Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Romantic Circulations

Nordic Association of Romantic Studies Conference

University of Oslo, 10–12 September 2026

Organized by Ellen Rees with Tonje Haugland Sørensen

Proposals due by 1 October 2025

This three-day conference at the University of Oslo invites scholars engaged in the study of romanticism writ large from the expanded Nordic region to present new research on the circulation of romantic ideas and objects. The topic Romantic Circulations encompasses both romantic discourses that arose in the period most typically associated with romanticism, but also the afterlives of romantic ideas, people, objects, discourses, etc. Focusing on processes like dissemination, circulation, and transference, we aim to challenge traditional understandings of the relationship between center and periphery in the spread of romantic discourses and aesthetics. We also posit that the recent turn toward transnational and transdisciplinary aspects of romanticism in scholarship demands a reassessment of approaches, methodologies, and historiographic structures of the field. We therefore encourage meta-theoretical perspectives, as well as meta-critical reevaluations of entrenched narratives about romantic phenomena. We also welcome cultural interventions from various perspectives, including Indigenous, environmental, postcolonial, gender, and other marginalized groups.

With this conference, we aim to expand our understanding of romanticism and explore together how it manifests and adapts in different times, place, and artistic forms. We encourage contributions from a broad range of fields, including art history and visual culture, literary studies, musicology, history of ideas, philosophy, cultural studies and museology, and history.

Keynote Speakers
• Timothy Tangherlini (University of California, Berkeley)
• Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St. Andrews)

We welcome individual proposals as well as pre-constituted panels. Early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Please send an abstract (of no more than 500 words) and a short biography (200 words) by 1 October 2025 to romanticcirculations@gmail.com. Note of acceptance will follow by 1 February 2026.

Organized by Ellen Rees (University of Oslo) in collaboration with Tonje Haugland Sørensen (NARS Executive Committee) and co-funded by the ERC project NORN.

From ArtHist.net:

‘Deviant’ Women and the Visual Arts

University of Bristol, 10 July 2025

Proposals due by 5 May 2025

The Women and the Visual Arts Research Cluster at the University of Bristol is excited to announce our forthcoming symposium taking place at the University of Bristol on Thursday, 10th July 2025. Women have long been viewed as ‘deviant’ in their roles as artists, authors, models, patrons, and collectors. Their paths to becoming artists or patrons may ‘deviate’ from the norm, their chosen medium or subjects may diverge from those expected by the market, and their representations of themselves and those around them may be unorthodox compared to the art historical canon. How can we, as researchers, contextualise this ‘deviancy’ in our work on women and the visual arts?

We welcome submissions that think about women’s ‘deviancy’ in their relationship to the visual arts in diverse ways: women who push the boundaries on what has been seen as the norm or whose work is divergent from accepted standards. While we are explicitly seeking contributions that foreground the visual, we are excited to hear from colleagues working across fields and disciplines, including (but not limited to) history of art, visual culture, classics, film and theatre studies, history, religious studies, and those doing practice-based research.

Potential topics could include, but are not limited to
• Exhibiting and collecting strategies used by women or the curation and collecting of work by women
• Self-representation and self-portraiture — identity and sexuality
• Transnational feminine identities — culture, race, immigration, and exile
• The nude and representations of the body
• The archive — the formation of celebrity, reception, and legacy
• Women and the environment
• Women’s work — motherhood, domesticity, labour, artist collectives
• ‘Deviant’ use of artistic medium through textual approaches, the applied arts, craft, performance, etc.

In addition to proposals for papers, we also welcome submissions for videos or artist talks related to the symposium’s themes. To apply, please submit a 150- to 200-word abstract with a short bio to Helena Anderson (helena.anderson@bristol.ac.uk) and Valéria Fülöp-Pochon (vf15404@bristol.ac.uk) by Monday, 5th May 2025.

