Call for Papers for Session
Carrying Across: Translation as Material Practice in the Pre/Early Modern World
Association for Art History 2026 Annual Conference
University of Cambridge, 8–10 April 2026
Due by 2 November 2025
This session explores how portable things, such as reliquaries, textiles, books, and tools, are objects of translation. A coconut shell from Ceylon, joined to a Fatimid rock-crystal ewer and refashioned as a Christian reliquary in thirteenth-century Münster, invites us to rethink the concept of ‘translation’ as an act of transgressing linguistic, sociocultural, geospatial, and temporal boundaries. Taking its etymological root, the Latin translatio (‘to carry across’), as our point of departure, we ask how materials move across contexts. We explore how they mediate intercultural traffic, urging a reconceptualisation of translation not as a linguistic but also a material act. Shifting focus from the moment and place of an object’s creation to the networks through which it has travelled, we seek to illuminate pre- and early modern circuits of local and global exchange. Building on scholarship on material agency by Beate Fricke, Finbarr Barry Flood, Tim Ingold, and others, we invite conference papers that explore questions such as: How can translating (e.g., mounting, re-cutting, over-painting) be understood as a form of making? How do deliberate misuses, repairs, or forgeries reveal contested meanings? In what ways do pre-/early modern artefacts act as ‘temporal hinges,’ enabling dialogue between past, present, and future? We welcome papers that consider materials and makers that have been underrepresented in existing scholarship and that stimulate a productive methodological conversation between art history and other adjacent disciplines, including translation studies, cultural heritage preservation studies, and material anthropology.
Abstracts (max. 250 words) should be submitted using the 2026 Paper Proposal Form to the convenors, Yupeng Wu (yupeng.wu@yale.edu) and Se Jin Park (sejin.park@yale.edu), by 2 November 2025.
Paper formats
The majority of AAH Sessions are made up of between three and eight 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions. The minimum number of papers per session is three, and eight is the maximum number of papers per session. Sessions run for a half or full day only.
For more information or questions, please get in touch with the Session Convenors.
Please also visit https://forarthistory.org.uk/carrying-across-translation-as-material-practice-in-the-pre-early-modern-world/