Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Cemeteries as Part of the Landscape through the Centuries

Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, 5–6 November 2025

Proposals due by 31 May 2025

The Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences cordially invites you to participate in an international interdisciplinary conference focused on funerary culture, which will take place on 5 and 6 November 2025 in Prague. This conference builds upon a long-standing tradition of International Sessions on the Issue of Sepulchral Monuments, aiming to expand both the thematic and methodological scope of the discussion. This year’s theme is Cemeteries as Part of the Landscape through the Centuries, focusing on the role of burial grounds in social, urban, and natural environments. The conference seeks to create a space for scholars from various academic fields and methodological backgrounds and to offer a platform for discussing cemeteries’ historical, anthropological, artistic, and social aspects.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Cemeteries as part of the anthropological landscape — the role of cemeteries in collective memory and social identity
• Cemeteries as part of the cultural landscape — the role of burial sites in urban and natural environments, their preservation and transformation
• Cemeteries as part of the social landscape — the social role of burial grounds and their place within human communities
• The ‘sepulchralization’ of public space — from individual graves to family chapels, from churchyards to large cemeteries and memorial complexes, their development and functions across different cultural contexts

Contributions may address all aspects of the above topics, with a preference for materials or methodological approaches relating to Central Europe. We especially welcome contributions by early-career researchers, as well as studies on Jewish or Muslim sepulchral monuments, which may be included in a dedicated conference session. Conference languages: Czech, Slovak, German, and English. No conference fee will be charged.

Presentation formats
• Individual papers (20 minutes)
• Research reports (10 minutes)
• Panel presentations (including student panels)

Selected papers will be published in a collective volume within the Epigraphica & Sepulcralia—monographia series by Artefactum, the publishing house of the Institute of Art History, CAS. Other papers may be considered for publication in the journals Historie–Otázky–Problémy, Archivní časopis, or Studia historica et archivistica. The organizing committee reserves the right to select which papers will be published.

Please submit an abstract (max. 200 words) along with a short academic bio by 31 May 2025 to founova@udu.cas.cz. Authors will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their papers by 15 June. We look forward to your contributions and engaging discussions.

On behalf of the organizing committee,
Vanda Fouňová, Eva Jarošová, Kristina Uhlíková
Institute of Art History, the Czech Academy of Sciences

From ArtHist.net:

Legacies: Why Museum Histories Matter

Leiden, 13–15 January 2026

Organized by Laurie Kalb Cosmo, Marika Keblusek, and Susanne Boersma

Proposals due by 1 June 2025

The 21st century is a particularly engaging moment to study the history of museums. Due to pressing concerns about new ways to make old art accessible, global art, decolonization, and the social, ecological, and political responsibilities of culture, museums are sustaining great periods of self-reflection and debate. One could argue that museums are renewing their 18th-century Enlightenment origins as institutions of civility and hope, although these values are also undergoing reevaluation and change, in a global world.

Amidst such profound and urgent topics, what about the ideas of museums themselves? How do their storied origins—as private palace collections and Wunderkammern, houses of worship, monuments to the nation, sites of commemoration, or new archistar containers for art—relate to their significance in contemporary life? How do their physical structures, be it cabinets, palaces, white cubes, temples, churches or mausolea, and their collections reflect the museums’ histories, wherever they may be in the contemporary world? How do we navigate the idea of the museum as an inherited construct, within the context of its many debates? What is it about a museum’s past that keeps us curious, and how does it inform what it does in the present?

This international conference invites papers that focus on museums with significant founding histories—broadly defined by their buildings, collections, commemorative functions, collectors, or founders—that are currently engaged in some manner of institutional introspection, by way of exhibitions, acquisitions, restitutions, or renovations. We invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

Museums and Buildings
How does architecture shape a museum’s legacy and/or how does legacy shape a museum’s architecture?

Museums and Geopolitics
How do museums respond to war, vis-à-vis their collections, provenance, and national identities of the artists, whose work they exhibit or collect?

