APS Sponsored Call for Papers:
Renaissance Society of America, Feb 19-21, 2026, San Francisco
Witchcraft and Magical Knowledge in Early Modern Print Culture

Positioned at the intersection of visual and textual culture, print played a critical role in shaping both imagined and institutional responses to magic, witchcraft, and the occult. Its advent in fifteenth-century Europe enabled the widespread circulation of texts and images concerning magic and witchcraft, ranging from demonological treatises and legal handbooks to illustrated broadsides, sensational pamphlets, and works of art by renowned early modern artists. Far from signaling a “decline” in magical thinking, this proliferation of printed material suggests a redefinition of the boundaries of magic, both as a practice and as a conceptual category. Print culture served simultaneously to document, disseminate, and delimit magical knowledge. It reflected emerging interests in classifying popular beliefs, integrating occult ideas into new natural philosophies, and asserted control over invisible forces through the apparatus of increasingly centralized religious and political authorities.

Organized in conjunction with the Cunning Folk: Early Modern Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Knowledge exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, this panel invites papers that explore how magic, witchcraft, and the occult were represented and contested through print. We welcome contributions that address a wide range of magical topics across early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. This can include papers that address the interplay between image and text in constructing magical authority, articulating fear or fascination, and/or legitimizing its control. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

● Witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural in broadsides, ballads, and newsprints
● The aesthetics and materiality of grimoires and printed books of magic
● Relationships between the print culture of magic and painting, decorative arts, architecture, or other visual forms
● The printed/published visual rhetoric of witchcraft and demonology and its relationship to state or ecclesiastical power, including trials and punishment
● The representation of cunning folk and popular healing in print
● Artists and publishers as mediators of magical or occult imagery
● Magic, race, and colonial knowledge systems in transatlantic print culture
● Archival gaps and historiographical challenges in the study of printed magic
● New interpretations of specific witchcraft prints or illustrated books
● Presentations on exhibitions, curatorial activities, archival/library initiatives, conservation projects, or other museum practice with objects related to this theme

Papers should be in English and a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Presenters at any stage of their career are welcome to apply.

Please send the following materials to Sara Frier at sfrier23@stanford.edu, by August 1, 2025:

• Paper title and abstract (400 word max) with a summary of key conclusions
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address
• Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages)

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 4, 2025. For any questions, feel free to contact Sara Frier.

Women Printmakers in the Early Modern World
An APS-sponsored session for RSA 2026
Abstracts due: July 25

The history of early modern printmaking has long centered on male engravers and publishers, leaving the contributions of women largely overlooked and insufficiently theorized. Yet ongoing archival research and recent scholarship continue to recover names, works, and forms of labor that unsettle the conventional picture of how prints were made, circulated, and valued. Across Europe and beyond, women participated in the world of intaglio and woodcut not only as inheritors of family trades but also as brilliant amateurs or as anonymous contributors to the devotional image economy. Their presence complicates neat distinctions between art and craft, genius and labor, public and private spheres.

This session invites papers that center the work of early modern women printmakers (c. 1450–1700) in any geographic context. We welcome close readings of individual artists and works, as well as methodological or historiographic interventions that reflect on how and why women’s labor as printmakers has remained so difficult to see. Possible questions include—but are not limited to:

• How did women access the training, tools, or networks necessary to enter the world of printmaking?
• What kinds of images were women printmakers asked to produce—or found themselves producing—and how were these works received?
• In what roles did women participate in workshop economies, and what forms of collective or domestic labor supported their production?
• What critical frameworks might allow us to better apprehend this history and the absences that define it?
The papers, in English, should be 20 minutes in length. Scholars at any stage of their career are encouraged to apply. Travel support may be available thanks to Stanford University.

Please send the following materials to Emanuele Lugli, elugli@stanford.edu, and Rhoda Eitel-Porter, editor@printquarterly.co.uk by July 25, 2025:

• Paper title and Abstract (400 word max). The abstract should briefly cover the main points of the paper, including its research topic, the main findings and their significance.
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address
• Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages)
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 4, 2025.

For any questions, feel free to contact Emanuele Lugli or Rhoda Eitel-Porter

Call for Papers: Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, Volume XVII. Send completed materials to hmsphr@unm.edu. Deadline: Monday, June 30, 2025
We invite graduate students (MA & PhD) to submit work on topics such as agency and political interventions, geopolitical landscapes, cartographies and borders, migration and transnationalism, memory-making and alternative archival practices, belonging and identity, food relations and visual culture, gender and sexuality, indigeneity, and methodologies (decolonial, feminist, anti-imperial, critical race theory, etc.)