From the Call for Papers:

The Future of the Antique: Interpreting the Sculptural Canon

Warburg Institute and Institute of Classical Studies, London, 10–12 December 2025

Organized by Adriano Aymonino and Kathleen Christian

Proposals due by 15 May 2025

The University of Buckingham, the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), the Warburg Institute, and the Institute of Classical Studies (University of London) are organising an interdisciplinary conference to celebrate the publication of the new edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s seminal work Taste and the Antique (Harvey Miller/Brepols, December 2024).

This landmark publication provides an opportunity to review and coordinate recent achievements and new initiatives in the study and interpretation of the Greek and Roman sculptural legacy. The original 1981 Yale University Press edition of Taste and the Antique significantly shaped the field’s direction over four decades, influencing both academic research and curatorial practices. The revised and expanded three-volume edition, featuring numerous newly commissioned photographs, substantially updates the scholarship with research from recent decades. It broadens the exploration of these works’ reception and influence, from Renaissance collectors to contemporary artists. The edition particularly examines how classical statues impacted European imagery beyond direct replication, including:
• Their adaptation across diverse media
• Their impact on art and architectural theory and pedagogy
• Their influence on anatomical study and proportional theory
• Their role in modernist culture and modern / postmodern popular culture
• Their enduring presence in contemporary imagery and conceptions of the human body

The conference aims to assess the current state of research, rethinking established methodologies and exploring possible future directions in the field. Its primary goal is to foster discussion among different generations of scholars whose research outputs are often separated by language and methodological barriers. We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on interrelated topics such as the following, outlined by the book or extending beyond it. Priority will be given to innovative papers focusing on the legacy of antique sculptural models in European/Colonial art and culture since the Renaissance:
Academy and Canon — examining their establishment, radical alteration, and dissolution in the modern era.
New Canons — the antique in modern and postmodern theoretical frameworks and practices.
Antique / Modern Bodies — classical statuary’s influence on human anatomical study; proportioned and disproportioned body concepts; the representation of the male and female body; physiognomy; conceptions of race and ethnicity.
Empire and its Enemies — political and racial implications of the antique.
Priorities and Display — the antique within modern museum contexts.
Restorations and Forgery — reconfigurations of the antique and notions of authenticity.
Narrative Patterns — the classical language of gesture, story-telling/narrative.

Please submit your title and abstract of no more than 200 words, along with a short biography (about 100 words—please do not send CVs) to Mattia Ciani (m.ciani8@student.unisi.it) by noon (BST), 15 May 2025. The abstract and biography should be combined in a single Word document and submitted as an email attachment. Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Notification of the outcome will be communicated via email by 1 July 2025. We intend to publish the proceedings of the conference.

From ArtHist.net:

Sculpture and the Non-Normative Body

Thematic issue of Sculpture Journal

Proposals due by 1 June 2025; completed articles will be due 1 September 2025

The normative body has been the traditional subject of sculpture since antiquity. Its ubiquity, however, has led to the invisibility of the diversity of bodies in the history of art: from the disabled body of Aesop and the ‘hermaphrodite’ from antiquity to the ‘grotesque’ or ‘monstrous’ from the Renaissance garden to the polychrome ‘ethnographic’ portrait busts from the nineteenth century. We want to question these categories and address bodies that have been under-represented in sculpture, either through representational strategies, materials that reflect on lived experience, and/or sculptural practice itself.

In the first of a series of recurring themed issues around sculpture and the body, the Editors of the Sculpture Journal encourage abstracts that rethink the traditional methods of sculpture in art history in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class and/or disability. We invite proposals for contributions that stem from but are not limited to the following: fragmentation and decay; queer and trans perspectives; health and disability; processes of othering; materiality; redefinitions/responses to normativity/the normative body; artists engaging in their work via lived experience or through materiality. We are looking at this issue transhistorically and globally, across a range of sculpture practices, from the figurative to the abstract.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words to be submitted to Teresa Kittler (teresa.kittler@york.ac.uk) and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez (natashar@essex.ac.uk) by 1st June 2025. Final submission of full-length articles of 6000–8000 words including endnotes will be requested by 1st September 2025.

