Martin, and Hannah Williams

Proposals due by 3 April 2026; finished articles will be due by 1 September 2026

In 2026, Journal18 celebrates a decade of publishing cutting-edge scholarship on the art, material culture, and social life of the eighteenth century. To mark this tenth anniversary, for the first time since launching Journal18, we will take an open call approach. Unlike our usual tightly themed issues, this “Untitled” issue invites contributions from scholars working on any aspect of visual and material culture of the long 18th century from around the globe, drawing on diverse methodologies, perspectives, and global contexts.

Our “Untitled” issue of Journal18 offers an opportunity for open reflection and critical intervention in the field of eighteenth-century studies. What assumptions, canonical narratives, or disciplinary boundaries merit reconsideration today? What methods, sources, or frameworks might illuminate eighteenth-century art in new and unexpected ways? Which objects, artists, or practices remain unexplored, and why? Can we rethink the role of audiences—past or present—in shaping our understanding of the eighteenth century? How can our field speak to contemporary debates, challenges, or experiences affecting the world today?

We welcome contributions that explore, but are not limited to:
• Transnational and cross-cultural approaches to eighteenth-century art.
• New theoretical, methodological, or archival interventions.
• Reconsiderations of canonical objects, artists, or movements.
• Reflections on the evolving field of eighteenth-century art history and cultural studies.
• We are especially interested in work that offers fresh perspectives from underrepresented regions, traditions, or voices within the global eighteenth-century art world.

We anticipate an issue comprised of relatively short texts (max 4000 words). We also welcome contributions that do not follow the standard scholarly essay format, including pieces that are co-authored or take the form of an interview, data visualization, short film, audio recording, virtual exhibition, creative collaboration, or something that has yet to be dreamed up.

Proposals for issue #23 Untitled are now being accepted. The deadline for proposals is 3 April 2026. To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to editor@journal18.org. Articles should not exceed 4000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by 1 September 2026. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

Issue Editors
Catherine Girard, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia
Sylvia Houghteling, Bryn Mawr College
Meredith Martin, NYU and Institute of Fine Arts, New York
Hannah Williams, Queen Mary University of London

Henry Salt, Ancient Excavations at Carli, from Twenty-four Views in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, London: Published by William Miller, Albemarle-Street, 1809 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).

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From the Call for Papers:

Building Identities: Character in Architecture and Beyond, 1700–1900

Zurich, 2–4 September 2026

Organized by Sigrid de Jong, Maarten Delbeke, Nikos Magouliotis, and Dominik Müller

Proposals due by 1 March 2026

The term ‘character’ is part of today’s vocabulary of architecture: we casually refer to the ‘character’ of specific buildings or landscapes, and the ‘characteristics’ of projects or historical city centres, to emphasize their uniqueness, or the qualities attributed to them. We seem to resort to the term whenever more figurative terms fail to describe a certain formal or material je-ne-sais-quoi, which may also be associated with a distinct atmosphere or ethos. ‘Character’ often allows us to personify a building—to apply human empathy to inanimate matter.

‘Character’ emerged as a critical concept in the eighteenth century and developed into a key notion within architectural discourse of that period. It became ubiquitous in public debates concerning buildings, cities and landscapes between 1750 and 1850. Writers on architecture employed this notion to indicate how a building expressed the personality of its patron, its architect, a style or genre, how its form related to its use, or how it represented a culture or a nation; in short, a building’s character was synonymous with its identity. Borrowing from literary theory, architects such as Germain Boffrand, Jacques-François Blondel, William Chambers, Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Quatremère de Quincy elaborated on the notion of character in their writings. They used the term to articulate principles that ensured buildings properly express their function, or would be read and experienced appropriately by their audiences.

‘Character’ became especially versatile when the discovery of non-classical architectures rendered the Vitruvian orders insufficient to describe the different building cultures of the world, and when the stylistic repertoire of Western architecture broadened in all directions to include the gothic, the rural vernacular and various forms of non-European architecture. With questions of meaning and appropriateness becoming increasingly urgent, writers turned to the term ‘character’ when discussing landscapes, cities, buildings, and interiors in architectural theory, philosophy, travel literature, as well as literary fiction. Furthermore, as discussions regarding architectural proportions shifted from ideal systems and norms to the emotional effects of proportional modulation, ‘character’ came to encapsulate the affective dimensions of architecture and landscape. Our project Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design, 1750–1850 explores how such discussions were related to broader uses of the term ‘character’, rooted in its origins outside the discipline of architecture. A convenient vehicle for various metaphors and metonymies, ‘character’ often signifies both the means and instruments of classification and their intended effect.

