Call for Papers
ICMA-Sponsored Sessions at International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2027
Visual Cultures of Surveillance in the Medieval World
due 23 September 2026
Communities of Things: Materiality, Objects, and Makers
due 25 September 2026
Visual Cultures of Surveillance in the Medieval World
Sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art
Medieval communities were subject to, and themselves produced, forms of surveillance. Among other forms of coercion — corporal punishment, rents and taxation, patriarchal authority, banishment — surveillance reinforced social and political power imbalances and shaped behavior both within and between communities. Social, bureaucratic, and carceral structures facilitating surveillance commonly marked the production of works of art: scribes and illuminators labored in Italian prisons, courts dictated the terms under which artists worked, and late-medieval artisans were legally required to shape their wares before open windows. Art was also often understood to possess its own powers of surveillance: oversize figural monuments presided over marketplaces, badges made legible their bearers’ political allegiances, and multiple miracle stories imagine the eyes of an icon tracking its devotees.
This panel asks how surveillance shaped the making of medieval art and how objects and images attest to, enact, or even expose medieval modes of surveillance. Attending to such intersections of the visual and the carceral, this panel seeks contributions that interrogate the liberatory assumptions that often underwrite the equation of art with community.
Topics might include:
Medieval “surveillance technologies”
Coercive patronage
Guilds and licensing organizations
Medieval theories of privacy
Works depicting surveillance
Architecture and control
Theories of optics and perception in their social contexts
Mobility and its restrictions
Strategies of occlusion
Connections between medieval visual culture and contemporary activist artists
Submissions due September 23. We are seeking proposals for papers 15 - 20 minutes in length. Please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and current CV to Luke Fidler (lfidler@usc.edu) and C.B.Boxer (c.boxer@bucknell.edu)
Communities of Things: Materiality, Objects, and Makers
Sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art
Object biography has reshaped the study of medieval art history and material culture studies, revealing the ways in which things and materials function in the medieval world and beyond. The 2027 IMC theme, “Communities,” invites exploration of material culture in terms of how an object-centered approach can redefine contemporary understandings of medieval communities. What can scholarly approaches that center medieval objects and materials and how they circulate reveal about their communities? How can non-anthropocentric approaches towards medieval materiality speak to medieval lived conditions? As objects with biographies, what can medieval objects say about their communities past and present?
There has been much scholarship in recent years about the object biographies of medieval things, and this session calls for papers that extend these biographies of things, including materials, objects, traces, and makers, and how they impact the formation, continuity, or breaking of a community. This session welcomes 20-minute papers exploring the roles of medieval material objects and their makers in medieval and contemporary communities, broadly defined. Papers discussing social lives of things, entanglement, and other methods centering objects and their interactions with community are welcome, as are approaches from any geographic region across the long Middle Ages. We welcome scholars at any stages of their career and encourage graduate students and early career scholars to apply.
Potential topics include: medieval objects and materiality as evidence of community, objects defining communities of their makers, objects and their role within communities of practice, social lives of medieval objects in contemporary communities, or any other approaches that center medieval objects and material culture.
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with your name, institutional affiliation, and a brief biography of around 100 words to Cortney Anne Berg (archivist@c-berg.com) by September 25th.
Applicants will be notified of the outcome around September 30th. For further information, please contact Cortney Anne Berg at archivist@c-berg.com.
A note about Kress Travel Grants
Thanks to a generous grant from the Kress Foundation, funds may be available to defray travel costs of speakers in ICMA sponsored sessions up to a maximum of $600 for domestic travel and of $1200 for overseas travel. If available, the Kress funds are allocated for travel and hotel only. Speakers in ICMA sponsored sessions will be refunded only after the conference, against travel receipts. In addition to speakers, session organizers delivering papers as an integral part of the session (i.e. with a specific title listed in the program) are now also eligible to receive travel funding.
Click here for more information.