Museums and Social Responsibility
As museums take on ownership of their pasts, what do they owe the visiting public, and what do visitors owe them?

Museums and Their Pasts
How can a museum’s history be reconstructed through its collections, exhibitions and building?

Museum Founders and Their Legacies
How do founders’ stipulations inform contemporary museum practices?

Museums in the World
How are the legacies of Western museums realized and/or revised across the globe?

Please submit your abstract (200 words) and author biography (100 words) to Dr. Susanne Boersma via s.w.boersma@hum.leidenuniv.nl by Sunday, 1 June 2025. We welcome applications from the broadest range of researchers, scholars, and museum professionals. You will be notified about the acceptance of your proposal by 1 July 2025.

This in-person conference is organized by Dr. Laurie Kalb Cosmo, Dr. Marika Keblusek and Dr. Susanne Boersma, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

From ArtHist.net:

Autres objets, autres enjeux ?

Les catalogues d’exposition hors du champ des arts visuels

Université Grenoble Alpes and Musée dauphinois, 6–7 November 2025

Proposals due by 2 June 2025

Après plusieurs journées d’études appréhendant le catalogue d’exposition d’arts visuels comme un objet d’étude en soi (Paris 2023 et 2024, Bordeaux 2025), ce titre sous forme de question est volontairement provocateur. Il reprend en effet, pour évidemment le questionner, un partage entre musées des Beaux-arts et musées autres qui a structuré la vision des musées du point de vue de l’action publique, et qui a renvoyé dans une catégorie définie par défaut des musées extrêmement divers et hétérogènes. Il s’agit ici d’interroger les formes, les pratiques et les enjeux liés aux catalogues d’expositions et aux publications liées à celles-ci, dans les musées de société, les écomusées ou les musées de science, mais aussi les catalogues dédiés à des œuvres d’art de nature essentiellement allographique, c’est-à-dire qui ne se matérialisent pas dans un objet unique ou en un nombre limité d’exemplaires, mais qui s’incarnent sur le temps long dans des objets dont la diversité ne modifie pas l’œuvre idéale, comme le livre, la partition, et/ou qui s’interprètent sous des formes immatérielles, comme le concert, le spectacle de danse, la représentation théâtrale, etc.

Alors que la mise en exposition de tels artefacts a elle-même déjà fait l’objet de plusieurs travaux dans chacun de ces domaines, le catalogue qui l’accompagne n’a pas encore été vraiment interrogé, pas plus que ces différents domaines n’ont été traités ensemble. La réunion de ces différents domaines, très hétérogènes, doit d’ailleurs être immédiatement interrogée : y a-t-il réellement des différences essentielles entre le catalogue d’une exposition réunissant des œuvres autographiques (peinture, sculpture, etc.) et celui d’une exposition d’œuvres allographiques (littérature, musique, danse, etc.) ? Peut-on considérer les ouvrages édités à l’occasion d’expositions reliées à des problématiques en sciences humaines et sociales, comme des « catalogues », définis plutôt dans ce cas à partir d’un usage lié à la visite d’exposition ?

Existe-t-il vraiment des catalogues « autres », comme on a voulu désigner des musées « autres », ceux qui n’étaient pas des beaux-arts ? Y aurait-il d’un côté les catalogues d’exposition réunissant des artefacts d’abord considérés comme des œuvres d’art, de l’autre des catalogues réunissant des artefacts d’abord compris comme documents ? En retour, dans quelle mesure le choix même de la forme catalogue d’exposition témoigne-t-il du statut que l’on souhaite donner aux artefacts exposés ?

Cette journée d’étude propose de réfléchir à la fois aux similitudes et aux différences, aux enjeux communs et aux spécificités de chaque forme éditoriale, aux passages comme aux rejets, avec l’idée que cette réflexion peut permettre en retour d’éclairer le rôle des différents lieux d’exposition et d’interroger le statut des artefacts comme l’articulation entre le document et l’œuvre d’art. L’appel est donc ouvert aussi bien aux chercheur·euses qu’aux professionnel·les des musées, de l’exposition, de l’édition et de la médiation.