Sculpture Journal is the foremost scholarly journal devoted to sculpture in all its aspects across the globe. It provides an international forum for writers and scholars in the wider field of sculpture, including all three-dimensional art and monuments. Published by Liverpool University Press, the journal offers a keen critical overview and a sound historical base, encouraging contributions of fresh research from new and established names in the field.

From ArtHist.net:

Essay Collection | Rethinking the Material Afterlives of Animals, 1500–1800

Edited by Catherine Girard and Sarah Grandin

Proposals due by 30 April 2025; final essays due February 2026

Do animals introduce a material difference to objects from the early modern period? Should scholars think differently about objects that include animal remains than they do about other materials? The editors of this volume invite essays that examine human and non-human animal relations through objects made of animal remains in the early modern period to investigate this possible difference. This era saw intensified zoological research alongside the expansion of armed trade, overland and maritime travel, and extractive industries dependent on biotic materials. These shifts shaped the ways in which animal remains were preserved, transformed, and recontextualized within artistic and economic networks. Rather than treating these materials in terms of visual encounters alone, contributors to this volume are asked to foreground the visceral and tactile engagements generated by objects crafted with materials such as fur, skin, quills, feathers, shells, ivory, and bones.

We encourage essays that stem from diverse epistemologies and that explore alternative approaches to thinking about artistic materials. How might perspectives that emphasize reciprocity and relationality, for instance, reshape art historical approaches to objects made with and from animals? How does animal presence both ‘construct and disrupt’ human culture? How are the material ‘affordances’ of biomatter—their ability to alert, lubricate, protect, join, support—preserved, distorted, or deferred in human-made objects? How do such materials maintain continuity with their former life and how are they fundamentally altered? We invite contributors to reflect on how their work can be a site of reconciliation, acknowledging both the original contexts of these materials and the contemporary responsibilities of their material, intellectual, and spiritual caretakers.

The book seeks full-length essays that examine moments of transformation in the lives of these animal materials: from the deep ecological knowledge of those who sourced these materials, to the artisans and artists who processed them, to the wearers and collectors who recontextualized them. How do the acts of sourcing, crafting, and collecting materialize particular worldviews? How do these objects navigate tensions between organic and inorganic, sentient and non-sentient entities? What are the limits of such categories?

We also invite shorter contributions that explore the specific ethical and methodological challenges that museological care and conservation raise. How does the field of conservation reckon with biotic materials’ instability and latent animacy? What are the ethical implications of working with such materials? How do artists, scholars, curators, and knowledge-keepers participate in the care of historical objects that include animal substrates?

As a whole, this volume aims to chart new methods for engaging with animal materials in the archive, interrogating how anthropocentrism and colonialism have shaped art history’s disciplinary practices and omissions. We welcome contributions from scholars in art history, visual and material culture, museum studies, and related disciplines who are interested in rethinking the material afterlives of animals from diverse cross-cultural, temporal, and methodological perspectives.

Please submit a 500-word abstract to Catherine Girard (St. Francis Xavier University, cgirard@stfx.ca) and Sarah Grandin (The Courtauld Institute of Art, Sarah.Grandin@courtauld.ac.uk) by 30 April 2025, specifying whether you are planning to write a full-length essay of up to 8000 words or a shorter contribution of up to 4000 words, including notes. Final essays will be due in February 2026.

From the full Call for Papers, which includes the French Appel à communication) . . .

