Category: call for papers

Slavery North: Call for Abstracts — Deadline Dec. 19, 2025

Slavery North is pleased to invite participation in an academic conference, Rebellion, Resistance, and Refuge: Slavery and Border-Crossing during the American Revolution.

The conference will take place in person from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 12, 2026, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.

On the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Slavery North invites proposals for papers that rethink the cultures, events, and experiences of the Revolutionary War. This call encourages new scholarship that reexamines the Revolutionary War through the experiences of enslaved people in British North America, exploring themes of displacement, resistance, and freedom across emerging national borders.

Call for Abstracts:

Deadline for Abstracts: Friday, December 19, 2025

Slavery North invites proposals for 20-minute papers from graduate students, scholars, professors, and cultural and heritage workers. Proposals must include:

· Name, title, affiliation/institution, and location (city, province/state, country)

· Paper title

· Abstract: 200-300 words

· Two-page CV (featuring research highlights)

Submission Instructions:

Please submit your abstract and supporting materials via email as PDF attachments by Emily Davidson at: emilydavidso@umass.edu

More information: https://slaverynorth.com/event/call-for-abstracts-academic-conference/

The full call for abstracts is here.

We encourage you to circulate this invitation across your scholarly and community networks.

CFP: “Photography Beyond the Vault” Photography Network Symposium 2025

PHOTOGRAPHY BEYOND THE VAULT
PN VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM, DECEMBER 4–6, 2025

https://www.photographynetwork.net/symposium-2025-call-for-papers

Photography Network’s fifth annual symposium will consider the subject of photography collections and the institutions that shape them. When Rosalind Krauss published her 1982 essay “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” questioning the categorical shifts of historic photographs from archives to art museums, the effects of the 1970s “Photo Boom” were still unfolding. Today, a half century after the founding of influential galleries, museums, and academic programs focused on photography, the medium is fully ensconced in the global art market and public collections through countless prints, negatives, books, magazines, and many other materials. At the same time, this history centers on the United States and western Europe, and within these geopolitical regions, scholars and critics have long noted how particular sets of photographs are privileged for preservation and study over others. Collecting photographs became a way to value and prioritize certain stories over others. 

Drawing inspiration from the Nepal Picture Library, a digital archive of over 120,000 photographs that strives to create a broad and inclusive visual archive of Nepali social and cultural history, this symposium seeks to present a current appraisal of changes to photography collections around the globe. Our keynote speaker will be NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Co-Founder and Director of photo.circle, a platform for photography in Nepal including the Nepal Picture Library, and the organizer of Photo Kathmandu—an international photography festival that serves as an alternative platform for conversations between visual storytellers and local audiences. 

For our 2025 virtual symposium, we invite proposals that critically examine how the institutional frameworks of photographic history and practice—often shaped by Western models of scholarship, archiving, and pedagogy—are unevenly applied across global contexts, and that explore how alternative or locally grounded approaches can challenge, expand, or reconfigure dominant narratives in the field. How can photography collections of the future improve and how can we better serve these collections?
Proposals might consider: 
Alternative collecting, preservation, or display practices
Issues of access to and ownership of photographs
Legacies of colonialism and histories of resistance in photography collections
Absence, loss, and destruction of photographs 
Digitization, databases, and AI as tools 
Artists in the archives and archives as art
Photography’s “discursive spaces” today

Submission Information: 

Photography Network invites proposals across disciplines and a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographic and thematic diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their careers are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the symposium will be in English.

The symposium organizers encourage a variety of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 15-minute papers, we also seek alternative-format presentations (e.g., workshops and roundtables). Applicants may submit up to 2 proposals, provided that one is in an alternative format. Sessions will be organized around accepted submissions, rather than prescribed themes.

To be considered for a panel or alternative-format presentation, please prepare: 
(1) a 250-word abstract with a clear indication of format, and
(2) a two-page resume or CV.
All files should be named “[LAST NAME]–CV” or “[LAST NAME]–ABSTRACT.”
Email completed materials by August 15 to photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. Notifications of accepted proposals will be emailed by August 31. The symposium will be held online December 4–6. 2025. 
Note: Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. We have a sliding scale membership: $20 (Student/Unaffiliated), $40 (Affiliated), or $100 (Senior). We also have free need-based memberships. Please visit Photography Network’s membership page for more information on how to join and email any questions to photographynetworkboard@gmail.com.

Call for Research Writing: Submit your research by Sept. 15, 2025 to the Met Journal

The Metropolitan Museum of Art invites  invite you to submit your research to the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

The Journal publishes articles and research notes that contain original research on works of art in The Met’s collection.

Articles contribute extensive and thoroughly argued scholarship—art historical, technical, and scientific—whereas research notes are narrower in scope, focusing on a specific aspect of new research or presenting a significant finding from technical analysis, for example.

The maximum length for articles is 8,000 words (including endnotes) and 10–12 images, and for research notes 4,000 words (including endnotes) and 4–6 images. 

The process of peer review is double-anonymous. Manuscripts are reviewed by the Journal Editorial Board, composed of members of the curatorial, conserva­tion, and scientific departments, as well as scholars from the broader academic community.

