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Call for Papers: The Twenty-second Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: Yale University
Deadline: Sun, January 31st, 2027

Call for Papers: The Twenty-second Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium
Theme: Aftermath
Date: April 3, 2027
Keynote Speaker: Marci Kwon, Associate Professor of Art History, Stanford University

The world has ended many times, as sixteenth-century Nahua mapmakers knew when they painted the destructive ecological effects of cows introduced by Spanish colonizers. “Aftermath” invites us to linger in our never-ending endings. After a momentous event, crisis, or creation come new problems and possibilities. But while the term implies rupture, it also suggests continuity, defining what follows in terms of what came before.

The Twenty-second Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium asks: How does “aftermath” structure our understanding of art and history? Working in the aftermath, how have artists attempted or refused recovery? How have they engaged afterimages, echoes, and pre-used materials, such as Puerto Rican sculptor Daniel Lind-Ramos’s redeployment of FEMA tarps—the stuff of disaster response—after Hurricane Maria? Both the costs incurred by disaster and the responsibilities of repair are often unequally borne. After the U.S. Civil War, the sites of battle—the fields where armies met, the artillery scars on trees—became commemorative spectacles that proposed who and what had been sacrificed. At the same time, rebuilding the South relied on the labor of formerly enslaved people navigating the unending “wake” of slavery, as Christina Sharpe calls it, and the violence that is not named as war. If aftermath is the persistence of the past in the present, how should art history navigate these simultaneous temporalities? And how do objects enable us to see both past and present, before and after?
 
We welcome submissions exploring art, architecture, performance, and visual and material culture across time in the Americas, including the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

 

Material remains (stains, damage, waste) and memory (souvenirs, evidence)

Restoration, conservation, and care

Artworks in extended time, through lags, exposure, erosion, or cycles

Visual and material dimensions of crisis

How new worlds are imagined, delayed, and contested in colonial or decolonial processes

Recovery as healing (embodied, emotional, social), return to order, or reorientation

Repercussions and justice

How and whether art history can recuperate archival loss

Periodization and theorizing the post- (postmodernism, posthumanism, and more)

Relationships between rupture and ongoing change

 

We invite abstracts of no more than 350 words and a CV to americanist.symposium@gmail.com by January 31, 2027. Accepted participants will be notified in mid-February. “Aftermath” will take the form of a day-long, in-person symposium, with food and hotel accommodations provided for all speakers.  

Posted on Fri, November 6th, 2026
Expires on Sun, January 31st, 2027

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