Visual Culture of Gastronomy, 16th–20th Century

La culture visuelle de la gastronomie, XVIe–XXe siècles

Galerie Colbert, Paris, 18–19 December 2025

Organized by Frédérique Desbuissons and Ryan Whyte

Proposals due by 1 June 2025

This international conference addresses the visual dimension of gastronomy, whose study surpasses traditional disciplinary limits for historical research (Allen Weiss, Déborah L. Krohn, Marcia Reed). In contrast to the logocentric definition that prevails in most of the work on gastronomy of the last century (Jean-Louis Flandrin, Pascal Ory, Priscilla Ferguson, Jean-Robert Pitte), we propose to consider gastronony as a qualitative relationship to food (Julia Csergo) constituted not least by images in their sensory and material manifestation. Whether as visual perception or material representation in the visual arts, printed matter, consumer goods such as games and toys, or popular and mass culture more broadly, images have played an active role in the construction and experience of the “art of eating well” [art de bien-manger] (Brillat-Savarin). Due to their quantity and ubiquity, such images, whether traditional or more often “popular,” are as essential to gastronomy as those of the fine arts, usually more difficult to access due to their socially restricted sites, relative rarity, and elite visual language. Visual culture, far from being subordinated to or dependant on text as mere illustration, commentary or archival record, immediately and directly defines “eating well.” D’abord l’à bord [first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er)], in the formula of Jacques Derrida, the very immediacy of gastronomic images defines the perimeters of gastronomy, thereby to furnish foundational models of experience and desire. In this way images, inseparable from other forms of signification, testify to the composite nature of gastronomy.

In the early modern period, the culture of the table began to free itself from both the rules of dietetics and the religious morality stigmatizing sensual pleasures that Louis de Jaucourt, in the Encyclopédie, evoked in defining cuisine as “lust for good food” [cette luxure de bonne chere dont on fait tant de cas], perpetuating its denigration by Michel de Montaigne as the “science of the gullet” [science de gueule] two centuries earlier. Meanwhile, banquets abandoned the ostentatious symbolism that prevailed before the Renaissance. Cuisine became a product of intellectual exchange in which images played a key role, including frontispieces and other images for cookbooks, reference books and other works relating to domestic economy. In urban spaces, images of consumer products were disseminated in the form of shopsigns, window displays, and trade cards. In France, on the eve of the Revolution, “eating well” no longer necessarily meant eating to maintain physical and moral health according to the precepts of medicine and religion, but also eating good things, with the right table setting, in an appropriate environment, and in good company. All these dimensions of table culture are described, not without irony, in the poem of Joseph de Berchoux, “Gastronomy: Or the Rural Philosopher Dines” [La gastronomie, ou l’homme des champs à table] (1801), whose title would furnish the term for the “art of good cheer” finally accepted by the Académie française in its Dictionary of 1835.

Like the various prints published in successive editions of Berchoux’s poem, images participated in the diffusion of the knowledge, practice, and social imaginary of gastronomy well beyond the narrow social and geographic limits of the table culture of the Old Regime. The multiplication of images and print technologies in the nineteenth century emancipated gastronomy from the houses and restaurants accessible only to those capable of employing the services of great chefs, consuming luxury products, and frequenting good tables. In addition to the fine grocery stores, caterers, and restaurants emblematic of the urban spectacularization of food from the nineteenth century, representations disseminated in books, journals, and posters revealed the labour, implements, stagings, uses, and forms of conviviality once inaccessible to most people.

If images established a new visual regime of gastronomy, they also fixed and standardized norms transcending local and regional variations and facilitating their broader recontextualization. This is why this conference will focus on developments in Europe in the early modern period and following the French Revolution, as well as on other gastronomic cultures and geographies, whether in themselves or operating in the context of colonial empires and other forms of globalization of food products, standards, and practices. How, in particular, may one describe and conceptualize qualitative relationships to food in non-European cultures using emic images and terms rather than the etic discourses of European gastronomy? And how can subaltern communities create visual cultures as vectors of resistance and emancipation, as in the exemplary case of Soul Food? We invite proposals from all disciplines on the visual dimensions of gastronomy, whether international or local, elite or popular. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

Physiology, psychology
• Food synesthesias
• Ephemeral consumption and visual memory

Presentation, representation, conservation
• Representing taste
• Staging the table
• Gastronomical exhibitions (displays, markets, shop windows, museums and galleries …)
• Museums and heritage

