Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Baroque Portraiture in Silesia and its Neighbouring Lands: New Perspectives

The Ossoliński National Institute, Wrocław, 26–27 November 2026

Organized by Emilia Kłoda and Marek Kwaśny

Proposals due by 31 July 2026

Following the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Silesia, as a land belonging to the Bohemian Crown, became the arena of fundamental political and social transformations. In place of the local Protestant nobility, new cosmopolitan aristocratic families of the Catholic faith emerged, loyal to the imperial authority. The confessional character of the Habsburg state fostered the renewal of religious life and increased the influence of ecclesiastical institutions on politics, culture, and society.

These changes manifested themselves in numerous and magnificent artistic foundations. Noble and episcopal palaces, monasteries, and academies filled with art, with portraiture occupying a particularly prominent place. Alongside images of the ruler and his family—expressions of political loyalty—noble portrait galleries comprised likenesses of contemporary family members and their most illustrious ancestors. Thus created, the ancestor halls were intended as an artistic manifestation of high status, aspirations, and proof of noble lineage. Bishops’ palaces were adorned with portraits of successive church hierarchs, while the representative halls of monasteries were filled with extensive portrait cycles depicting subsequent abbots and abbesses. These often included imaginative representations of semi-legendary early superiors, reaching many centuries back, thereby underscoring institutional continuity and sanctioning the communities’ exceptional social position.

On the other hand, despite a more difficult political and religious situation, numerous portrait commissions also came from the numerically dominant Protestant inhabitants of Silesia: wealthy burghers, councillors, scholars, humanists, and Lutheran clergy, equally eager to emphasise their significance as prosperous and educated representatives of society. It must of course be remembered that the portrait in this period served various functions: from the most fundamental one of „making the absent present,” through representative, ritual, propagandistic, and commemorative roles, to finally serving as a tool of self-creation and manifestation of identity (social, political, and religious).

Thanks to extensive field research conducted in recent years, we know of over 800 surviving Baroque portraits of various types located in Silesian museums, palaces, monasteries, and public institutions. Despite such a rich heritage, many aspects of this artistic activity still await new, interdisciplinary approaches. Suffice it to say that over forty years have passed since the last exhibition on early modern portraiture in Silesia, organized by the National Museum in Wrocław, and since then no comprehensive, overarching study has been dedicated to this subject, leaving it on the margins of other art-historical inquiries.

Therefore, the Institute of Art History of the University of Wrocław and the Ossoliński National Institute invite you to participate in an international academic conference devoted to early modern portraiture in Silesia and its neighbouring lands. The artistic phenomena observable in Silesia were similar in other lands of the Bohemian Crown, while the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had extraordinary patrons of portraiture among its magnates and high-ranking clergy. We invite you to jointly reflect on the place of the portrait in the visual culture of Central Europe, on its functions, meanings, and transformations over the centuries. We are open to new methodological perspectives and various interdisciplinary approaches that take into account the socio-economic conditions of the epoch and region. We welcome not only scholars interested in painted portraiture but also in sculptural, graphic, and drawn portraits.

We encourage the submission of papers addressing, among others, the following topics:
• The portrait and its function: representation of power, propaganda, commemoration, self-creation, the portrait as an object of exchange
• Historicising portraiture and sacred identification portraits
• The portrait and the sitter’s identity: confession, estate, nationality, gender
• Portraitists and their place in the art market: the artistic activity of portrait painters and guild structures with their constraints, secular and ecclesiastical servitorate, artist mobility and earnings
• The portrait and its display: residential ancestor galleries, monastic portrait cycles of abbots and abbesses, collections of portraits of famous figures, scholars and professors, bourgeois interiors, images in public spaces, epitaphs and tombstones
• The portrait in sculpture, numismatics, graphic arts, and decorative arts
• The turbulent fate of portraits: translocations, destruction, thefts, restitution
The thematic scope remains flexible. We will gladly consider proposals that extend beyond the aforementioned areas.

Speaking time: 20 minutes
Conference languages: English
Please send your proposals by 31 July 2026 to marek.kwasny2@uwr.edu.pl.

Submissions should include:
Full name, academic title/degree, affiliation
Paper title
Abstract (max. 200 words)
Short biographical note

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 31 August 2026.

We plan to publish a peer-reviewed post-conference monograph in English with a high-scoring academic publisher.

