We’re pleased to see the 2027 College Art Association Annual Conference is filled with plenty of medieval sessions! Please consider submitting a paper and participating in the conference. To view the full list of Call for Papers, click HERE

Notes: These are not ICMA-Sponsored Sessions and not eligible for the ICMA-Kress Travel Grants. The ICMA-Sponsored Session already selected its presenters. This list is non-exhaustive.

Save the date: The ICMA will host its Annual Meeting and celebration on Friday 5 February 2027 in conjunction with the exhibition Know-How for a New Era: City Living / City Learning, circa 1400–1550.

Although medieval European art is a touchstone for many modern Black artists, and although depictions of racialized or symbolic blackness is a focus for many medieval art historians, scholars of the two domains are rarely in direct conversation. There is much to be gained from looking across the gap. Scholars in both areas have to contend with fragmentary archives and large gaps in knowledge, for drastically different reasons. And both domains are grounded in similar concerns about the body – its fragility, its senses, its expressions, its strength – and a similar commitment to finding transcendence – the otherwise – in a dangerous world through artistic expression and materials.
This session invites medievalists (in any area) and scholars and practitioners of Black arts (Africa and the African diaspora across time) to share their work on questions of the body and its figuration in art and material culture. Papers might present specific case studies (e.g., modern Black artists who engage with medieval styles, materials, or themes; examples of medieval arts that thematize blackness in various ways). Or they might experiment with cross-temporal methodologies and comparisons.
Building on collaborative work we have done over the last five years, the organizers want to open up to both medievalists and modernists the beauty, power, and complexity of arts that may have seemed intimidating, inaccessible, and strange, and initiate new lines of dialogue that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Keywords:
Topics: Medieval
Topics: Contemporary
Topics: African American
Medium: Figurative/Human Body
Topics: Methodologies
Chair: Jacqueline E. Jung, Yale University
Discussant: Isaac Jean-Francois
How were the end of times and thereafter expressed and experienced visually, materially, and in the built or modified environment? This panel explores visual and material entanglements with eschatology across the medieval world, ca. 500-1500 CE. The Christian Apocalypse was of profound theological importance as it described the journey on Earth of individual Christians and the Church as a whole, and the future awaiting the saved and the damned. Buddhism offered a different perspective, as the notion of a singular end of times was replaced by a cyclical understanding of time in which the degeneration of the dharma unfolded over three distinct ages. Islam posited a day of judgment as revealed in the Qur’an and prophesized by the prophet Mohammed in hadith attributed to him, and Judaism saw the end of days followed by the resurrection of souls. These notions were materialized in images, objects, and sites.
Papers should address beliefs regarding and depictions of “things to come,” be they end times, paradises, infernos, reincarnations, divine encounters, and more. We seek papers that address religious and artistic traditions from across the medieval world, either singly or comparatively; that engage with lived and eschatological temporalities; that represent innovative and path-breaking scholarship in their own subfields; and above all that have the potential to inspire thought-provoking transregional dialogue regarding the nature of art, religion, and temporality in the medieval world.

Keywords:
Geographic Area: Global
Time Period: Sixth to Tenth Century
Time Period: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
Time Period: Fifteenth Century
Time Period: Sixteenth Century
Chairs: Michelle C. Wang, Georgetown University and Alison Locke Perchuk, California State University Channel Islands
In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the generation of pearls within oysters served as a natural simile for the manifestation of deities into the world. A shell carried the sea-born Aphrodite toward the Levantine coast. Later, Christians portrayed Mary as a virginal shell, whose hollow womb brought forth the Savior as a precious pearl gifted to humankind. Likewise, in Islamic contexts, the shell-enclosed pearl became a non-anthropomorphic metaphor of divine revelation as a contained effulgence of light. Shared by Greco-Roman polytheists and Abrahamic monotheists alike, the understanding of pearl-bearing oysters as material receptacles of the divine had a strong impact on the visual conception of sacred spaces. Whether they were situated along the seacoast or further inland, temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques use shell-shaped (semi-)domes as frames for their most sacred precincts. This panel uncovers the capacity of maritime life to generate metaphors of containment across various pre-modern religious traditions. It seeks to bring together a diverse group of scholars from disciplines such as Art History, Archeology, Classics, Religious Studies, and Literature, aiming to assess the cross-faith use of oyster-like containers. Did shell imagery belong to a common heritage underlying different cultures? If so, how did its archetypal meaning persist across various contexts of use? Could its generic containing function develop more localized meanings, reflecting specific institutional and sectarian identities? Moreover, was the use of shell structures dependent on the proximity to the sea, or could it testify to a flow of maritime imagery and narratives into landlocked regions?