Media and technologies
• Print culture and gastronomy: almanacs, newspapers, magazines, posters, pamphlets, etc.
• Design, packaging, labels
• Food and image technologies

Geographies, spaces, sites
• Perimeters and geographies of the gastronomic image
• Sites of production and consumption: kitchen, pantry, dining room, restaurant
• Empire and gastronomy

Values, customs, ideologies
• Images, egos, personifications: eaters, chefs, critics, gastronomes, servants, merchants
• Moralities of food
• Political and gastronomic economies
• Gastronomic laughter: satire, burlesque, comedy

Please submit proposals in French or English, including an abstract of maximum 700 words and a brief curriculum vitae by 1 June 2025 to frederique.desbuissons@univ-reims.fr and rwhyte@ocadu.ca.

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / OCAD University, Toronto) / Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs
Frédérique Desbuissons (université de Reims) & Ryan Whyte (OCAD University, Toronto)

Scientific Committee
James Benn, McMaster University, Hamilton
Valérie Boudier, université de Lille
Gwenhael Cavanna-Kernemp, Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Julia Csergo, Université du Québec à Montréal
Michael Garval, North Carolina State University
Jérémie Koering, Université de Fribourg
Camille Paulhan, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Bibliographie indicative / Preliminary Bibliography

L’Art de manger. Rites et traditions en Afrique, Insulinde et Océanie, exh. cat. Paris, musée Dapper, 2014–2015.
L’Art gourmand, exh. cat. Bruxelles, Galerie du Crédit communal, 1996–1997.
Atelier + Küche = Labore der Sinne, cat. exp. Hertford, Marta Herford, 2012.
Victoria Avery (ed.), Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, exh. cat. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 2019
Sylvette Babin (ed.), Eating the Universe : vom Essen in der Kunst, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2009–2011
Kate Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side, Chicago, Dartmouth College Press, 2015
Judith A. Barter (ed.), Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, exh. cat. Chicago, Art Institute, 2013–2014.
Daniel Bender (ed.), Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2024
Diane Bodart and Valérie Boudier (ed.), Le banquet de la Renaissance : images et usages, Prédella. Journal of Visual Arts, n° 33, 2013.
Nicolas Bourriaud (ed.), Cookbook. Quand l’art passe à table, exh. cat. Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2013–2014.
Susan Bright, Feast for the eye. The Story of Food in Photography, New York, Aperture, 2017.
Germano Celant (ed.), Arts & Foods. Rituali da 1851, exh. cat. Milano, Triennale di Milano, 2015.
Germano Celant (ed.), Cucine & Ultracorpi, exh. cat. Milano, Triennale design Museum, 2015.
Julia Csergo, La gastronomie est-elle une marchandise culturelle comme une autre ?, Chartres, Menu fretin, 2016.
Julia Csergo and Frédérique Desbuissons (eds), Le cuisinier et l’art. Art du cuisinier et cuisine d’artiste (XVIe-XXIe siècle), Chartes, Menu Fretin ; Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2018.
Jörg Dürrschmidt and York Kautt (eds.), Globalized Eating Cultures: Mediation and Mediatization, Cham (Switzerland), Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Zilkia Janer, The Coloniality of Modern Taste: A Critique of Gastronomic Thought, London, Routledge, 2023.
Shana Klein, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion, Oakland, University of California Press, 2020.
Jonatan Leer and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (eds), Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions, and Heterotopias, London, Routledge, 2016.
Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache (eds), Food and Museums, London [etc.], Bloomsbury, 2017.
Deborah Lupton and Zeena Feldman (eds) Digital Food Cultures, New York, Routledge, 2020.
Simeon Magliveras (ed.), Odysseys of Plates and Palates: Food, Society, and Sociability, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015
Marcia Reed (ed.), The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, exh. cat.. Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, 2015.
Jérémie Koering, Les iconophages, une histoire de l’ingestion des images, Arles, Actes Sud, 2021.
Deborah L. Krohn, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens, London and New York, Ashgate Publishing, 2015.
Linda Roodenburg, Food is fictie verhalen over voedsel en vormgevin / Food is fiction. Stories about food and design, Rotterdam, nai010 Publisher, 2018.
Nancy K. Stalker (ed.), Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity, New York, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Nelleke Steughels and Peter Scholliers (eds), A Taste of Progress: Food at International and World Exhibitions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, Ashgate, 2017.
John Varriano, Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy, Oakland, University of California Press, 2009.
Kim M. Williams and Warwick Frost, Gastronomy, Tourism, and the Media, Bristol, Channel View Publications, 2016.