Conference Fee: 450 PLN / 100 EUR
The fee includes: conference materials, coffee breaks, lunches, and a gala dinner. Please note that the organizers do not cover travel or accommodation expenses. However, we are happy to assist with hotel reservations where possible.

Scientific Committee
Katarína Kolbiarz Chmelinová, PhD., Comenius University Bratislava
Andrzej Kozieł, University of Wrocław, University of Ostrava
Zuzana Macurová, Ph.D., Palacký University Olomouc
Jacek Tylicki, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Organising Committee
Emilia Kłoda, The Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław
Marek Kwaśny, Institute of Art History, University of Wrocław

From ASECS:

2027 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference

Portland, Oregon, 1–3 April 2027

Sessions Proposals due by 18 July 2026

Paper Proposals will be due by 18 September 2026

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) is pleased to announce our Call For Papers for the 57th Annual Meeting,  to be held 1–3 April 2027 in Portland, Oregon. The Society, established in 1969, is the foremost learned society in the United States for the study of all aspects of the long eighteenth century, the period from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In their 57th edition, ASECS is co-hosting its Annual Meeting along with the Western Society of Eighteenth American Studies, and collaborating with the Society for French Historical Studies.

ASECS is committed to fostering an inclusive and welcoming conference environment in which all members participate fully in the exchange of knowledge and ideas. The society welcomes scholars pursuing all aspects of eighteenth-century studies and in all careers and career stages: in graduate studies; in tenured, tenure track, or non-tenure track academic positions; in part-time or temporary positions in the academy; and colleagues in contexts beyond the academy including libraries, museums, publishing, and teaching, as well as independent scholars.

The Annual Meeting has four rounds for submissions:

Round 1 | 22 May — 22 June 2026
Call for guaranteed sessions (panels, roundtables, poster sessions, and special sessions) submitted by caucuses and affiliate society chairs. Submissions must have session title, session description, email, chair/co-chair. Submissions for these sessions must be from caucuses or affiliate members in good standing. Caucuses can have up to two sessions, affiliates can have one.

Round 2 | 22 June — 18 July 2026
Open call for session proposals by chairs (panels, roundtables, project sessions, special sessions). Submission must have session title, session description, email, and chair/co-chairs.
Important: Before submitting, please review the guaranteed caucus and affiliate sessions that were submitted in Round 1 to avoid duplication.

Round 3 | 31 July — 18 September 2026
Open call for individual paper abstracts to proposed chairs’ sessions. Submissions must have presenter’s name, paper title, email, and paper abstract.

Round 4 | 10–18 October 2026
Open call for individual paper abstracts. Submissions must have presenter name, paper title, and paper abstract Individual paper abstracts that were not selected in Round 3 can become part of Round 4 or ASECS created sessions, that are organized by the Program Committee.

Please direct any questions to ASECS Meeting Planner, Devon Binder, at programs@asecs.org.

Program Committee
Monica Hahn
David Diamond
Soren Hammerschmidt
Sal Nicolazzo
Marisol Barbón
Leigh Mercer

From the Call for Papers:

Many (More) Antwerp Hands: Collaborations across Media, 1500–1750

Rubenshuis, Antwerp, 22–23 April 2027

Proposals due by 31 July 2026

In early modern Antwerp, making was rarely a solitary act. Artists and artisans participated in complex processes of production that relied on an array of specialists, materials, techniques, and areas of knowledge. Collaboration as a dominant organizing principle of artistic creation in Antwerp was critically foregrounded in a 2018 Rubenianum conference, which explored how artists pooled their skills, divided their labor, and forged creative partnerships in one of early modern Europe’s most productive artistic centers. An edited volume with its origins in the conference, Many Antwerp Hands: Collaborations in Netherlandish Art, 1400–1750 (Harvey Miller Publishers), was published in 2021. Both the conference and the book positioned painting, and to a lesser extent printmaking, as its primary media.

In the years since, scholarship on early modern Netherlandish art has increasingly turned its attention to media beyond painting and the graphic arts, while also asking new questions about how those media relate to one another. In particular, sculpture and the decorative arts (metalwork, textiles, and glass, among others) have attracted renewed interest. With this interest, there is also a sharper awareness of how these objects rarely emerged from a single hand, discipline, workshop, or material. Instead, artistic production in Antwerp relied on wide networks of contributors whose roles were integral to the conception, execution, and reception of works of art. Collaboration can thus be read across media, among a variety of specialists, and traversing the boundaries imposed by institutional structures and art historical categories.