While scholars usually studied the uses of the concept focusing on Western-Europe and on designers and architectural critics (Szambien, Forty, Grignon and Maxim), our conference ‘Building Identities’ is interested in examining character in a broader manner, across various disciplines and geographies. We aim to investigate the complexity, variety and contradictions surrounding its centrality in discourse. By foregrounding aspects that have long been undervalued, the conference Building Identities invites participants to collaborate in writing a critical history of ‘character’ tracing:
• How ‘character’ connects and relates to different fields (art history, landscape, urban history, travel, literature, the performing arts, philosophy, religion, cultural history, anthropology, nascent natural sciences).
• What ‘character’ presupposes in terms of ideologies, also in connection to notions such as identity, custom, mœurs, civilisation, etc.
• How and why ‘character’ operates in specific contexts (classification, subordination, naturalisation).

We invite proposals that
• Examine the notion of ‘character’ and its intellectual history in a variety of sources, within a diversity of disciplines and geographies.
• Question texts or practices that rely on ‘character’ in relation to architecture, landscape, and territory.
• Explore descriptions of the built environment that rely on ‘character’ to bridge the specific with the universal.
• Interrogate the notion in artistic practices, in building, urban, and landscape designs.
• Exemplify the problems, paradoxes, flaws, and possibilities of the notion.

We are interested in paper proposals treating and complicating ‘character’ as a historical concept, addressing specific uses of the term ‘character’ in sources from the period 1700–1900. Papers are welcomed that venture beyond the canonical sources of architectural theory, and engage with one or more of the following topics:
• The gender of architecture (buildings and interiors), cities and landscapes: usages of ‘character’ to gender the built environment, its relation to patrons, clients, and the public.
• The emotions of architecture, cities and landscapes: authors for whom ‘character’ served as a synonym for empathy, affect, or the emotional impact on the human mind and soul.
• The cultural or national identity of architecture, cities and landscapes: texts in which the term ‘character’ is employed to articulate cultural specificity and difference, or to construct ideas such as race, ethnicity and nation.

We particularly welcome papers that examine how the term migrated between different fields, semiotics, and epistemes, as well as how it was translated from one language to another.

Abstracts of max. 300 words should be submitted to buildingidentities@gmail.com by 1 March 2026, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number and a short curriculum vitae (maximum one page). Please combine both abstract and CV in one PDF file. Selected speakers will be notified by April.

The conference is part of the project Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design, 1750–1850, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and based at the Chair for the History and Theory of Architecture, gta Institute, ETH Zurich.

From the Call for Papers:

Origins and Evolution: The Quest for Beginnings, 1750–1850

Ursprung und Entwicklung: Sehnsucht und Suche nach den Anfängen, 1750–1850

Second Wellhöfer Colloquium, Martin von Wagner Museum, Universität Würzburg, 4–5 December 2026

Organized by Damian Dombrowski and Ulrich Pfisterer

Proposals due by 28 February 2026

The recourse to earlier stages of culture belongs to the basic inventory of every civilization. Since the mid-eighteenth century, however, profound transformations have taken place in the modes of such engagement. No longer were scholars, writers, and artists concerned solely with presumed or actual high points within their own pasts; instead, increasing attention was directed toward early forms of social and artistic formation. This ‘originist desire’ constitutes the central theme of this year’s Wellhöfer Colloquium, which every two years addresses research questions in the history of art and culture between 1750 and 1850 from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Across diverse regions of Europe, anthropology and early civilizational history emerged as central fields of scholarly inquiry. The normative authority of classical antiquity began to erode: in Italy, the Etruscans came into focus; in England, the Celts; and within the interior of the classicist Walhalla, the principal ornament was a monumental frieze depicting the history of the Germans from their migration from Asia to the baptism of Widukind. The Homeric epics were translated, revered, and illustrated on an unprecedented scale as the earliest monuments of literature, believed to embody a simplicity subsequently lost—corresponding to a broader revaluation of Mediterranean antiquity, for which Friedrich Schiller’s depiction of a prehistoric idyll in The Gods of Greece is emblematic. In archaeology, early idealism gave way to relativism, teleology to aetiology, and enthusiasm for the classical to an interest in the archaic. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt pursued the idea of a primal language; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Marc-Antoine Laugier anchored the ‘primitive hut’ in architectural theory.