Keywords:
Geographic Area: Southern Europe and Mediterranean
Geographic Area: Middle East
Architecture
Pre-modern
Medium: Landscape
Chairs: Leena Zahweh Ghannam, Stanford University and Andrei Dumitrescu, Stanford University
This session investigates how medieval Italian women lived their lives both in compliance with and in circumvention of the societal assumptions circulating about their nature and capabilities, read through their relationships to visual images and artistic patronage. Papers will address this topic through two lenses: 1) ways that gendered religious and social beliefs were encoded in visual imagery and 2) how women of different social and economic strata negotiated regulations that defined and constrained them in the ways they engaged with visual imagery or commissioned works of art or architecture.
The roles of women as artists, patrons, and audiences for visual art enjoy extensive in-depth study for northern medieval and Renaissance cultures since the mid 20th century. Studies of women’s participation in the visual culture of medieval Italy, itself an often-marginalized field, are much rarer and less well-known. This session seeks to help redress that imbalance by focusing on medieval Italian women as patrons of artistic projects in diverse media and the ways women helped shape the imagery and ideas those works projected. Of equal interest is analysis of the ways images promoted traditional ideals and women’s agentic responses to them.
Papers are welcome from art history scholars in all stages of their careers whose research focuses on Italy in the 5th through 14th centuries.

Keywords:
Geographic Area: Southern Europe and Mediterranean
Topics: Visual Culture
Topics: Women
12th through 14th century
medieval
Chair: Judith B. Steinhoff
From the simurgh perched on Sasanian textiles to dragons coiling through Yuan porcelain, creatures—real and imagined—were among the most mobile and mutable figures of the medieval Eurasian visual world. They migrated across textiles, metalwork, ceramics, paintings, manuscripts, and prints, shedding and acquiring attributes as they crossed linguistic, religious, and political frontiers. A phoenix in East Asia was not quite a simurgh in the Islamic world, yet the two could share a silhouette, or hybridize altogether. Such creatures did not merely illustrate cross-cultural exchange; they were the very vehicles through which artists, patrons, and viewers co-produced meaning, continually transforming and reinvesting these figures with new significance in the process.
This panel convenes scholars working across the art histories of the Eurasian visual world to examine how zoomorphic imagery materialized transcultural entanglement between roughly 500 and 1500 CE. We invite papers that treat creatures as agents rather than ornaments: as carriers of diplomatic meaning, as sites of iconographic negotiation, as problems of translation, and as catalysts for artistic invention. Why did artists adapt foreign beasts to local visual idioms? What was lost, gained, or generated in the passage? How might attention to creaturely imagery help us move beyond diffusionist models toward richer accounts of medieval connectivity? Interdisciplinary approaches, including those drawing on the environmental humanities and material studies, are especially welcome.

Keywords:
Geographic Area: Global
Eurasian
Time Period: Sixth to Tenth Century
Time Period: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
Topics: Animal Studies
Chair: Yuxi PAN, SOAS, University of London
This session celebrates the legacy of Caroline Bruzelius (Professor Emeritus at Duke University) as a leading American scholar on the history of medieval art and architecture. Bruzelius’s published research, including titles such as The 13th-Century Church at St-Denis; The Stones of Naples: Church Building in the Angevin Kingdom; and Preaching, Building, and Burying: Friars in the Medieval City, spans Northern Europe, Italy, and the greater Mediterranean between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Meanwhile, through innovative teaching and advising, honors such as directing the American Academy in Rome, leadership of several acclaimed Digital Humanities projects, and a recent public-facing role in the scientific research attending the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris, Professor Bruzelius has impacted countless individuals and shaped the field in diverse ways. She has particularly influenced the methods of building archaeology, social art history, material and technical analysis of art, and digital art history.
We invite papers about new approaches to medieval architecture and sculpture, particularly those related to any of the following subjects:
- The chronologies and processes of building and artistic manufacture.
- The urban and social contexts of church building in France, Italy, or beyond.
- The art and architecture of religious orders, spiritual movements, and reforms.
- The impact of materials on architecture or sculpture.
- Scientific or team-based study of historic monuments.
- Digital representation and narrative to understand change over time.
By exploring the state of these themes impacted by Bruzelius’s thought, this discussion intends to better comprehend and build upon her legacy in the present.