It is within this context that the Rubenshuis will return to the subject of collaboration in 2027 for the second chapter of Many Antwerp Hands, broadening the conversation to include the full range of media, materials, intermedial exchanges, and actors that shaped artistic life in early modern Antwerp. This conference will take place in the year of the 450th anniversary of Rubens’s birth and look ahead to the planned reopening of the Rubenshuis in 2030, embracing that moment of renewal as an opportunity to imagine a materially diverse and interconnected future for the study of early modern Netherlandish art.

We invite proposals that engage with collaboration across a broad range of media, practices, and perspectives, with early modern Antwerp as their center of gravity. Contributions might address the collaborative making of individual objects, the structures that enabled or constrained collaboration, the movement of designs and materials locally and globally, and the individual actors who shaped Antwerp’s culture of making. Papers may also call into question the spatial or institutional boundaries of artistic collaboration in Antwerp, as well as reconsider the categories through which artistic labor has traditionally been defined and valued. We welcome perspectives from beyond the visual arts, exploring how artisans collaborated with practitioners of the performing and literary arts, or with those working in natural philosophy and the emerging sciences. Finally, we encourage scholarship that sheds light on the contributions of women and underrepresented racial and religious groups connected to Antwerp’s artistic economy.

Papers might address, but are not limited to:

Formal Networks
Guilds, academies, and societies as sites where collaboration is facilitated or constrained

Informal Networks
Collaborations between women and through kinship networks (families, marriages, friendships)

The Workshop
Internal organization, division of labor, and collaborative production

Paper as Catalyst
The role of drawing and design in activating collaborative processes

Travel and Exchange
Antwerp artists collaborating across distances and borders; economic networks as channels for collaboration (trade, supply chains)

Conceptual Collaboration
Shared ideas, programs, and intellectual exchange between makers

Material Transformations
How materials change hands, forms, and meanings across media

Interspherical Collaborations
Exchanges between the visual arts and other spheres of making (i.e. natural philosophy, emerging sciences, performing and literary arts)

Paintings as Objects
The painted surface as a material thing that travels, is reworked, and participates in larger collaborative chains (i.e. frame and panel makers, pigment sourcing and making)

Animal Materials
Substances of animal origin and the collaborative networks their use implies

Gender
Formal and informal roles of women in collaborative artistic production, including in workshops, religious settings, or the domestic sphere

Underrepresented Spaces and Actors
Environments and participants not traditionally recognized as sites of art making

Abstracts of no more than 400 words, accompanied by a short academic bio and up to 2 images (if applicable), should be submitted to manyantwerphands2027@gmail.com by 31 July 2026. Abstracts should clearly articulate the research question addressed, the object(s), artist(s), or material(s) under consideration, and the methodological approaches used to examine them. Speakers can expect to be notified by September 2026. Those whose proposals are accepted will be asked to submit a draft of their paper approximately six weeks before the conference. Papers should be in English and 20 minutes in length. For any questions about the conference or its call for papers, please email manyantwerphands2027@gmail.com.

Organized by the Rubenshuis, Antwerp, with visiting researchers:
• Emily Hirsch (Brown University, United States)
• Hanne Schonkeren (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
• Margot Steurbaut (Rice University, United States)
• Annelies Verellen (McGill University, Canada)

From ArtHist.net:

The Art of Failure: Hybridity, Risk and the Limits of Artistic Projects, 1450–1900

Die Kunst des Scheiterns: Hybridität, Risiko und die Grenzen des

künstlerischen Handelns, 1450–1900

9th Philipp Hainhofer Colloquium, Augsburg, 19–21 March 2027

Proposals due by 30 September 2026

The Augsburg art entrepreneur Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) designed highly elaborate display furniture, most of which contained numerous, equally masterfully crafted fittings and ranked among the most complex works of art of his time. Whilst the Pomeranian Art Cabinet (1611–1617), the earliest of these grand pieces of furniture, was created as a commissioned artwork, Hainhofer had his later major projects produced only for the open market. These works combined artistic and iconographic conception, the organisation of a collaborative working process that brought together a wide variety of arts, the marketing of the finished product, and, not least, logistics, transport and conservation. His late pieces of furniture reached such a degree of complexity and scale that, whilst exceptionally artistic, they were virtually impossible to sell due to their high prices and the difficulty of handling them. In other words: Hainhofer deliberately pursued an artistic concept, even though it was fraught with a high risk of failure.

