The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) invite emerging scholars studying the art, architecture, and visual culture of the long eighteenth century (c. 1660-1830) around the globe to participate in a virtual showcase to promote their research. Each scholar will be given 3-5 minutes to present their work, followed by an open question and answer session.

We currently plan to hold our session in March or April 2026, in conjunction with presenters' schedules. Applications are due by Saturday, January 24 at midnight (EST).
PLEASE VISIT THE LINK BELOW TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT.

Direct any questions to Sarah Lund: hecaa.emergingscholarsrep@gmail.com

Eligibility:
- Emerging Scholars may be current graduate students (MAs or PhDs) and early career researchers who have received their PhDs in the past five years.
- Emerging Scholars may participate more than once with different projects, different aspects of the same project, or an “update” on how the project develops. However, we ask that presenters apply no more than once every three years to allow for as many individuals as possible to participate.
- Please note that you do not have to be a member of HECAA to apply to participate in the Emerging Scholars Showcase.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
EDITORS: Natalie Phillips and Cindy Torgesen
Deadline for abstracts: Monday, March 2nd, 2026 5:00pm Eastern Time

Birth, care, and maintenance have long been framed as “women’s work,” often rendered invisible, undervalued, and sanitized in visual and cultural representation. Yet they are also profound sites of creativity, power, and resistance. Labor Pains: The Art and Politics of Reproductive and Domestic Work invites essays that examine the visual cultures surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, and domestic or reproductive labor, from the sacred to the taboo, the everyday to the spectacular.
This edited volume seeks contributions that trace how artists, designers, filmmakers, and activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have represented, contested, and reimagined the labor of making and sustaining life. We welcome work grounded in art history, visual and material culture, media studies, design history, performance, and feminist or queer theory. Essays might explore how artistic practices have visualized reproductive autonomy, the economies of care, and the politics of cleanliness, domesticity, and the body. We especially encourage intersectional and transnational approaches that address how race, class, sexuality, and disability intersect with reproductive and domestic labor.

Possible areas of focus include but are not limited to:
- Artistic and activist interventions around childbirth, parenting, or reproductive justice
- Histories of maternity, midwifery, and maternal health in visual culture
- Representations of domestic or care labor
- The aesthetics of cleaning, maintenance, and domestic technologies
- Visual rhetorics of gendered labor, intimacy, and bodily discipline
- Reproductive technologies, biopolitics, and ecofeminist perspectives
- Art practices engaging fertility or loss
- The proposed length of each chapter will be 6000-8000 words.

Please send your 300-word abstract and a short bio to both Natalie Phillips nephillips@bsu.edu and Cindy Torgesen at cetorgesen@ung.edu
Deadline for abstracts: Monday, March 2nd, 2026 5:00pm Eastern Time

Undergraduate students are invited to submit abstracts for a 10-minute talk on any art historical topic of their choosing. We welcome research informed by any and all theories and methodologies and encourage interdisciplinary exploration.
Submissions may include a version or part of an undergraduate thesis, an exceptional course paper, or independent research.
Please send your title and abstract of no more than 300 words to Professor Keely Heuer at heuerk@newpaltz.edu.

Note: A bibliography is not necessary. Your submission should also include your name, your major, academic year, institutional affiliation, and email. Students will be notified by the end of February 2026.

Amélie Folliot, Louise Quentel and myself, doctoral students in Art History at the universities of Rennes and Poitiers in France, along with our thesis director Ms. Estelle Leutrat, are organizing a one-day symposium called Rethinking Early Modern Print Today: New Questions & New Approaches, that will be held on 24 September 2026 at the University of Poitiers. We are really happy to share with you the call for papers for this event, details of which can be found below and in the attached document.

The symposium aims to bring together established researchers, early career scholars, PhD candidates, and students — in art history or related disciplines — to present and discuss current research and perspectives on prints in the early modern period (15th - 18th centuries). It seeks to provide a forum for exchange devoted to recent approaches and ongoing projects, whether they focus on the practices and techniques of printmaking, on its networks of production, circulation, and exchange, or on the place of the printed image within visual and material culture.

Presentations, lasting around twenty minutes, may address, without geographical restriction, any aspect of the production, circulation, or reception of prints, from historical, artistic, material or theoretical perspectives. As part of the “Creation, Corpus, Heritage” program of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for History, Art History, and Musicology, the symposium will take place at the University of Poitiers and will also be available via videoconference.

Submission guidelines:

Please submit an abstract with a title (in French or English) of no more than 2,500 characters (including spaces) and
 a short biographical note (institutional affiliation, contact details, and research topic(s)) by february 16, 2026 via: je.rechercheestampe@gmail.com

CFP | Undergraduate Symposium: New Work in Material Culture Studies

Deadline: November 29, 2025
We invite undergraduate students who have taken classes in material culture studies, art history, design history, fashion studies, museum studies, and related disciplines to submit abstracts for fifteen-minute presentations that will share new research in our dynamic field. We especially welcome studies grounded in a specific object or set of objects.
 