From ArtHist.net and the Call for Papers:

Practices of Entanglement

38th Annual Conference of the South African Visual Arts Historians

University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 25–27 September 2025

Proposals due by 11 April 2025

The term entanglement has been widely used in academic discourse across multiple disciplines—postcolonial studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, physics and beyond. It often refers to the complexity of relationships between histories, cultures, and identities, with Karen Barad extending these ideas to apply to what she calls agential realism, where concepts of entanglement (or intra-action) describe how entities emerge through relationships with other entities, challenging traditional distinctions between subject/object, human/nonhuman.

Nicolas Bourriaud applies entanglement to contemporary art, arguing that artists navigate and intertwine multiple cultural and historical references, making art a process of relational engagement rather than fixed meaning. Achille Mbembe, on the other hand, applies notions of entanglement to postcolonial and decolonial thought, as a means to demonstrate how Africa’s colonial past and present are inextricably linked, producing complex subjectivities and overlapping temporalities. Conceptualisations such as these challenge linear narratives of history and explore how colonial and postcolonial conditions are mutually constitutive.

The concept of entanglement has gained traction in art history, especially in relation to postcolonial theory, global art histories, material culture, and the decolonial turn. Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial work, such as Documenta 11 (2002), foregrounded the idea of art as a site of entangled histories, where space and meaning are in constant negotiation. Mieke Bal proposes that the interplay between visuality and textuality is a fundamental aspect of interdisciplinarity, and this dualism is also central to the discipline of art history, which at its core involves writing about visual things. The tension produced through the entanglement of verbal and visual languages has also been foregrounded since the Practice Turn insisted on the ability of creative practice to produce original knowledge.

The 2025 SAVAH conference aims to pull at these entangled threads and connections in order to begin an untangling that might reveal the richness of the layers in between. In the spirit of creative curiosity, we ask that submissions focus on the many possible questions rather than the conclusions. We welcome provisional research in progress and hope that the conference will be a platform for knowledge sharing and exchange. We also, therefore, welcome submissions that think through some of these webs across disciplines, and are interested in novel research of any kind that extends beyond the themes outlined below.

Abstract submissions could focus on (but are not limited to) the following topics:
• Visual and verbal entanglements: language, image, and knowledge production
• Postcolonial and decolonial art histories
• Materiality and entangled objects
• Entangled histories and temporalities
• Materiality and the making of tntanglements
• Entangled objects, archives, and memory
• Decolonial entanglements and the politics of space
• Curatorial entanglements: exhibitions, practice, and knowledge sharing
• Entangled performances of self and society
• Other novel research and experimental approaches to entanglement

We invite papers and visual presentations from scholars, researchers, and post‐graduate students. Practice-led research is particularly welcome. We also invite contributions from SAVAH members on current research that engages topics not included in this call for papers. Please submit an abstract of 300–400 words via the savah.org.za website by 11 April 2025. Successful applicants will be notified by 30 April 2025. For any queries, please contact conference@savah.org.za.