For this reason, the 9th Philipp Hainhofer Colloquium has chosen the issue of failure in the arts and sciences as its starting point. As is known, Hainhofer was not only an art agent; he also acted as a mediator of knowledge and political information. Consequently, the focus will be on projects and works in the visual arts as well as those in the field of knowledge dissemination, spanning from the late Middle Ages to the period around 1900. The aim is to take a comparative approach to examine specific projects in art and book production against the backdrop of the risk of failure and to identify the critical factors involved.

A variety of aspects may play a role here. First, the general conditions must be addressed, such as material and technical problems during production or innovation processes leading to new, experimental, yet untested methods. Furthermore, the discrepancy between the artistic or publishing ambitions of producers on the one hand, and market pressures and the expectations of audiences and clients on the other, can be identified as a key reason projects might fail. Ambitions and strategies of competition can escalate to such an extent during the creative process that, from a certain point onwards, projects become unmanageable and resources—both in terms of time and funding—are stretched to breaking point. Furthermore, such projects may become difficult to communicate to the public or remain incomprehensible due to a lack of comparability, a consideration that applies not only to art but also, in a similar vein, to publishing ventures. Likewise, the aspect of functionality must be taken into account, particularly in projects involving architecture and the applied arts, but also in sculpture (for example, in the case of funerary monuments).

The planned conference will therefore focus primarily on the inherent momentum of artistic and scientific working processes, under the key concepts of ‘hybridisation’, ‘complexity’ and ‘scale’. The scope is intended to encompass all genres of art and book production, ranging from projects such as Hainhofer’s art cabinets to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the late 19th century.

Researchers from all academic disciplines are therefore invited to submit proposals for an interdisciplinary exchange on the conference theme. Please send your proposal (max. 2000 characters) together with a CV (including details of relevant publications, if applicable) by 30 September 2026 to: Hainhofer-Kolloquium-9@t-online.de
Travel and accommodation costs for speakers (in the case of tandem teams, usually for one person only) will be covered by the organiser. If you are traveling from abroad, we will also try to cover the costs, but we may only be able to cover a portion of the travel costs. The conference languages are German and English. PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are strongly encouraged to apply.

Accepted papers will be published in an edited volume by Andreas Tacke, Michael Wenzel, and Marika Keblusek, in the Hainhoferiana series by Michael Imhof Verlag (Petersberg) in March 2028; the deadline for submission of all manuscripts is 3 October 2027.

Organised and funded by the DFG long-term project (HAB, Wolfenbüttel and the LEUCOREA Foundation, Lutherstadt Wittenberg) for the annotated digital edition of Philipp Hainhofer’s travel and collection accounts (namely Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Tacke) and the Institute for European Cultural History (IEK) at the University of Augsburg (namely Prof. Dr. Günther Kronenbitter and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Niggemann) in cooperation with Dr. Michael Wenzel (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel) and Dr. Marika Keblusek (Associate Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society).

From ArtHist.net:

Just Beautiful and Charming? Gender-theoretical Perspectives on

Production, Reception, and Representation in Miniature Painting, 1600–1900

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 9–10 July 2026

Organized by Mirja Beck and Ulrike Kern

Registration due by 6 July 2026

Towards the end of the eighteenth century both women artists and miniature painting became increasingly important in public art, but the interrelation between the two has barely been explored to date. A systematic study is still lacking, despite the fact that the proportion of women miniature artists was considerably higher than in other visible art forms. Following Linda Nochlin, we want to discuss: Why have there been so many great women miniature artists (and why do we know so little about them)?

The conference addresses a two-fold desideratum: first, female and queer positions have often been neglected in art history until recently. Secondly, miniature painting, as a particular form between decorative artisanal production, cultural-historical object of daily use and masterful art in small format, is still regarded as less relevant than, for example, large-scale painting. Within a larger art-sociological context, our intention is to shed light on artistically relevant but little-noticed actors in a genre that is underrepresented in research. In doing so, we aim to subject the status of miniature painting to an art historical re-evaluation and expand the research on the topic, which often does not go beyond questions of collecting, style and biography, by social, gender-theoretical and intersectional levels.

