Before and Amid the Artificial: (Trans)historicizing the Visual
Before and Amid the Artificial:(Trans)historicizing the Visual
March 5-6, 2027 | 榴莲app官方网站入
Call for Papers
In 2015, Art History @ Elon hosted 鈥淏etween, Among, and Across: Transhistories of the Visual鈥 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the art history program. This symposium, affectionately nicknamed 鈥淏AA鈥, celebrated how art history has expanded the Eurocentric and Enlightenment-based model on which the discipline was founded. In 2027, we will mark the 20th anniversary of the art history major with a second symposium. And while we will continue to celebrate the good work happening in our field, we also recognize that this moment is not like before. We live and work amid local, national, and global crises that endanger lives, threaten well-being, and tear at community values and commitments. At the same time that arts and humanities institutions are losing economic and social support, academic institutions are adopting artificial intelligence for the sake of efficiency rather than deepening intellectual inquiry and committing to ethical practices.听Our second symposium 鈥淏efore and Amid the Artificial: (Trans)historicizing the Visual鈥 (BAA2) will examine how art history helps us understand what it means to be human/e.
We seek a variety of approaches to the concept including (but not limited to) proposals that
- center concepts of practice, praxis, and pathos over product, productivity, or apathy
- undertake critical reevaluations of or enact alternatives to the colonial, racist legacies of our intellectual and cultural institutions and the erasure/omission of human/e experiences
- critique tokenistic 鈥済lobal鈥 encounters and too-narrowly defined geographic approaches
challenge cisheteronormative, ableist, and/or anthropocentric frameworks - question whose history is privileged by linear chronologies and accelerating temporalities
And as we did in 2015, we welcome presentations that address these concerns creatively, rigorously, contingently, and/or in a questioning frame of mind. Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words and your CV Review of abstracts will begin on Sept. 15, 2026.
*If you have questions (or any problems accessing the form), please reach out to Professor of Art History Evan Gatti (egatti@elon.edu).
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