Call for Papers
ASSOCIATION FOR ART HISTORY CONFERENCE
CONFOUNDING IMAGES: FRUSTRATION AS ART HISTORICAL METHOD
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
8th-10th APRIL 2026
Due by 2 November 2025
If the mission of Art History is to make sense of visual and material cultures, then what can be learned from objects that resist art historical study?
This panel invites contributors to reflect on pre-modern artworks that they find compelling, but which they feel they have ‘failed’ to satisfactorily engage in art historical study. We encourage contributors to consider objects and images that they find confounding, have struggled to write about, have abandoned study of or which they have found resistant to art historical methodologies. We also invite papers which consider methodological ‘failings’: art historical theories that present significant challenges when applied to pre-modern art. In reflecting on encounters with the limits of art historical research, we hope to provoke generative discussion about what can be learned from this friction, about both these objects and Art History as a discipline. In doing so, we conceive frustration as a productive method in the study of material culture.
This panel discussion will consist of 10-minute presentations followed by a round table discussion and Q&A. We therefore invite papers that reflect on: a single pre modern artwork, object, image or method. Papers should raise issues which may form the basis of a broader conversation between panellists and with the audience. We welcome papers which consider pre-modern objects from across periods and geographies, including those related to the ‘afterlives’ of pre-modern objects.
Please submit an abstract using the form on the AAH website (https://forarthistory.org.uk/confounding-images-frustration-as-art-historical-method/) by Sunday 2nd November 2025.
Contributing panellists will have the opportunity to submit their paper for publication in a special issue of the open-access journal, Different Visions, titled ‘Points of Friction’ and co edited by Millie Horton-Insch and Lauren Rozenberg. More details may be found here: https://differentvisions.org/special-issue-points-of-friction/.