Submission Types:
-Research Articles (20-30 pages)
-Exhibition/Performance Reviews (5-10 pages)
-Interviews (5-10 pages)
-Book Reviews (5-10 pages) on recent works related to Central American art and visual culture, including:
-Carnalities by Marianna Ortega (2025)
-Visual Disobedience by Kency Cornejo (2024)
-Central American Counterpoetics by Karina Alma (2024)

Submission Guidelines:
-Only completed works from graduate students will be considered.
-Submissions in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Read more about the publication at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hemisphere/

Email submissions to hmsphr@unm.edu by Monday, June 30, 2025.

The Association of Print Scholars invites submissions for its sponsored sessions at the Renaissance Society of America conference, to be held in San Francisco from 19-21 February 2026.

APS-sponsored session proposals may be related to any theme of Renaissance and Early Modern printmaking, or any aspect of print scholarship for the era 1300–1700. RSA is a multidisciplinary society, and we especially welcome session proposals that transcend geographic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that engage current theoretical interests in historiography, materialism, archival theory, bibliographic studies, or social history.

Series of sessions in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to two sessions per honoree. Co-organized sessions are welcome; junior and senior scholars are encouraged to collaborate. Organizers may act as chair(s), or they may elect another scholar to serve this position, as per RSA guidelines.

You do not need to be a member of RSA to submit a session proposal to APS, but all accepted participants must become RSA members for 2025-2026 and register for the conference. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend.

Organizers, chairs, and/or co-organizers or co-chairs must be members of APS, however, please note that those currently serving as APS officers, whether elected or appointed, may not submit conference proposals for panels sponsored by the organization during their tenure, although are welcome to participate in the selected panel.

How to submit a session proposal for APS sponsorship:
To propose an APS-sponsored session, please submit your session title (15-word maximum) along with a maximum 300-word abstract describing the topics and issues of printmaking that your session will address. Applicants do not need to propose a full panel of presenters in order to submit a session proposal. Submissions should include a two-page CV for each organizer. In the subject line, please indicate “APS-Sponsored session proposal RSA 2026” and send to Dr Talitha M. G. Schepers at rsacoordinator@printscholars.org

DEADLINE:
Submission deadline for all session proposals is:
25 June 2025


Acceptance decisions will be communicated to submitters by 30 June 2025.

“Antillean art,” remarked St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, “is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.” Walcott’s Nobel lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, offers a compelling meditation on the interplay between art, history, and the archipelago as a space of fragmentation, multiplicity, and interconnectedness. In dialogue with Walcott’s reflections, Italian philosopher and politician Massimo Cacciari has framed the rise of early Cycladic culture in the Aegean Sea as the archetype of sociocultural relationality in Europe, inviting a reconsideration of the Archipelago as a model of geographical, as well as political negotiations.

As the eighteenth century witnessed the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the anchoring of European empires across Atlantic, African, Indian, and Mediterranean archipelagic complexes, the insights of Walcott and Cacciari challenge us to rethink how eighteenth-century art and architectural practices in archipelagic spaces were shaped by tensions between isolation, connection, empire, displacement, autonomy, and exchange. While offering an opportunity to reconsider the intertwined histories of colonialism, slavery, and territorialism, focusing on archipelagic structures can help “decenter” Western narratives. An archipelagic perspective is also critical to understanding how island societies navigated and negotiated their cultural identities and agency outside, or in spite of, colonial structures.

This issue of Journal18 explores how archipelagic thinking informs the study of eighteenth-century art, architecture, and material culture. How might concepts of creolization, diaspora, and tidalectics, in the words of Kamau Brathwaite, reshape our understanding of artistic production and circulation? In the fragmentation of archival repositories, what can eighteenth-century objects and built environments made within archipelagic spaces reveal about the experiences of the people who lived there? How did eighteenth-century objects negotiate relationships between islands, oceans, and continents? How did artistic and architectural practices in the archipelago both reflect/reinforce and resist colonial power?

We encourage contributions that explore the metaphorical and material implications of the archipelago in artistic practices, cartography, and networks of exchange and use. We welcome interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to object study in the form of full-length articles or shorter pieces focused on single objects, interviews, or other formats.

