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Before and Amid the Artificial:(Trans)historicizing the Visual

March 5-6, 2027 | Elon University

Call for Papers

In 2015, Art History @ Elon hosted “Between, Among, and Across: Transhistories of the Visual” to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the art history program. This symposium, affectionately nicknamed “BAA”, 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. Our second symposium “Before and Amid the Artificial: (Trans)historicizing the Visual” (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 “global” 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 using this form. 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).

Click here to see a draft version of the BAA2 Symposium Schedule.