Articles and research notes in the Journal appear in print and online, and are accessible in JStor on the University of Chicago Press website.

Deadline for submissions for Vol. 61 (2026): September 15, 2025.

Submission guidelines: 

www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/met/instruct

Please send materials to: 

journalsubmissions@metmuseum.org

Questions? Write to:

Elizabeth.Block@metmuseum.org

Inspiration from the collection: 

www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

View the Journal: 

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/loi/met

Call for Papers: Submit to the Metropolitan Museum Journal

The Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed Metropolitan Museum Journal invites submissions of original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection.  

The Journal  publishes  Articles  and  Research Notes. Works of art from The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection should be central to the discussion.  Articles  contribute extensive and thoroughly argued scholarship—art historical, technical, and scientific—whereas  Research Notes  are narrower in scope, focusing on a specific aspect of new research or presenting a significant finding from technical analysis, for example. The maximum length for articles is 8,000 words (including endnotes) and 10–12 images, and for research notes 4,000 words (including endnotes) and 4–6 images. 

The process of peer review is double-anonymous. Manuscripts are reviewed by the Journal Editorial Board, composed of members of the curatorial, conserva­tion, and scientific departments, as well as scholars from the broader academic community.

Articles and Research Notes in the Journal appear in print and online, and are accessible in JStor on the University of Chicago Press website.

The deadline for submissions for Volume 61 (2025) is September 15, 2025.

Submission guidelines: www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/met/instruct

Please send materials to: journalsubmissions@metmuseum.org

Questions? Write to Elizabeth.Block@metmuseum.org

Inspiration from the Collection: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

View the Journal: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/loi/met

CFP: Disabilities and American Art Histories, American Art

Call for Papers:American ArtCommentaries
Disabilities and American Art Histories
Deadline: April 1, 2025
Co-organizers Laurel Daen and Jennifer Van Horn invite short essays that explore the intersections of disability studies and the histories of American art, architecture, and design; center disability in compelling and innovative ways; foreground critical disability studies methodologies; and conceptualize disability broadly. For details, visitjournals.uchicago.edu/journals/amart/cfp-disabilities-and-american-art-histories. The articles will be published in American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, in 2026.

CFP: Thinking Art History and Black Studies Together, American Art Journal

Call for Papers:Thinking Art History and Black Studies Together
SAAM American Art Journal
Deadline: March 1, 2025
Co-organizers Tiffany Barber, Ariel Evans, and Cherise Smith invite short essays that investigate the methodological intersections between art history and Black studies, understood as both theory and practice; document the institutions and individuals who have championed them; and exemplify how thinking art history and Black studies together expands the roots and aims of both disciplines. For details, visit journals.uchicago.edu/journals/amart/cfp-thinking-art-history-and-black-studies-together. The articles will be published in American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, in 2026.

PUB: Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize

Submissions are now open for the 2024 Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize. The submissions deadline is December 1, 2024.

The annual Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers launched in 2018, to coincide with the journal’s fortieth year of publication, and seeks to further enhance Oxford Art Journal’s international reputation for publishing innovative scholarship. The Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers aims to encourage submissions from British and international doctoral students, as well as early career researchers who are within five years of gaining their PhD. The essay will be on any topic relevant to art history and should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words (normally including footnotes) in length. The editors will review all submissions to select the Prize winner and will work with the successful candidate to advise on revision of the manuscript for publication. The journal and Oxford University Press will advise the Prize winner on securing image permissions and may be able to make a contribution to image costs.

The winner will receive:
Publication of the winning essay in Oxford Art Journal
£500 worth of Oxford University Press books
A year’s free subscription to Oxford Art Journal

Other entries of sufficient quality may be invited to publish their submission in Oxford Art Journal.

Please see the following page for more information about submission and the prize: https://academic.oup.com/oaj/pages/essay_prize

CFP: 2024 Photography Network Symposium “In Relation: Photography’s Communities”

October 25–27, 2024
Tucson, Arizona + virtual (hybrid)
Proposal due date: May 15, 2024

Photography Network will convene its fourth annual symposium in the Sonoran Desert Borderlands city of Tucson, Arizona in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Grounded in the themes that arise in three CCP-organized exhibitions of Latinx photography that will be on view this fall (Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer; Chicana Photographers LA, curated by Sybil Venegas; and Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature, curated by Sybil Venegas and Christopher Velasco), “In Relation” will consider how communities are made visible, defined, and constituted through photography. In her book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021), Elizabeth Ferrer writes: “As the photographer/subject relationship shifted from outsider/insider to insider/insider [in the late twentieth century], the photograph became less an ethnographic document than an autonomous and self-validating form of individual and community expression.” This shift highlights questions of agency, circulation, diaspora, and storytelling that are relevant to the practice and institutional interpretation of photography. Taking this idea as a point of departure, we invite proposals that broadly respond to the following questions and themes:

● How have artists, especially those from Latinx communities, used photography to probe issues of visibility, belonging, and representation? How do their artistic practices constitute forms of activism?
● Who has the right to tell stories for whom?
● How does the circulation of photographs create—or restrict—communities of subjects and viewers?
● How have borders—in the US and beyond—shaped histories of photography, and how has photography from borderlands challenged state-imposed divisions?
● What alternate models might exist for interpreting photographs and photographic practices that transcend simplistic binaries such as “insider” versus “outsider”?
● What do authentically relational, community-centered curatorial practices look like? How are methodologies such as community advisory councils rethinking the notion of curatorial voice and storytelling?

