Enfilade

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.

From ArtHist.net:

Textual Embodiments: Remediating Meaning across the Disciplines

Link Campus University, Rome, 11–12 September 2026

Proposals due by 1 June 2026

Eighteenth-century philology, as the science of editing and interpreting texts, while evolving in compartmentalised disciplines within the modern university curricula, formalised the analysis of written and visual works according to a shared methodology. Throughout its long history, philology has gone through important changes in the understanding of each component of the hermeneutic circle: author, text and reader. All periods in which philology was formalised as a discipline—i.e. the Hellenistic period, the Renaissance, and the second half of the eighteenth-century in Göttingen—have elaborated a methodology in response to important changes in the material production and dissemination of texts. A focus on the technology of writing, the critical evaluation of the manuscript tradition, and the manufacturing of printed books and critical editions have all accompanied its evolution in response to the ground-breaking technological innovations of the time mediating culture transfer.

As we are undergoing a new technological revolution with the production and dissemination of digital texts, this conference shall focus on the question of mediality in the production and circulation of texts, artistic works, and performances from all periods. What is the role of each medium (writing, printing, digital textuality, artistic practice, embodied performance) in shaping communication strategies, literary and journalistic genres, as well as interactions and synergies with other media accompanying the written text? Which communities are involved in these exchanges? The topics proposed shall ideally contribute to a transhistorical, intermedial and interdisciplinary reflection.

Possible topics include
• the circulation of manuscript texts (including collections of poems, libri amicorum, albums, diaries, etc)
• text/image dynamics from the medieval period to the contemporary era
• genres of periodical fiction and non-fiction
• digital editions of manuscript texts
• the evolving structures of the English language in relation to specific media
• the history of reading, writing and publishing
• the mediators of culture-transfer (printers, booksellers, illustrators, colonial agents)
• serialization (of printed texts and visual narratives)
• the evolving media landscape through the lens of aesthetics—performativity in conceptual art, experimental theatre, modern dance
• literary narratives foregrounding specific media
• self-reflexive transmedial adaptation studies

Please send a 250-word abstract to Alberto Gabriele a.gabriele@unilink.it and Carlo M. Bajetta at c.bajetta@univda.it by 1 June 2026.

From ArtHist.net:

New Research on Venetian Art

A Study Day for Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Researchers

Online, 24 October 2026

Proposals due by 30 June 2026

The Venetian Art History Research Group (VAHRG) invites submissions for its second virtual conference, open to current PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working on any aspect of Venetian art history. The conference will take place online via Zoom on Saturday, 24 October 2026, and will be hosted by members of the VAHRG committee. We welcome proposals for short papers presenting current research on Venetian art. Presentations may be given in either English or Italian, be accompanied by a PowerPoint, and not exceed 20 minutes. Those interested in participating are invited to submit a proposal title and an abstract (maximum 200 words) to venetianahg@gmail.com by Tuesday, 30 June 2026. Please also include your current university affiliation and the contact details of your supervisor(s).

From ArtHist.net:

The Public of the Monument, 1789–2026: Collective Celebration in Question

Le Public du monument, 1789–2026: La célébration collective en question

13th Symposium for Young Researchers in Sculpture

Online and in-person, Musée Rodin, Paris, 9 October 2026

Organized by Thierry Laugée

Proposals due by 31 May 2026

“This is how the Republic knew how to impress the masses, by involving them in these great national performances.” –Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, “Fêtes nationales,” Dictionnaire politique: Encyclopédie du langage et de la science politiques (Paris, Pagnerre, 1842), pp. 400–01.

Through these words, published by Pagnerre in 1842 in the Dictionnaire politique, Pierre-Jean David d’Angers elevated the revolutionary festivals of Year II of the Republic to the status of exemplary models, considering them to be authentically popular in nature. The Festival of the Supreme Being in particular—staging the participation of the people in the celebration of temporary statues—aroused an enthusiasm conducive to moral elevation and reminded the sculptor of the emancipatory function of the sculpted monument. David’s attentiveness to the collective dimension of the monument must be situated within the broader history of public statuary. For shared celebration—whether marking an inauguration or assuming a more symbolic form—constitutes one of the necessary conditions for a monument to be genuinely perceived as public, that is, as belonging to those who encounter it in their daily lives. Whether an association commemorates the anniversary of a great man before his statue, a spontaneous gathering assembles around an effigy in defense of a political cause, or supporters climb the statue of the Republic to celebrate a club’s victory, such gestures represent as many ways of celebrating a monument—or of celebrating with it.