To submit a proposal for a presentation, email the following materials as a single Word document to Professor Joseph H. Larnerd at JHL73@drexel.edu by 11:59pm EST on November 29, 2025:
 
Page #1: a cover page that includes your name, the title of your proposed paper, your
university/college, and your academic major and year of study
 
Page #2: a 200-word abstract that introduces your object(s), foregrounds your paper’s thesis and/or central interpretation, and briefly explains how you intend to support it
Your proposal should be double spaced and in 12 pt. Times New Roman font. The document name and subject of your email should read as follows: “H-MC Symposium Abstract—Your Last Name.”
 
Proposals will be reviewed by a panel of scholars active in the field of material culture studies who will also serve as session respondents. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by December 13. If you have any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to email JHL73@drexel.edu.
 
HECAA member Emily C. Casey (University of Kansas) will be presenting the keynote lecture at this event, and encourages those members with teaching appointments to share this opportunity with students!

2026 Graduate Student Art History Symposium: "'Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups': Hauntings, Afterlives, and Reawakenings"
Washington University in St. Louis, February 13–14, 2026
Deadline: December 8, 2025

The Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis is seeking papers for its 2026 Graduate Student Art History Symposium (GSAHS). The theme of the symposium is "'Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups': Hauntings, Afterlives, and Reawakenings" and the event will be held in-person on our campus in St. Louis on February 13–14, 2026.

While working on the Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929), Aby Warburg characterized his art historical practice as a “ghost story for grown-ups.” As scholars, we are often all too familiar with recurring images, motifs, and ideas that persist in the canon or emerge from the archive as if of their own volition. Similarly, many communities have their own traditions and tales of spirits or spectral encounters that linger in visual culture. Many studies across the humanities have attended to the culture of the afterlife, both literally and figuratively. In his book Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida introduced the theoretical framework of “hauntology” to consider elements of the social and cultural past that endure and reappear in a manner of ghostliness. Furthermore, sociologist Avery Gordon contends that such hauntings are an index of “dispossession, exploitation, and repression” that reemerge in order to demand being addressed. This symposium seeks to lift the veil by critically engaging with hauntings, afterlives, and ghostliness as both cultural phenomena and a conceptual model for art historical inquiry.
We invite current and recent graduate students in art history, archaeology, visual culture and related disciplines to submit abstracts for this symposium. Submissions may explore aspects of this theme as manifested in any medium, historical period, cultural, and geographical context.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Patrick R. Crowley, Associate Curator of European Art at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

We welcome potential topics from any time period/geographical area that contend with ghosts, phantoms, spirits, or hauntings, including but not limited to:
• Spirit photography
• Ghosts, spirits, and demons in historical folk and religious art
• Spectral images in theatre and cabaret performances
• Paranormal and horror cinema
• The afterlives of artworks, motifs, notable figures, or ideas
• The persistence and/or reemergence of repressed peoples, beliefs, and images
• Art made in the wake of war, genocide, or tragedy
• Mausoleums, tombs, memorials, or other elements of the built environment meant to connect the living with the dead
• The display of human remains, sacred relics, and objects that house spirits in museums, cultural institutions, and tourist attractions


To apply:
Submit a 350-word abstract and a CV in a single PDF file by Monday, December 8, 2025, to Jillian Lepek and Hannah Wier at gsahs@wustl.edu. Selected speakers will be notified by Friday, January 2. Paper presentations must not exceed 18 minutes in length and should be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The symposium will be held entirely in-person at Washington University in St. Louis. Modest honoraria will be provided to student speakers to offset the cost of travel and accommodation.

In histories of art as in contemporary practice, we rarely consider where ink wiped off a printing plate ends up or how reams of trial proofs get recycled. When we celebrate end products of creation, we silence and conceal the flows of waste to which all making inevitably contributes. NET-ZERO PRESS, a new impact project funded by the University of St Andrews and led by Dr Ruth Ezra, Lecturer in Art History, aims to work with contemporary stakeholders, educators, and practitioners across the printmaking landscape of Scotland to "start from trash" as we trace waste flows in print shops and act on these data to propose strategies for making studio spaces (from classrooms to open-access workshops) less toxic and more sustainable.

To launch the project, a group of art historians, practitioners, and technicians will gather together for a workshop at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) on Tuesday 21 October, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Our goal? To share stories from the print room floor.