Issue Editors
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia

Proposals for issue #22 Archipelago are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: September 1, 2025.

To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, cd2bv@virginia.edu, and vogiatzaki@arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by February 1, 2026. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is pleased to announce the forthcoming symposium Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt taking place on November 6-7, 2025.

Cooper Hewitt is home to 143 sheets of drawings and inscriptions by the Netherlandish artist Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet, 1523–1605). With support from the Getty’s Paper Project Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collections Program, Cooper Hewitt embarked on The Stradanus Project, an effort to conserve, research, and digitize Stradanus’s drawings, which served as preparatory designs for his engravings. At some point in their history, the drawings were bound together to form several sketchbooks that were later disassembled. The leaves were separated and cut apart, and the sheets were laid down on secondary and tertiary supports—perhaps as part of an album that was then again cut apart.

From 2021 to 2022, Cooper Hewitt conducted a conservation survey of all of its Stradanus sketches. Based on this information, the team selected 38 sheets for lining removal and treatment, which was completed in 2024. As a result of conservation work and research, drawings and inscriptions that have been obscured for more than a century have been newly revealed.

To share the discoveries, Cooper Hewitt has launched a website with high-resolution images of the treated drawings and reconstructed sketchbook sheets, an updated catalogue raisonné of the museum’s Stradanus holdings, transcriptions and translations of the newly revealed inscriptions, and detailed information about the conservation process:

The Stradanus Project
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/the-stradanus-project

We invite symposium submissions on Stradanus that draw from this new information and Cooper Hewitt’s holdings. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

Stradanus’s international artistic, publishing, and trade networks
Stradanus’s working methods and processes
The role of materiality and Stradanus’s use of paper
The afterlife of Stradanus’s drawings

High-resolution images of the treated sheets can be consulted on The Stradanus Project website. Images of all sheets in Cooper Hewitt’s collection can be found through the Cooper Hewitt’s Collections Highlights (https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/highlights/2318812519/).

Submission guidelines:
Please submit a 150–200-word abstract, along with CV and affiliation to stradanus_symposium@si.edu by June 15, 2025.

Participants will be notified by July 18, 2025. Honoraria will be provided for speakers.

The symposium will be free and open to the public. General registration will open in early September through Cooper Hewitt’s The Stradanus Project website.

The Stradanus Project is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through The Paper Project initiative; and received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care Initiative, administered by the National Collections Program.

The California Printmaker | 2026 | Journal Call for Proposals

Accepting proposals now until August 30, 2025, from artists anywhere in the world regardless of CSP affiliation. No application or participation fees.

The California Society of Printmakers is soliciting proposals for the 2026 issue of The California Printmaker, “Raising Your Voice–Telling Your Story.”

Do you have a unique body of work that sends a message? Does your visual narrative focus on current or past events, your identity or your personal experience?

We would like proposals by you or your recommendation of other print artists (including their website) who could contribute to this topic.

Your work will be judged on its quality and how well it relates to this year’s theme.
If you are considered, your finished article (up to 1200 words with accompanying pictures) would be due November 1, 2025.

Proposals due:
August 30, 2025

Proposals should include:
• how your article will address the theme.
• outline or short narrative (about 200 words) in a word doc.
• 5 or more jpegs relating to your proposal content–do not embed images in a pdf
• website address.
• artist bio with contact information.
• please send a word doc and attach image files: no pdfs, no embedded images.


Submit proposals to:
Bob Rocco, Editorial Board, California Society of Printmakers
bobroccoart@gmail.com
www.caprintmakers.org

To view past issues of The California Printmaker visit:
www.caprintmakers.org/the-california-printmaker

https://www.caprintmakers.org/


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The California Printmaker, annual journal of the California Society of Printmakers, features articles and artwork from print artists worldwide. Each issue provides insight into the diverse perspectives shaping the global conversation on printmaking. Free access to our published journal is provided to the public digitally.