From CAA:

114th Annual Conference of the College Art Association

Hilton Chicago, 18–21 February 2026

Panel Proposals due by 25 April 2025

The CAA Annual Conference is the largest convening of art historians, artists, designers, curators, and visual arts professionals. Each year we offer sessions submitted by our members, committees, and affiliated societies that deliver a wide range of program content. The 114th Annual Conference will take place at the Hilton Chicago, 18–21 February 2026. The conference will be held in person with a selection of hybrid sessions and events. CAA leadership, in collaboration with the Annual Conference Committee, is reviewing participant and attendee feedback from the 113th Annual Conference to determine any format adjustments needed for the 2026 program. Please check back regularly for updates and see this page for important information.

t i m e l i n e

March 15: Call for Proposals period begins; submission forms open
April 25: Deadline for CAA114 session, workshop, and presentation submissions
Mid-July: Submitters notified of acceptance or rejection
July: Affiliated Society Business Meeting & Reunion or Reception request forms open
Late July: Call for Participation (CFP) opens
Late August: Deadline for CFP submissions
Mid September: Deadline for chairs of sessions soliciting contributors to make decisions and add to session entry
Early October: Registration opens and conference schedule is announced
December 5: Access accommodation requests for in-person and/or remote participants due to CAA.
February 18–21: Annual Conference

This panel is part of the AISU conference in Palermo:

‘National’ Churches and Mediterranean Ports in the Early Modern Period

Foreign Communities Reshaping the Urban Fabric

Chiese ‘nazionali’ nei porti del Mediterraneo in età moderna (secoli XV–XVIII)

Il ruolo delle comunità forestiere nella riconfigurazione del tessuto urbano

Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana Congress, Palermo, 10–13 September 2025

Organized by Nadia Rizzo and Carl Alexander Auf der Heyde

Proposals due by 3 May 2025

The establishment of ‘national’ mercantile groups in major Mediterranean port cities—key hubs for cross-cultural exchange—developed continuously from the Middle Ages into the early modern period (Colletta 2012). These ports became meeting places for foreign merchants who organised themselves into ‘nations’, structured associations based primarily on geographical origin, but also on shared language and religion (Petti Balbi 2001). These communities did not limit their activities to commercial spaces such as ‘fondaci’ and ‘logge’.

From at least the fifteenth century, they established meeting and worship places, often gaining patronage for chapels within existing churches. The most ambitious goal of the foreign communities, however, was the construction of a dedicated church, consecrated to their patron saint and intended primarily to meet the religious and liturgical needs of the group (Koller, Kubersky-Piredda 2015 [for national churches in Rome]). In addition to serving as a devotional landmark, the construction of a national church was a clear statement of the community’s presence, identity, and wealth, exerting a tangible and visible influence on the urban and architectural landscape of the host city.

From the mid-sixteenth century, coinciding with a wave of significant urban redevelopment, there was a marked increase in the construction of national churches independent of local religious communities. This phenomenon intensified during the seventeenth century, alongside the architectural fervour of the newly emerging Counter-Reformation orders, fostering a virtuous cycle of competition not only between nations, but also among religious congregations and national communities.

This panel seeks to explore the impact of foreign communities on the urban transformation of Mediterranean port cities between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the institution of the national church as a key reference point. We invite proposals in Italian, English, Spanish, and French that approach this topic from different perspectives and levels of analysis, including:
• Research on the settlement system of a single nation in multiple mercantile centers
• Specific studies on individual national churches
• Diachronic investigations on the settlement of a foreign group in a specific center (from chapels to national churches)
• Comparative overviews of multiple national churches in the same city

To apply, please fill out the form available at the bottom of each session presentation. The link for session 4.1 can be found here. Applicants are required to submit the paper abstract (maximum 5000 characters) and a brief biographical note. For any further information regarding the session, please contact the panel coordinators: Nadia Rizzo (Scuola Normale Superiore, nadia.rizzo@sns.it) and Carl Alexander Auf der Heyde (Università degli Studi di Palermo, carlalexander.aufderheyde@unipa.it).

The congress of the Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana (Italian Association of Urban History / AISU International) will meet in Palermo, 10–13 September 2025. This year’s theme is The Crossroad City: Relations and Exchanges, Intersections and Crossing Points in Urban Realities.