OPEN CALL: Papers for Art History 2060-Imagining our Futures to Rethink our Pasts

How will the discipline of art history be practiced in the year 2060 C.E.? This C3 New Scholars symposium asks emerging scholars in art history, visual studies, and proximate fields to imagine the methods we will use in 40 years to historicize art, architecture, and visual culture. The prompt for this symposium offers the field’s newest scholars a platform to envision how their imminent academic careers will transform the discipline. How will we pursue fundamental questions of art history and visual studies when our current understandings of politics, identity, and globalization will have shifted substantially? How will tomorrow’s global scholars expand the geographical and chronological scope of art history, which as of now largely remains tethered to European colonial epistemologies? How will our tools in a rapidly evolving digital world change the analysis of the past? We seek submissions that will fundamentally reimagine our discipline and how art historians (if we remain such) participate in broader discussions of art, futurity, and the cultural and environmental preservation of heritage sites. We particularly encourage historians of premodern and preindustrial art, architecture, and visual culture to think about how their subfields of study will contribute to hitherto unimagined methodologies and contexts.

Inaugurated in 2018, this 2022 symposium at Davidson College concludes the C3 New Scholars Series, which introduced graduate students from underrepresented groups to liberal arts colleges. Accepted panelists will have travel, room and board expenses fully reimbursed by Davidson College.

The symposium will take place on Tuesday, March 22, 2022. We are planning for a daylong in-person event and will adapt if Covid-19 conditions change. Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words for a 20-minute paper, up to two images, a 100-word rationale, and a brief CV (two pages max) by November 30, 2021.

Contact: John Corso-Esquivel, Associate Professor, Art Department, Davidson College. Email: arthistory2060@davidson.edu