The objective of the conference is to discuss miniature painting as an art form which enabled female artists and other members of historically and socially marginalised groups to be active as artists. We aim to open the discourse for new research positions on miniature painting such as gender and queer studies, or the field of material culture. Central to our discussion are aspects of production of miniatures, forms of representation and circumstances of their reception between 1600 and 1900. For information and registration, please contact m.beck@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de or kern@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de.

t h u r s d a y ,  9  j u l y

10.00  Welcome and Introduction by Ulrike Kern and Mirja Beck

10.30  Panel 1 | Accessibility of a Medium
• Caroline Gould (Sheffield/London) — Rethinking the Miniaturist: Defining Mary Ann Flaxman’s Practice
• Pavla Mikešová and Olga Trmalová (Prague) — Hedwig Höna-Senft (1855–1923): An Unknown Representative of the Prague Miniature School of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
• Dorian Greenbaum (Boston) and Ulrike Kern (Frankfurt am Main) — Portraits in Circles: Ethel Webling and Her Career as a Miniature Painter in London
• Mirja Beck (Frankfurt am Main) — ‘… un genre qui laisse immaculés les habits et les mains’: Miniature and Femininity

12.30  Lunch break

16.00  Panel 2 | A Market for Miniatures
• Anna Pratley (York) — Women Miniature Copyists as Quasi-professional Suppliers of the Familial Art Market in England, 1650–1750
• Anna Vallugera Fuster (Barcelona) — A ‘Portable Museum’ for Sale: Translation Copies, Art Market, and Female Agency in a Series of Enamel Miniatures by Giuseppe Macpherson

f r i d a y ,  1 0  j u l y

10.00  Panel 3 | Medium and Agency
• Lisa Hecht (Marburg) — (Un)conventional: Giovanna Garzoni’s Zaga Christ (1635)
• Julia Saviello (Frankfurt am Main) — Gaia’s Fruits in Giovanna Garzoni’s Art
• Marianne Koos (Wien) — Bravura in Small Size. Skin, Colour, and Touch(es) in the Miniatures of Marie-Anne(?) Fragonard

12.45  Lunch break

14.15  Panel 4 | Miniature and Memory
• Laura Kromer (Konstanz) — Media Traces: Mutual Refinement in Miniature Format
• Ines Kelly (Karlsruhe) — The Heads of the Revolution: American Miniatures of the Revolutionary Era

16.15  Closing Remarks

From the Call for Papers:

Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory, and History

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 16–17 September 2026

Proposals due by 13 July 2026

Later this year, the Paul Mellon Centre will be able to announce the completion of the cataloguing of the archive of Deanna Petherbridge (1939–2024). Petherbridge was an artist, writer, curator, and educator, known above all for her artistic practice in and writing on drawing. To mark this moment, the Centre will also be showing a display of materials from her archive, accompanied by a number of Petherbridge’s artworks from private collections (29 July to 30 October 2026).

This follows closely on the heels of the publication in 2026 of the new Thames & Hudson edition of her landmark book, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (first published in 2010). Petherbridge completed the revised edition as an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute, which also holds her celebrated ink-drawn triptych, The Destruction of Palmyra (2017).

Held in collaboration with the Warburg Institute, this conference will explore Petherbridge’s concept of “drawing as visual thinking” within the context of British art history. We are seeking proposals for 20-minute papers that engage with British drawing, in any period, and in its most diverse and international contexts.

We invite proposals on any topic, but are particularly interested in the following themes:
• the purposes and functions of drawing practice
• the significations of line, particularly, but also tone and colour
• issues of power and control in drawing as a means of knowledge formation. This could include the colonial gaze, for example, or the dynamics of the life class
• drawing as a means of knowing the human body
• the role of drawing in understanding people, including the drawing of portraits within social gatherings, for example, or caricature and satire
• the role of drawing in understanding and interpreting the natural world, from the molecular to the celestial
• drawing as a prominent technology in interpreting landscapes, through topographical practice
• drawing as a means of knowing the built environment
• the role of drawing in understanding the imagination, creativity and expression

We welcome contributions from across disciplines and professional fields, as long as the proposal is focused on drawing within artistic practice, as a means of knowledge formation.