Submission Information

Photography Network invites proposals across disciplines and a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographic and thematic diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their careers are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the conference will be in English.

The symposium organizers encourage a variety of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 20-minute papers relating to the themes outlined above, we also seek submissions for a workshop on the topic of community-centered exhibition development and for a roundtable featuring presentations from artist activists .
Please prepare for submission:
(1) a 250-word abstract with a clear indication of format, and
(2) a two-page resume or CV.

All files should be named “[LAST NAME]–CV” or “[LAST NAME]–ABSTRACT.”

Email completed materials by May 15 to the Photography Network Symposium organizing committee: Josie Johnson, Emilia Mickevicius, and Anne Cross at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. Notifications of accepted proposals will be emailed by mid-June. The schedule and registration information will be available by July 1 and the symposium will be held October 25–27, 2024.

Note: All are welcome to apply. Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. We have a sliding scale membership: $20 (student/unaffiliated), $40 (affiliated), or $100 (sustaining). We also have free need-based memberships. Please visit the Photography Network’s membership page (www.photographynetwork.net/memberregistration) for more information on how to join.

CFP: “The Black Commonwealth” at CAA2024

The Black Commonwealth
Co-Chairs: julia elizabeth neal (University of Michigan), Janell Blackmon-Pryor (Bowie State University)
Submit:https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12517.html
Session will present: In Person

Investigations of place have prompted radical reconsiderations of social and artistic geographies of visual culture. It absorbs and reflects psychosocial views and cultural relationships between communities and sites. Place is discursive across the disciplines: Tim Creswell, an anthropogeographer, situates place as a “meaningful category,” whereas Lucy Lippard, a feminist curator, describes it as “the locus of desire,” and artist Renée Green discursively engages notions of place and site-specificity in “Peripatetic at ‘Home’.”

With the objective to contribute to increasing microhistories–local, transnational, and global–reframing art historical inquiry, this panel will convene around Pennsylvania and its role within Black art production. A colony, the second state to join the Union, and a commonwealth implicated by the myths of the nation, Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the United States. How does it shape histories of artists from Henry Ossawa Tanner and Meta Warrick Vaux Fuller to Raymond Saunders, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Benjamin Patterson, and more, from the past to now?

We invite submissions related to Pennyslvania’s role in the profiles, practices, networks, institutions, and histories, of artists of African descent from the 19th to 21st centuries. Graduate students, adjunct, tenure-track and tenured professors, curators and arts cultural workers are encouraged to present.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

* Placemaking
* Politics of Identity and Blackness
* Gender Politics
* Respectability Politics and Whiteness Studies
* Andrew Carnegie and Institutions
* Labor Histories and Art
* Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
* Deindustrialization
* Archives and Documentary Histories
* Museums, Galleries and Race

Deadline is August 31, 2023

CFP: Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Studies: 

Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

deadline for submission: August 15, 2024

full name(s)/name of organization:

Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard co-editors/Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email(s): wcastenell@wlu.edu; ahazar1@saic.edu

This special issue will explore how Blackness was constructed and problematized by a hegemonic global structure across national boundaries during the long nineteenth century. The issue will pay particular attention to emerging concepts of Black identities during this period.  Critically, majority narratives have driven these constructions, propagating mediated histories that subjugate Black people, yet the full impact of these narratives has not been thoroughly explored and needs additional interrogation. Essays might consider topics related to images, texts, other forms of media, and more. Possible topics could include expressions of Black autonomy in white supremacist cultures; colonialism/decolonization; trauma studies; slavery/emancipation; Black soldiers; Black artists/photographers/writers; the development and expression of stereotypes; the practice of lynching; the transatlantic migration and the Black diaspora; and other relevant subjects. Nineteenth Century Studies publishes studies of nineteenth-century world cultures in all humanistic fields, including literature, art history, history, musicology, and the history of science and the social sciences. It is an interdisciplinary journal issued annually by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. One exciting aspect of Nineteenth Century Studies is that the journal encourages authors to enhance their contributions with pertinent artwork.

Please submit manuscripts for scholarly essays of 6,000-10,000 words, pedagogical essays of 2,000-4,000 words, or book reviews of 600-1000 words formatted in Chicago Manual Style to guest editors Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard at wcastenell@wlu.edu and ahazar1@saic.edu. Additionally, we welcome suggestions of books for review relevant to the theme of this special issue. Please send your suggestions to the editors. Early expressions of interest and proposals of topics are also welcome. The initial deadline for submission of full manuscripts will be August 15, 2024, but earlier submissions are encouraged.