Incidentally, the popular gatherings of 1899 around the sculpted monument Le Triomphe de la République by Jules Dalou are said to have inspired him with the idea of his Monument aux ouvriers, attesting to the political and artistic emulation generated by the public appropriation of the monument.

Public statuary, by inscribing itself within urban space, exists in daily proximity to pedestrians. Although the statue is intended to convey a message to them, to shape their memory, or to signal the values upheld by the locality, the role of the passerby cannot be confined to passive reception. Beyond potential financial participation through taxation or public subscription, it is the passerby who ultimately accepts—or rejects—the monument and integrates it into local social life.

To recount the history of a public monument entails reconstructing, through archival sources, the genealogy of debates and the administrative and financial decisions that led to its erection, followed by an examination of the artist’s successive projects culminating in its execution in its definitive material, and possibly its inauguration. Yet one of the fundamental stakes of public statuary lies in its inscription within the future of a locality. Every episode occurring on or around the monument, up to its potential dismantling, forms part of the long-term history of the public monument. This urban history generally escapes the artist’s control; it is composed of ceremonies and festivities that focus on the statue or incorporate it into a spatial framework defined either by deliberate choice or by necessity. This symposium therefore seeks to examine the modalities and paradoxes of celebrating statuary within the city, as well as the multiple actors involved in these collective forms of celebration. It aims to observe the statue’s “fellow citizens,” those for whom it is intended, in order to better understand their role, their practices, and the attachment they may gradually develop toward an effigy over time.

One of the proposed research perspectives concerns the study of the ways public monuments are inaugurated. As Bertrand Tillier notes, “these collective uses of the monument at the moment of its inauguration, as it enters the public sphere, generate a shared emotional experience” (La Disgrâce des statues, 2022). This emotion may surface in speeches, poems, concerts, or songs—forms whose study has, until now, remained largely peripheral. Yet a rich and varied corpus of artistic and literary works, whether published or unpublished, accompanies these ceremonies. Yet there exists a rich body of artistic and literary productions, published or unpublished, that mark the rhythm of the ceremonial proceedings and contribute to the staging of the collective.

The ways in which a monument is celebrated prove to be remarkably varied, and in some cases, they overlap significantly with religious ceremonial practices, particularly through processional forms. These points of permeability between civic and sacred spaces, far from being incidental, invite a deeper examination of the circulation of practices, symbols, and ritual registers through which individuals express attachment to—or acknowledgment of—a secular figure.

Beyond the moment of inauguration alone, it becomes clear that public statuary functions as a form of spectacle. Another research perspective during this study day will therefore be to examine the forms and uses of this spectacularization, understood as a mode of collective engagement within public space. Particular attention may be given to the most ephemeral expressions of statuary, a transitory character that appears at first glance to contradict the ideal of permanence. From the First Republic to the most recent Olympic Games, the display of temporary statues—in plaster, cardboard, paper, fabric, or resin—during civic celebrations attests to the structuring role of statuary in shaping urban discourse. Contributions addressing the use of pyrotechnics, illumination, or sound design in relation to monuments are especially encouraged, since these devices play a significant part in the festive appropriation of public monuments.

This study day is explicitly interdisciplinary in scope and is intended for scholars across all fields of the humanities and social sciences, with the aim of fostering dialogue, methodological exchange, and the enrichment of historical knowledge concerning sculpted monuments. Particular attention will be given to contributions that offer a fresh perspective on groups of monuments, civic celebrations, or related practices.

Proposals for papers may be submitted in French or English. They must include a title, an abstract (between 1500 and 2000 characters), and a brief biographical note (between 500 and 1000 characters). They should be sent before 31 May 2026 to colloques@musee-rodin.fr.