Les propositions pourront s’inscrire dans différents axes, qui ne sont néanmoins en rien exclusifs :

La diversité des formes, des auteur·trices et des échelles
Travailler sur les catalogues d’exposition hors du champ des arts visuels suppose de prendre en compte leur hétérogénéité, en ne se contentant pas d’une définition en creux. Une diversité thématique, d’abord, qui pose la question de la multiplicité des catalogues : peut-on penser de la même manière un catalogue portant sur la littérature ou sur les sciences, sur l’ethnologie ou sur la musique ? Une diversité d’auteur·trices, ensuite. Qui écrit dans des catalogues si divers ? S’agit-il de spécialistes de chacune de ces questions, de professionnel·les des musées ou de la médiation ? Une place peut-elle être faite aux historien·nes de l’art et des images ? Une diversité d’échelles, enfin : si certaines expositions thématiques sont de très grandes manifestations à la fréquentation exceptionnelle, nombre de musées de société sont au contraire de très petites structures. Cela pose donc la question de la possibilité même d’accompagner l’exposition d’un catalogue, et des formes d’édition choisies ou imposées, y compris par le recours à l’auto-édition.

La forme du catalogue
Le catalogue d’exposition artistique a longtemps été défini d’une part par les listes d’œuvres, d’autre part par la présence de notices pour chacune de ces œuvres, enfin par les reproductions. Dans le cadre d’expositions où les objets sont présentés plutôt pour leur valeur d’usage que pour leur valeur esthétique—ou pour leur intérêt tout à la fois documentaire et artistique—comment la forme catalogue d’exposition est-elle investie ? La question de la place des images, et de l’articulation entre texte et image paraît particulièrement pertinente, et participe du statut accordé à chacun des artefacts exposés. Par ailleurs, comment, par le catalogue, rendre compte de mises en exposition spécifiques ? Là où les musées de science misent souvent sur l’interactivité, où les musées de société ont une attention particulière à la participation des publics, l’objet catalogue ne pourrait-il pas sembler dépassé ou désuet ? Le catalogue d’exposition serait-il devenu dans ce cas un livre d’histoire ou un ouvrage accompagnant le thème de l’exposition mais sans faire catalogue ? Enfin, quand la distinction entre beau livre ou monographie d’art et catalogue d’exposition repose souvent sur l’apport heuristique du rapprochement physique des œuvres d’art en un lieu, quelle est la place de catalogues d’exposition de musées de science ou de société par rapport à des ouvrages thématiques sur les mêmes questions ?

Enjeux de médiation
L’un des enjeux principaux des catalogues d’exposition est celle de la médiation auprès des publics, lecteur·rices et spectateur·rices. Quels sont les points communs et les différences avec les catalogues d’expositions artistiques ? Dans quelle mesure les enjeux d’articulation entre science et société sont-ils portés par les catalogues d’exposition et quel public/lectorat est ici visé ? Comment s’emparer de ces enjeux dans un format historiquement et socialement situé ? Alors même que les musées de société mettent l’accent sur un activisme muséal et l’ancrage culturel dans la cité, donnant la parole aux publics, la question est ici double : les catalogues d’exposition peuvent-ils être le support de mémoires et d’histoires jusque-là non racontées, au même titre que les expositions elles-mêmes, et peuvent-ils s’adresser à des publics divers ? Dans quelle mesure ces catalogues peuvent-ils s’appuyer sur une co-construction avec les publics et sur une narration participative ? Enfin, alors même que le catalogue centré sur les arts visuels participe de la construction de la valeur des œuvres d’art, et a donc aussi une fonction économique, quelles fonctions remplissent d’autres formes de catalogues ?