Keywords:
Geographic Area: Europe
Time Period: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
Topics: Art History
Topics: Social History
Topics: Medieval
Chairs: Joseph Chandler Williams, University of Maryland, College Park and Alexandra Dodson, Notre Dame of Maryland University
Venice’s crucial role as a meeting point between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean has long been recognized. This panel, however, seeks to turn attention away from East-West cultural exchanges towards the less considered North-South, exploring how these may be similar or diverge, as well as the effects they had on the art and architecture of Venice, its terraferma, and the Alpine regions to the north. We welcome papers addressing the vital trade routes which facilitated the movement of peoples, artists, and objects between Venice and lands beyond the Alps. Moreover, explorations of the artistic impact of Venice’s late Medieval terraferma expansion to the west and north are equally encouraged. The critical role of the Alps as both a barrier and bridge between these two cultural spheres, as well as a source of territorial strife between the expanding Republic of Venice and the Holy Roman Empire is a further point of focus for this session. This panel therefore seeks papers that consider the following questions: What role did artists from north of the Alps play in Venice? How did Venice adopt northern stylistic and iconographic forms and create a uniquely Venetian artistic language? What role did artworks created outside of Venice play in Venetian devotional and/or collecting practices? With which political contexts did these works engage?
Possible themes and subjects:
- Importation of artwork and materials
- Itinerant artists and craftsmen
- Movement of peoples (e.g., pilgrimage, mercantile ventures, military interventions, diplomatic missions)
- Program themes and iconography
- Political ties and ducal ambitions
- Trade networks
Keywords:
Eleventh to Fifteenth Century
Exchange
Trade
Patronage
Migration
Chairs: Sarah Cohen, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and Emma Leidy, Columbia University
The vine tangles and travels across region, time, and culture until it belies its own origin. This panel takes the vine—and related vegetal forms such as the tendril, the arabesque, and the branching tree—as a lens through which to examine how these motifs transform across temporal, geographic and cultural borders. Vegetal motifs appear as trees from the Buddha’s awakening, in the Garden of Eden, and on the Assyrian palace at Nimrud; and, as vines within İznik tilework, on the Ara Pacis, and on Art Nouveau ironwork. The imagery of undulating growth travels to points across art history that mimic the structure of the vine itself and proliferate beyond any singular tradition or chronology. We invite papers in a comparative panel across art historical disciplines that consider how the vine moves through trade networks, across material traditions, and between sacred and secular contexts. Papers may address the vine’s entanglement with religious symbolism, its role as a disruptor of cultural boundaries, or the methodological difficulty of tracing motifs across discontinuous histories. Our panel illuminates broader questions about ornament, transmission, and the limits of interpreting iconographic forms through examining how this one form branches and recurs throughout art history.
We welcome submissions from across geographies and periods, and especially look forward to papers with comparative and transregional approaches.
Keywords:
Topics: Materiality
Topics: Comparative Studies
Topics: Aesthetics
Topics: Art Trade
Topics: Ecology
Chairs: Charlotte Gorant, Yale University and Elizabeth Akant, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Medieval textiles rank among the most mobile objects of the premodern era, traversing vast distances through trade, diplomacy, devotion, and gift exchange. Woven, patterned cloths found their way into the sacred and secular collections of institutions and individuals far from their initial places of creation. But textiles traveled in another sense as well: their patterns and colors were adopted into the visual languages of painters, manuscript illuminators, mosaicists, and other artists across the medieval world, generating images that extend — and complicate — the physical and documentary record of textile exchange. Too often these two arenas of evidence, the woven and the painted, have been treated separately. In this panel, we join them, offering a broader framework for studying medieval global connectivity through textiles, reshaping the ways in which medieval exchange is studied across media and regions.
Therefore, this panel invites papers that explore material textile history and/or the painted representation of textiles across any region of the medieval globe. Patterns migrate; paintings preserve evidence of cloths that no longer exist; and artists transform the fabrics before them, investing imported textiles with meanings shaped by local context. When a textile pattern crosses media, geography, or religious tradition, what is lost, gained, or transformed? Contributions from scholars working outside the European tradition are especially encouraged.

Keywords:
Geographic Area: Global
Time Period: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century
Medium: Textiles
Time Period: Sixth to Tenth Century
Medium: Painting
Chair: Amanda Luyster, College of The Holy Cross