Please submit the following to events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk with the subject line “CFP Drawing as Knowledge”:
• An abstract (450 word maximum) describing your proposed contribution
• A 250-word biography
Please combine your abstract and biography into a single Word document and send it as an email attachment before Monday, 13 July 2026, 11.59pm (BST). Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Successful contributors will receive a speaker’s fee of £200, and reasonable travel and accommodation costs will be covered. If you have any access requirements, please let us know.

Jean-Baptiste Lestiboudois, Botanical and Medicinal Chart, detail, 1774, engraving with watercolor
(Paris, MNHN, Central Library; source: archive.org, 2016)

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From the Call for Papers:

Journal18, Issue #24 (Fall 2027) — Data

Issue edited by Yuthika Sharma and Clara Drummond

Proposals due by 15 September 2026; finished articles will be due by 2 April 2027

How does the notion of ‘data’ shape our understanding of the eighteenth century?

This issue of J18 queries the role of data in relation to art, visual, and material histories of the eighteenth century: for example, maps as an encapsulation of land-based statistics, the recording of flora and fauna, lists of people and occupations, the making of pattern books, logs of plantation produce, the quantification of goods traded, building/describing archives, the catalogues of collections, taxonomies, census taking, or even journals of voyages and touristic activities in the context of Europe’s maritime expansion into Asia, Americas, and the Pacific. From trade ships carrying porcelain as ballast (that was cataloged diligently) to personal cabinets of curiosity (that are examples of selective data mining), the scale and scope of data building varied. To what extent was the creation of ‘big data’ foundational to the process of empire building? And what sort of products (maps, albums, logs, gazetteers, almanacs) were the result of this information gathering? To what extent can complex, high volume datasets, such as those generated from maritime exploration, account for modes of colonial expansion? What was the nature of intangibles that resisted typification and classification?

The theme of ‘data’ takes a historical view of a phenomenon that is now driving the creation of large data centers and a quest for infinite data, and what critics have described as ‘data colonialism’ and dispossession. This issue seeks to query the idea of humanistic data as something emerging from specific cultural and historical contexts and representations of lives and ideas that were subjective and personal but that nonetheless drove larger conceptual and economic shifts in the context of empire building in the eighteenth century. This issue also encourages papers that bring together ideas from the digital humanities and collection-as-data theory and practice in order to reflect on the eighteenth century.

Proposals for issue #24 Data are now being accepted. The deadline for proposals is 15 September 2026. To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, yuthika.sharma@northwestern.edu, and cdrummond@northwestern.edu. Articles should not exceed 4000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by 2 April 2027. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

Issue Editors
Yuthika Sharma, Northwestern University
Clara Drummond, McCormick Library, Northwestern University

From the Call for Papers:

French Art and the Aesthetics of Power

Special issue of Arts, edited by Hector Reyes

Proposals due by 31 July 2026; final manuscripts due by 1 June 2027

French art looms large in the historiography of art history; its centrality is tied to the political role that France played in articulating the very idea of centralized state power for Europe more generally during the transition between the early modern and the modern age. The art of French culture, born of centralized power and encoded with cultural knowledge, has been able to sustain our collective attention, analyses, and interpretations. But as the field and the humanities have reconfigured what constitutes power and how it operates, it seems appropriate to rethink the transparency of the historical narrative that links political centralization to cultural authority to formal manifestation in art.

We invite papers that reconfigure those seemingly streamlined relations in various ways, for example: the identification of new archives that challenge our ideas about the locations or operations of power; new ideas about form, its constitution, or theorization; new ways to think about ‘experience’ as a political, social, or artistic phenomenon; new narratives of cultural patrimony; new theories or ideas of periodization; postcolonial or decolonial analyses. Together, the articles of this Special Issue will compliment and challenge the established narratives of French cultural authority while still taking seriously the artistic object that is at the heart of French patrimony’s power.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors first submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–400 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor hectorre@usc.edu or to the Arts editorial office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Hector Reyes
Guest Editor
Department of Art History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

From INHA: 

Looking Queerly / Regards Queer

Perspective : actualité en histoire de l’art, no. 2027 – 2

Guest edited by Ersy Contogouris and Nancy Thebaut

Proposals due by 15 June 2026; final drafts will be due by 1 December 2026

Pompeo Batoni, Peace and Justice, ca. 1745, oil on canvas, 120 × 90 cm (Montreal: Musée des Beaux-arts, 1979.21).