Research and Organizing Committee
Amélie Simier, Director of the Musée Rodin
Thierry Laugée, Professor of Contemporary Art History, Nantes Université, CReAAH-LARA
Emilia Philippot, Senior Curator, Head of Curatorial Affairs, Musée Rodin
Véronique Mattiussi, Head of the Research department, Musée Rodin
Franck Joubin, Researcher, Conference Coordinator, Musée Rodin

From the Call for Papers:

Painting and Genre

St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, 6 August 2026

Organized by Sofya Dmitrieva

Proposals due by 31 May 2026

Painting genres structure artistic practice, shape reception, and inform institutional frameworks. Yet as an analytical category, genre has long occupied a marginal position within art history.

This is not to suggest that the discipline has produced no genre theory. Influential studies, such as Wayne Franits’s Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (Yale University Press, 2004), have addressed genre explicitly, and scholarship on individual genres, particularly portraiture and landscape, is vast. Questions related to genre, most notably the academic hierarchy of genres, have received sustained scholarly attention, from Jean Locquin to Christian Michel, Mark Ledbury, and Paul Duro. Indeed, one of the discipline’s foundational texts—Alois Riegl’s The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902)—is a genre study.

Art-historical approaches to genre have likewise been varied and innovative. To cite just a small selection of recent examples, Amy Freund has examined the hunting portrait from a sociohistorical perspective, linking it to the changing status of the sword nobility in the early eighteenth century (Art History, 2019); Susanna Caviglia has revisited history painting under Louis XV, relating it to contemporary political and cultural discourses on pleasure (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020); and Stephanie O’Rourke has explored how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscape painting registered practices of resource extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Still, despite this substantial body of scholarship, the study of genre has remained largely overshadowed by iconographic and formalist approaches. In contrast to literary and film studies, where genre theory occupies a central methodological position, art history has yet to develop a comparably sustained theoretical framework for the analysis of genre.

This one-day conference invites contributions that place genre at the centre of the analysis of painting. It seeks to foreground genre not merely as a classificatory device but as a critical category through which artistic production, reception, and historiography can be re-examined. While certain periods, such as the Dutch Golden Age, readily lend themselves to genre-based analysis, the conference is not limited chronologically or geographically. Case studies of genres from all periods and regions are welcome, as are experimental theoretical contributions and historiographical papers that reflect on the role genre has played within art history, theory, and criticism.

Possible questions include, but are not limited to:
• What formally defines a painting genre?
• What mechanisms govern the formation, stabilisation, and transformation of genres?
• How do hybrid genres emerge and operate?
• How do generic expectations shape viewer perception and interpretation?
• How do genres reflect their historical contexts, including political ideologies, class relations, and gender roles?
• How do genres articulate sociocultural practices?
• What role have genres played within institutions (academies, museums, auction houses) and the art market?
• How has the notion of genre developed within the history, theory, and criticism of art?

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be provided at the venue. The organiser intends for the conference to result in a publication. Please submit a 300-word abstract for a 20-minute presentations and a 100-word biography to Sofya Dmitrieva (sofya.k.dmitrieva@gmail.com) by May 31.

From ArtHist.net:

Hungry for Data: Studying Court Dining and Using Sensory Data, 1300–1800

Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, Vilnius, 29–30 May 2026

Proposals due by 10 April 2026

Interested in how data, the senses, and court dining can be studied together?

The workshop Hungry for Data: Studying Court Dining and Using Sensory Data, 1300–1800 invites contributions for a hands-on, interdisciplinary event in Vilnius, 29–30 May 2026. Topics include sensory and spatial approaches to court dining, measurable proxies such as lighting, acoustics, ventilation, circulation, seating and visibility, as well as AI, modelling, and data visualisation. The call particularly welcomes contributions from researchers in history, art and architectural history, heritage studies, heritage science, digital humanities, computer science, geospatial and sensor data analysis, simulation, and AI. Early career researchers are warmly encouraged to apply. Submit an abstract (max 300 words) and a short CV (max 1 page) by 10 April 2026 to email@stephan-hoppe.de and fabian.persson@lnu.se.