Alongside this shift of beginnings into more remote historical strata, the thematic scope of the conference also encompasses the simultaneous reception of the Middle Ages. This reception found concrete expression, for example, in the illustrated volumes of J. B. L. G. Seroux d’Agincourt or in the collection assembled by Sulpiz Boisserée, as well as in visual culture through the style troubadour or the Nazarene movement. In light of a shared preoccupation with origins and authenticity, the traditional opposition between classicist and romantic tendencies loses much of its sharpness, while points of convergence in artistic practice come to the fore. Accordingly, contributions addressing formal archaisms, stylizations, and abstractions are particularly welcome—phenomena that, especially in nineteenth-century France (Ingres), appear to arise from the discourse on origins as a productive counterpoint to late classicist Salon painting.

It would also be worth discussing whether the outline style derived from Greek vase painting (Flaxman) should be situated within the same archaistic framework—and whether the concrete confrontation with archaic works, such as the Aegina pediment sculptures, may have posed excessive challenges to a productive reception. To what extent did the persistence of classicist aesthetics affect artistic and critical encounters with newly uncovered early epochs? And how did the growing knowledge of these periods, in turn, transform prevailing notions of normativity and exemplarity? The range of examples illustrating the new longing for beginnings could be extended almost indefinitely and in every conceivable direction; even the so-called ‘discovery of childhood’ belongs within this conceptual horizon.

Participation is sought not only from image-based disciplines—most notably art history and, in particular, classical archaeology—but the discussion would ideally be enriched by contributions from philological fields and the history of science. The invitation to the conference includes coverage of travel and accommodation costs. The organizers invite proposals for 20-minute papers in English or German. Please submit an abstract (maximum 2000 characters including spaces) and a short CV (maximum 1500 characters including spaces) by 28 February 2026 to Ulrich.Pfisterer@lrz.uni-muenchen.de and damian.dombrowski@uni-wuerzburg.de. Notification of participation will be given by 15 March 2026.

Organizers
• Damian Dombrowski (Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg)
• Ulrich Pfisterer (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München)

From ArtHist.net:

Sympoiesis: Temporal Ecologies in Art and Nature, ca. 1800

Sympoiesis: Zeit-Ökologien in Kunst und Natur um 1800

Erbacher Hof, Mainz, 30 September — 2 October 2026

Proposals due by 15 March 2026

Second annual conference of the Mini-Graduate College Die ästhetischen Erfindungen der Ökologie um 1800, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Between geological deep time and the fleetingness of a single breath, between the slow erosion of coastlines and the periodic return of day and night, between vegetative growth, heartbeat, pulse, and meter, concepts of the natural unfold as constellations of heterogeneous temporal horizons. In works of art, these heterogeneous temporalities can be synchronized: the artwork then becomes a site of sympoiesis (Donna Haraway). This delineates a becoming-with in which biological growth processes, cyclical repetitions, and linear processes of decay are not merely represented but amalgamated into a new aesthetic temporality of the artwork itself. Mary Delaney serves as one example here. In her Paper Mosaiks, she makes collages out of real plant parts put together with colored paper. She presents bud and fruiting body, which are distinct developmental stages, simultaneously, thus transgressing the natural temporal order and creating a synchronicity of diachronic events.

The conference seeks to explore how artworks around 1800 work as cross-sections through heterogeneous temporal layers of the natural. The guiding concept of sympoiesis marks a shift in perspective. It does not pitch nature against art, nor does it denote environments as mere background. Instead, it highlights the cooperative production of vitality across different forms of knowledge and practice. At the center is thus a making-with, in which matter and materials, media, bodies, discourses, and practices enter into relation with one another. The chosen timeframe of around 1800—during which the interplay of natural philosophy, early biology, geology, aesthetics, poetics, and new musical temporal orders is especially prominent—lends itself to discussions of how vitality is both understood in the context of ecological relations and conceived as a temporally structured process of becoming.

