Confounding Images: Frustration as Art Historical Method, University of Cambridge

Confounding Images: Frustration as Art Historical Method’, Association for Art History 2026 Annual Conference, University of Cambridge (8-10 April 2026), deadline 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 10-minute presentations that reflect on: a single pre-modern artwork, object, image or method. Papers should raise issues which will 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.

Submit your Paper via a form available here. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenors below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

• Dr Millie M. Horton-Insch, Trinity College Dublin, hortonim@tcd.ie

• Dr Lauren Rozenberg, University of East Anglia, l.rozenberg@uea.ac.uk

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 coedited by Millie Horton-Insch and Lauren Rozenberg. More details may be found here.