Les propositions de communication (5 000 signes maximum), rédigées en français ou en anglais, seront accompagnées d’une courte bibliographie et de quelques lignes de présentation bio-bibliographique de l’auteur·ice. Elles sont à envoyer par mail jusqu’au 2 juin 2025 aux membres du comité d’organisation :
• Marie Gispert, professeure d’histoire de l’art contemporain, Université Grenoble Alpes, LARHRA : marie.gispert@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
• Hélène Trespeuch, professeure d’histoire de l’art contemporain, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, CRHA – F.-G. Pariset : helene.trespeuch@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

Comité scientifique
Marie-Christine Bordeaux (Université Grenoble Alpes), Alice Buffet (Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de l’Isère), Marie-Charlotte Calafat (MUCEM), Olivier Cogne (Musée dauphinois), Marie Gispert (Université Grenoble Alpes), Aziza Gril-Mariotte (Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs de Lyon / Aix Marseille Université), Joëlle Le Marec (Museum National d’Histoire naturelle), Federica Tamarozzi (MEG, Genève), Hélène Trespeuch (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), Erika Wicky (Université Grenoble Alpes)

From ArtHist.net:

Settecento Malerei: Cultural Transfer between Italy and the Habsburg Territories

Department of Art History of the University of Vienna, 23–24 October 2025

Organized by Eleonora Gaudieri and Erika Meneghini

Proposals due by 30 May 2025

This two-day workshop aims to explore 18th-century Italian painting as the focus of transfer phenomena between the Italian peninsula and the territories of the then Habsburg Empire, with Vienna at its centre. The high quality and renowned tradition of Italian painting, fostered by a dense network of international connections, enabled numerous artists of Italian origin or Italians by adoption to pursue successful careers at the Habsburg imperial court in Vienna. This phenomenon must be understood within the context of broader diplomatic and artistic networks that connected Vienna with key centres on the Italian peninsula such as Venice, Bologna, Rome, and Naples.

The beginning of the Settecento was characterised by a considerable expansion of the transalpine art market, driven by a strong interest in collecting Italian artworks. This phenomenon attracted numerous Italian artists, including many painters, to Vienna and to the allied courts of the German prince-electors, such as the Schönborn and Wittelsbach Houses. At the same time, a number of Austrian painters were encouraged to further their training in Italy, where they were profoundly influenced by the local visual language.

The workshop will address two main currents. First, it will investigate the meanings and functions of Italian painting within the socio-political and cultural context of the Habsburg imperial court in Vienna and its allied courts. Second, it seeks to explore the various dynamics that fostered the transfer of Italian painting and Italian artistic knowledge to Vienna and the territories of the then Habsburg Empire. We welcome innovative proposals that address the following topics:
• The reception of Italian painting in Vienna and allied territories, and the role of workshops and art academies in this process
• Italian painting as a medium of Habsburg representation
• The role of regional schools of Italian painting in the context of Viennese and Central European art collections
• Grand Tour and Kavalierstour
• The reconstruction of networks of diplomatic, artistic, and patronage relations
Contributions addressing other topics relevant to the workshop’s main focus are also welcome.

Please send your proposal—in English, German, or Italian—including the title of your presentation, an abstract (approx. 300 words), and a short CV to settecentomalerei@gmail.com by 30 May 2025. Speakers will have 20 minutes for their presentations. Applicants will be informed about the acceptance of their proposals by 30 June 2025. The conference languages are English, German, and Italian. The conditions and procedures for reimbursement of travel and accommodation costs will be communicated following confirmation of participation.

If you have any questions, please contact the organisers:

Dr. Eleonora Gaudieri, eleonora.gaudieri@univie.ac.at
Project assistant (APART-GSK funding programme)
Department of Art History, University of Vienna

Erika Meneghini, erika.meneghini@univie.ac.at
PhD Candidate
Department of Art History, University of Vienna

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.