A range of disciplinary approaches is welcome, including:
• Temporal ecologies in poetics and aesthetics, descriptions of nature, history of metaphors; meter, rhythm, repetition; temporal semantics of growth, transformation, threshold, crisis.
• Image-time and material time; montage/collage, series, study; landscape as a medium of deep time; visualizations of cycles, change, erosion; practices of collecting and classification as temporal orders.
• Beat, pulse, period, tempo as models of the living; bodily and affective temporalities; rhythmization, synchronization, and their disruptions; form as a temporal ecology (recurrence, variation, transition).
More broadly, the conference invites reflections on:
• Aesthetics and orders of temporality
• Temporal concepts within individual disciplines
• Knowledge and history, tense and development
• Phenomenologies of movement and transformation: how can growth and metamorphosis be narrated or visualized without freezing them in static representation?
• Rhythm and meter: where does “striated time” (meter, beat, measured time) encounter the ‘smooth time’ of organic flow? How do heartbeat, pulse, and breath relate to the musical period or poetic meter around 1800?
• Cycles and thresholds: how do art, literature, and music stage the transition from day to night, the change of seasons, or the stages of life? Do these works assert a harmonious synchronicity of the natural, or do they instead make visible the asynchronies and fractures within the temporal fabric?

The workshop will take place from 30 September to 2 October 2026 at the Erbacher Hof in Mainz. We invite interested scholars to submit abstracts in either German or English (maximum 300 words) for a 30-minute presentation, along with a short CV, to gregor.wedekind@uni-mainz.de and ctheisin@uni-mainz.de by 15 March 2026.

b i b l i o g r a p h y

• Bender, Niklas und Gisèle Séginger (Hg.): Biological Time, Historical Time: Transfers and Transformations in 19th-Century Literature, Leiden: Brill | Rodopi, 2018 (Faux Titre, 431).
• Gamper, Michael und Helmut Hühn (Hg.): Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014.
• Geulen, Eva: „Zur Idee eines ‚innern geistigen Rhythmus‘ bei A.W. Schlegel“, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Bd. 137, 2018, Sonderheft: August Wilhelm Schlegel und die Philologie, S. 211–224.
• Groves, Jason: »Goethe’s petrofiction. Reading the ›Wanderjahre‹ in the Anthropocene«, in: Goethe yearbook 22 (2015), p. 95–113.
• Gould, Stephen Jay: Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Haraway, Donna: Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
• Heringman, Noah: Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
• Honold, Alexander: Hölderlins Kalender. Astronomie und Revolution um 1800, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005.
• Kisser, Thomas (Hg.): Bild und Zeit. Temporalität in Kunst und Kunsttheorie seit 1800, München: Fink, 2011.
• Kling, Alexander und Jana Schuster (Hg.): Zeiten der Materie. Verflechtungen temporaler Existenzweisen in Wissenschaft und Literatur, 1770–1900, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2021.
• Kugler, Lena: Die (Tiefen-)Zeit der Tiere. Zur Biodiversität modernen Zeitwissens, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021.
• Mitchell, Timothy F.: Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 (Clarendon Studies in the History of Art, 11)
• Naumann, Barbara: Musikalisches Ideen-Instrument. Das Musikalische in Poetik und Sprachtheorie der Frühromantik, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990.
• Oesterle, Ingrid: „‚Es ist an der Zeit!‘. Zur kulturellen Konstruktionsveränderung von Zeit gegen 1800“, in: Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, hg. von Walter Hinderer, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, S. 91–119.
• Pause, Johannes und Tanja Prokić (Hg.): Zeiten der Natur: Konzeptionen der Tiefenzeit in der literarischen Moderne, Berlin und Heidelberg: Metzler, 2023.
• Ronzheimer, Elisa: Poetologien des Rhythmus um 1800. Metrum und Versform bei Klopstock, Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck und Goethe, Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.
• Rudwick, Martin J. S.: Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Schnyder, Peter: Erdgeschichten: Literatur und Geologie im langen 19. Jahrhundert, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020.
• Völker, Oliver: Langsame Katastrophen. Eine Poetik der Erdgeschichte. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021.
• Voßkamp, Friederike: Im Wandel der Zeit. Die Darstellung der Vier Jahreszeiten in der Bildenden Kunst des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, München und Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2023.