Envisioning Gender and Sexuality in Premodern European Prints
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 17, 2025
Abstract deadline April 1, 2025

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, Imagination, Faith, and Desire:
Agency in European Printmaking, 1475-1800

Conceptions of sexuality and gender underwent profound changes in Europe during the premodern era (roughly 1300-1750) and were an important avenue of exploration for printmakers. In art prints, broadsheets, fashion plates, and anatomies alike, human subjects were fashioned and viewed in conversation with cultural attitudes and beliefs about gender and sexuality. Canonical works such as Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve and Henrick Goltzius’s Farnese Hercules as Seen from Behind not only convey notions of artistic excellence but also their ideas about idealized bodies, gender roles, and sexuality. Additionally, gender and sexuality had profound effects on artistic practices and training. In a time when many women were precluded from traditional apprenticeships and professional guilds, printmaking could present alternative paths to collaboration and network building. Moreover, as an artform linked with the broad circulation of knowledge but also with intimate, private viewing, prints open doors to consider how artists and beholders conceived of their own experiences of gender and sexuality in and outside of social norms.

This symposium will explore artistic production, practices, and the agency of printed media before 1750 as they intersect with themes of sexuality and gender.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on themes of gender and sexuality on themes including, but not limited to:
- women and gender nonconforming artists, patrons, collectors, and viewers
- representations of unconventional gender identities
- printed media and same-sex desire
- fashion and the sartorial politics of gender
- case studies on printed media through feminist, queer, nonbinary, and trans lenses

The symposium will be hybrid, blending in person presentations with online presentations via zoom to make the event more equitable and permit international participation, and will also include a walkthrough of the exhibition.

The keynote speaker will be Nicole Cook, Senior Program Manager at the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Dr. Cook will share her research about seventeenth-century Dutch prints of “nightwalkers” and how they envisage a space for gender nonconformity.

To submit, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words along with a 2-page CV (including contact info, any institutional affiliation, and your preference to present in-person or virtually) to Sandra Racek (sandraracek2014@u.northwestern.edu) and Maureen Warren, Curator of European and American art, Krannert Art Museum (maureen@illinois.edu) by April,1, 2025.

Accepting proposals now through August 30, 2024, from artists anywhere in the world regardless of affiliation.

The California Society of Printmakers is soliciting proposals for the 2025 annual issue of The California Printmaker for this year’s theme: Printmaking–Plus.

We are interested in how your printmaking process is combined with other techniques. How do your ideas develop into a cohesive body with mixed media? How are processes, technology or media joined to help express what you are trying to say while keeping with the essence of printmaking?

We would like proposals by you or your recommendation of other print artists (including their website) who could contribute to this topic.

Final articles should be 700-1200 words with accompanying pictures.
Your work will be judged on its quality and how well it relates to this year’s theme.

-outline or short narrative (about 200 words) in a word doc .
-5 or more jpegs (at least 3 mgb image size) relating to your proposal content, submitted as a separate attachment, please no images in pdf.
-website address.
-artist bio with contact information.
-please word doc, and attach image files – no pdfs.

If you are considered, your finished article would be due November 1, 2023

Submit to:
Bob Rocco, Editorial Board, California Society of Printmakers
bobroccoart@gmail.com

College Art Association Annual Conference, February 12–15, 2025
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art affiliate panel session
Call for Papers


Taking and Making: Artistic Reckonings with Cultural Property Theft in the Long Nineteenth Century

Chair: Nancy Karrels, PhD, JD, karrels.nancy@gmail.com

The nineteenth century witnessed a profusion of incidents of cultural property theft accompanied by coercion and violence and often driven by imperial and colonial agendas. From the notorious spoliation of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace during the Opium Wars to the seizure of sacred Native American belongings under the guise of scientific inquiry, these acts of looting left communities grappling with profound cultural losses that still reverberate today.

This panel explores the complex dynamics of artistic exchange and expression engendered by these traumatic events. Drawing inspiration from Bénédicte Savoy’s transnational approach to the cultural exchanges that resulted from the French spoliation of Germanic princely collections in post-Revolutionary Europe, we aim to investigate the ways in which forcible transfers of cultural patrimony globally catalyzed shifts in artistic value and meaning during the long nineteenth century, and how these contentious processes sparked cross-cultural discourse and innovative avenues of creative expression among artists directly impacted by or complicit in them. From the interplay between looting and artistic production to the evolution of techniques and styles in the aftermath of plunder, we encourage contributions from diverse cultural perspectives and methodological approaches.

Submission are due August 29 through the CAA conference portal.

Proposals are open to all, but once accepted, presenters will need to update their memberships in both CAA and AHNCA by the time of the conference.