Over the last several decades, queer has emerged as one of the most generative, contested, and transformative terms in the humanities. Within art history, queer theory has challenged normative assumptions about identity, desire, authorship, temporality, and visual meaning, all the while exposing the discipline’s investments in heterosexuality, gender binaries, and teleological narratives of style and progress.

This issue seeks to highlight the diverse forms, aims, and methods of queer art histories today. How is ‘queer’ a useful mode of analysis for art historians, and how might it unsettle binaries, hierarchies, and disciplinary conventions, including the very ways that art history is written? We welcome contributions across historical periods and geographical contexts: what might it mean to queer ancient Egyptian paintings, a Mesoamerican codex, or eighteenth-century chinoiserie, for instance?

Queer can also be understood expansively and need not be limited to works explicitly addressing sexuality or gender. Indeed, we are especially interested in contributions that mobilize queer theory to rethink objects and archives not typically understood as queer. To read the history of art queerly, as this issue seeks to do, is not simply to trace the emergence of queer art since the late nineteenth century; it is to question the discipline at its core and to re-examine all images with renewed attention.

We also encourage submissions that address the tensions, limits, and exclusions within queer theory itself, including its intersections with race, colonialism, disability, class, and trans and nonbinary studies. Rather than treat ‘queer art history’ as singular and settled, we are interested in papers that actively grapple with the historiography of queer within our discipline as well as what it means to queer art history today.

Please send your proposals (a summary of 200–500 words / 2000–3000 characters, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject and a brief biography) to the editors (revue-perspective@inha.fr) by 15 June 2026. Proposals will be examined by the editorial board regardless of language (the translation of articles accepted for publication is handled by Perspective). The authors of the pre-selected projects will be informed of the editorial board’s decision in July 2026. The full articles must be received by 1 December 2026. The texts submitted (4000–7000 words / 25,000–45,000 characters, depending on the format chosen) will be accepted in final form after an anonymous peer-review process.

The full Call for Papers with a bibliography is available here»

From the Call for Papers:

The Matter of Description

History, Theory, and Practice in Material Culture Studies

5th CMCS Triennial Conference in Material Culture

Center for Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware, 2–3 April 2027

Keynote Speaker: Susan Stewart (Princeton University)

Proposals due by 15 July 2026

Long considered a distinctive concern for literary specialists, description in fact informs all the arts and humanities and, no doubt, the natural sciences as well. Any object of inquiry—from texts to paintings to other modes of representation or from raw materials to consumer goods or from stars to dark matter—requires some level of description. While description has been and remains a mainstay of Western reflective thought, its valence has fluctuated over time, with some thinkers finding description to be paralyzing or pedantic, extraneous, misleading, even deceptive, and generally unwelcome. Others, reflecting on description specifically in relation to material culture studies, theorized description as a kind of second substance through which we make sense of objects, “reality reconstituted,” as T.H. Breen put it, whereas Jules Prown thought that textual description was, inescapably, the thing itself.

The symposium, The Matter of Description, welcomes submissions from all disciplines concerned with description and the way it interacts with material culture. Papers should offer new perspectives on questions regarding the powers and practices of description, including—perhaps especially—those times when we take descriptions for granted and let them stand unexamined. On the one hand, how does the description of an object inform and transform what can be grasped of it? On the other hand, is there a uniquely material culture approach to description, one that takes material agency seriously and presumes an iterative relationship between describer and described?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) to one or more of the following themes:

Histories of Description
Ekphrasis, Realism, Mimesis, Ut Pictura Poesis and the Imitation of Nature, Word and Image

Missions of Description
Expeditions, Experiments, First Descriptive Encounters, Taxonomies and Classification, Collecting and Archiving, Laws and other Codes, Memorialization, Education

Protocols of Description
The Camera Eye, Impressionistic Description, Thick Description, Processual Description, Translation, Rules, Textbooks, Witness and Meditation, Memory and Remembering

Media of Description
Oral Traditions, Personal Records, Print, Visual Media, Diagrams, Schematics and Maps, Photography and Film, Audio Media, Data Visualization

Ethics of Description
Observational Objectivity, Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Approaches, Colonial and Imperial Gaze, Reparative Description, Politics of Description

Please send abstracts of of no more than 300 words, with a brief CV of no more than two pages, to Martin Brückner (mcb@udel.edu) and Sandy Isenstadt (isnt@udel.edu) by 15 July 2026. The conference takes place 2–3 April 2027 at the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum, DE.