From ArtHist.net:

(Re)alignment: Rethinking Familial Ties in the Visual Arts

National Gallery, London, 28 May 2026

Proposals due by 26 January 2026

Expanding our understanding of family, community, and what binds us together requires us to look beyond conventional definitions and documented histories. While official records like birth certificates offer us names, dates, and biological ties, they often fail to capture the emotional, cultural, and chosen connections that shape our identities and our sense of belonging. In a world where families are built not only by blood but by shared experience, mutual care, and collective memory, we must turn to other forms of expression to grasp the full picture.

Visual art—through painting, sculpture, photography, and other media— has long served as a powerful tool for representing and reimagining lineage and connection. These works can embody intimacy, inheritance, loss, and continuity in ways that resist formal categorisation. A family portrait may reveal who is physically present, but also who is emotionally central. A sculpture might abstractly represent generations, resilience, or migration. A photograph can capture unspoken dynamics: the touch of a hand, the distance between bodies, a gesture of affection or estrangement. Such representations invite us to ask: What does family look like when it isn’t constrained by official records? How do artists convey relationships rooted in mentorship, solidarity, or shared struggle? What visual metaphors such as threads, branches, shadows, echoes might they use to trace the invisible ties that bind?

Art can fill in the silences left by documentation. It allows us to see what a birth certificate cannot: the emotional textures of a relationship; the complexities of chosen family; and the legacies passed through gesture, tradition and story rather than DNA. By engaging with these visual representations, we expand our understanding of lineage not as a fixed biological chain, but as a living, evolving network of connection and meaning.

With this in mind, we welcome proposals for 20-minute papers from researchers, museum professionals, independent scholars, artist-practitioners, and postgraduate students. A potential outcome of the Colloquium will be the publication of selected papers in a special journal issue or edited volume. Papers may cover any period, geographic location, or medium of art.

Proposals will relate to the following themes:
• Ancestry: How are family lines and the dynamics of succession visually rendered in the arts? From large-scale family portraits to ornate illuminations of family trees, papers may focus on any one of the myriad ways in which ancestral ties have been made legible for public and private audiences. This may include shields, crests, trees and other symbols of family.
• Familial relationships: In what way are intimate family bonds portrayed in the visual arts? From siblings to parents, grandparents, and children, artists have long been drawn to depicting their own family members as well as undertaking commissions from patrons.
• Marriage: Portraits of betrothed or newly married couples may be a visual contract born of financial and social arrangements, romantic keepsake, or even a symbol of resistance. ‘Mystic marriages’ and mythical subjects further diversify the types of marriage we may see rendered in art.
• Inheritance and legacy: ‘Passing it on’ is a major part of family dynasties, particularly when it comes to hereditary titles and businesses. Visual art can be one means of not just establishing a line of inheritance but justifying and even fictionalising it.
• Blended and extended families: With the concept of a ‘nuclear’ family being a modern invention, family groups have long included members from outside the immediate or even blood related spheres. Step-relations, in-laws, wards, and charges have been integrated socially, legally, and visually into familial groups.
• Chosen family: Whether spiritual, such as in confraternities, convents, and other religious orders, or social, as is often found in the LGBTQ+ communities, depictions of chosen family might emphasise elements of support, belonging, or diversity.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a short biography (maximum 150 words), should be sent to maryanne.saunders@nationalgallery.org.uk by Monday, 26 January 2026. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), preferred email, contact details, and any accessibility requirements. The conference organisers aim to let contributors know the outcome by mid-February. For further information, please view the colloquium website page.

From the Call for Papers:

The Artist’s Biography, 1400–Present

The Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ)

Volume 78 (2028)

Proposals due by 20 January 2026

In Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst (1961), Jan Emmens explored how, shortly after Rembrandt’s death, critics portrayed him as a Pictor vulgaris who preferred low-life company, fallen women, and ‘rough’ brushwork rather than classicism and fine painting. Such early criticism had a lasting impact on the Romantic idea of the artist as a misunderstood genius, influencing how Rembrandt and his artworks are perceived to this very day. Art historians also indulge in biographical manipulation, as Machiel Bosman shows in Rembrandts plan: De ware geschiedenis van zijn faillissement (2019). He scrutinizes archival material to expose the fragility of biographical claims built on incomplete or interpreted evidence while inviting reflection on how artist’s biographies are constructed, revised and contested. At the same time, new research on the artist, such as into Rembrandt’s relationship to the African community in Amsterdam (Ponte, 2020), has expanded our understanding of the artist as well as provided an entry into further understanding the Black experience in the Dutch Republic.

