CFP: ‘Carrying Across: Translation as Material Practice in the Pre/Early Modern World,’ AAH 2026 Annual Conference (8–10 April 2026), deadline 2 November 2025

Association for Art History 2026 Annual Conference, University of Cambridge, 8-10 April 2026

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.

Submissions instructions

Abstracts (max. 250 words) should be submitted using the 2026 Paper Proposal Form (bit.ly/4mSXjO8) to the Session Convenors, Yupeng Wu (yupeng.wu@yale.edu) and Se Jin Park (sejin.park@yale.edu), by 2 November 2025.

For more information or questions, please contact the Session Convenors.