Interested participants should prepare a 10-minute presentation wherein they tell the story of one material that features in their practice, tracking its lifespan from acquisition through consumption, transformation, and disposal. The tone is meant to be light and exploratory and the company, congenial. We will conclude the workshop with a guided tour of the DCA print room, with a focus on waste flows and reuse. Any artists presenting will be paid a stipend of four hours at the Scottish Artists’ Union rate, based on years of experience. An additional hour of comfort break/lunch will be provided as part of the day, as well as an optional closing half-hour of tea and chat. Local economy travel expenses (train/bus) to and from Dundee city will be reimbursed.

Interested? Email netzeropress@st-andrews.ac.uk with a description of your material; an 150-word summary of your object story; and a CV by 15 September 2025. Participants will be notified of acceptance by September 21. If you live outside of the UK but would like to attend in a virtual capacity, please also feel free to get in touch.

Learn more about the project: http://netzeropress.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
http://linktr.ee/netzeropress

When an object is collected, it begins a new life. It does not freeze in time, as it can still be altered and manipulated. This panel, sponsored by The Society for the History of Collecting, seeks to analyze, on a visual, material, and theoretical level, the various interventions made by artists, collectors, merchants, and restorers on artworks after their completion as these came to be part of a collection. Within this framework, many concepts come into play: reworking, retouching, alteration, manipulation, integration, correction, refreshing, reframing, repurposing. These interventions often respond to a need for conservation or restauration, sometimes they are carried out for esthetic or repurposing needs, other times they are the result of a misunderstanding as to an object’s original intention when this crossed cultural boundaries.
Whatever the reason, such practices have consequences that lead to changes in the artwork’s status of completeness, its function, its display or storage, and the way it is interpreted. Identifying, analyzing, and understanding these practices allows for a layered understanding of an object's life, from its production to its reception, within a complex temporal framework. What type of interventions are executed? How are they carried out, and by whom? Are there written sources that transmit this technical and material knowledge? What are the aesthetic and theoretical consequences of these actions on the objects themselves? Moreover, nowadays, how do scholars critically define these practices, considering their complex entanglements with concepts of authorship, originality and style?
Open to different media, we welcome contributions that explore cases from any geographical region during the early modern period. By privileging both diachronic and synchronic approaches, we aim to measure and analyze the growing interest in the physical condition of artworks, as well as in the conservation, restoration, and repurposing practices applied to objects within collections, broadly understood.

Proposals should be for 20-minute papers and must include a title (15 words maximum), abstract (150 words maximum), keywords and a CV (1 page maximum). Speakers will need to be members of RSA and members of The Society for the History of Collecting at the time of the conference. Please send your submission before 10 August 2025 (PDT) to Federica Gigante (federica.gigante@ames.ox.ac.uk), Alice Ottazzi (alice.ottazzi@khi.fi.it) and Adriana Turpin (adrianaturpin@gmail.com). Applicants will be notified by 11 August.

APS members Ruth Pelzer-Montada and Sandra De Rycker’s call for Participation in the CAA 114th Annual Conference (February 18-21, 2026) is now live:

We welcome contributions from artists, art historians, curators, educators, printers, and printmaking workshops that consider the important creative ecologies and often neglected infrastructures of the print workshop from various perspectives.
_ _ _

What would it mean to approach the model of a print workshop from an ‘intra-active’ perspective (Barad, 2007)? That is, to explore such environments as dynamic, agential and material-discursive phenomena? Considering workshop commonalities (such as printers’ preparation and processing of plates, stones or screens), as well as specificities (individual expertise, technological apparatuses, ecological approaches, spatial dynamics, differing models of collaboration), we wish to ask: How do prints operate in the workshop setting as non-human (objects, things, materials) and humans (artists, printers, institutions) mingle and/or intra-act?
Following Jennifer L. Roberts’ (2024) close investigations of the materiality of print processes, this session proposes further enquiry into the social and material groundings of the print workshop. Despite scholarly examinations of individual 'master printers' (Stanley William Hayter, Robert Blackburn, Kenneth Tyler, Stanley Jones); particular print workshop set-ups (Paul Laidler, 2011; Christina Weyl, 2019) and important collaborating printers’ accounts of working with artists (Craig Zammiello, Kathan Brown, Phil Sanders) this area remains seldom studied and undertheorized.

This session invites artists, art historians, curators, educators, printers and printmaking workshops to consider these often neglected ecologies from various perspectives, drawing on new-materialism and related interdisciplinary methodologies including decolonial, feminist, intersectional and eco-critical approaches. Taking account of print-making’s transitory states as well as its interrelationships with wider material, social, political, economic and institutional networks, we welcome proposals that delve into the dynamics of collaboration, tacit learning and embodied knowledge, and corresponding values in and beyond the print workshop, to elucidate these important and currently threatened infrastructures.

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.