Biography, the containment and shaping of the unruly details of a human life into writing by another, has been central to art history since the appearance Vasari’s Lives of 1550. Authors of lives of Netherlandish artists, Karel van Mander, Joachim von Sandrart, Cornelis de Bie, Arnold Houbraken, Gerard de Lairesse, Filippo Baldinucci, Bainbrigg Buckeridge, Adriaan van der Willigen and Gerarda Hermina Marius, among others, all used biography to shape their accounts of art and included commentary on artists’ life choices alongside evaluations and descriptions of their art. Netherlandish art history from the start has thus been enmeshed with the personal identity of the artists who contributed to it, and biography, however problematic or challenging, has always been implicated in art theory and the analysis of art objects. As Nanette Salomon showed in “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission” (1991), the selection of which artists’ lives to include and how they were written effectively shaped the canon of art history.

Of late, however, analysis of biographies has also served as an instrument to expand and critique the canon with particular significance for the study of Netherlandish art. Aspects neglected in biographies like artists’ gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and social class serve as a lens to ask new questions of familiar artworks or bring to the fore previously unknown or ignored artworks. Artists who did not appear in the standard biographies, especially women, are being rediscovered and given new ‘lives’. Additionally, biographical studies can also move into the direction of cancel culture. Comedian Hannah Gadsby, in her Netflix show Nanette (2017) and her exhibition, It’s Pablomatic (2023) at the Brooklyn Museum castigated Picasso’s misogyny. That same year, essayist Claire Dederer published Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023), exploring the consequences of such feelings as described by Gadsby. What do we do with great art by bad people? How do we define what’s bad and how does this relate to the art?

NKJ 78 invites contributions exploring examples of entanglement between artwork and artist biography that will advance our understanding of the significance and theoretical implications of biographies of artists from the Low Countries (present-day Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands), 1400-present. We are also interested in papers that consider the definition of artists’ biographies and the potential value to art historical study for expanding it.

The call is open for studies on a range of matters related to artists’ biographies, including but not limited to:
• Historical attempts at separating artists from their art
• Identity as a driving artistic force
• Appropriation of an artist’s biography to political ends
• Biography in the quest for greater representation in scholarship and museum collections
• Biography in relation to notions of genius or greatness
• Relationship of artists’ biographies and the identity and status within culture
• Transgression/transgressive behavior as inherent artistic quality
• The relation between biography and cancel culture
• The power of time to change appreciation of artists’ conduct
• The relationship between individual artist’s identities and their broader societal contexts
• Differences in the form and function of artist biographies in northern and southern Europe
• Differences in the writing and perception of biographies between male and female artists
• How art theory shapes biography and vice versa
• Relating the life of the artist to the life of objects
• Portraits as a form of biography
• Artistic autobiography, including self portraits
• Expansion of the notion of biography
• Biography as a frame of cultural encounter, involving the locations, mobility and geographical affiliations of artists
• Biography and the development of art connoisseurship, including insights from technical and digital art history
• The literary tools of artists’ biographical writing: ekphrasis, anecdote, the moral exemplum

The NKJ is dedicated to a particular theme each year and promotes innovative scholarship and articles that employ a diversity of approaches to the study of Netherlandish art in its wider context. More information is available here. Contributions to the NKJ are limited to a maximum of 7500 words, excluding notes and bibliography. Following a peer review process and receipt of the complete text, the editorial board will make a final decision on the acceptance of a paper.

Please send a 500-word proposal and a short CV to all volume editors by 20 January 2026:
Lieke Wijnia, l.wijnia@rug.nl
Natasha Seaman, nseaman@ric.edu
Ingrid Vermeulen, i.r.vermeulen@vu.nl

Schedule
20 January 2026: Deadline for submission of abstracts
February 2026: Notifications about abstracts
1 November 2026: Submission of full articles for peer review
Early 2027: Decision on acceptance based on peer reviews
1 July 2027: Deadline revised articles
1 September 2027: Final articles, including illustrations & copyrights
Early 2028: Publication