To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Research and Academic Program (RAP) at the Clark, we are gathering for four days under the theme Writing Art History to think together about the ways in which writing art history is changing rapidly.  
 
The celebration continues with two panels on Thursday.

PANEL 1: 9 AM–12 PM
Resisting nativist cultural politics on the one hand and art history’s Eurocentrism in the matters of theory on the other, the panel takes off from an article titled "The Work of Theory: Thinking Across Traditions” by Prathama Banerjee, Aditya Nigam and Rakesh Pandey in 2016 published in the Economic and Political Weekly, to propose that “we move from the position of being a critic of Western theory to that being a composer and assembler of a new theory from different sources and histories.” Theorists from the global south and the global north will gather to explore writing an art history that leaves open the possibility of abstract thinking and self-reflexivity in the non-European knowledge systems and aesthetic theories. 
 
Speakers: 

Parul Dave Mukherji, convener, professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India 

Iftikhar Dadi, professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University, on “Abstraction and Modernism” 

James Elkins, chair of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, on “Reconceptualizing Global Art History”   

Prita Meier, associate professor of Art History, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, on “The Indian Ocean as Method: Beyond the ‘Cross-Cultural’ Paradigm in Art History” 

Keith Moxey, professor emeritus of Art History, Barnard College, New York, on “Decolonization Now” 

Sugata Ray, associate professor, History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, on “Eco Art History from the Global South: Genealogies, Methodologies, Practices” 

PANEL 2: 1:30–4:30 PM
Art history awaits its anti-melancholic turn. From Aby Warburg’s belief in the universal lost “primitive” origins of human expression to George Kubler’s concept of the “extinction” of Indigenous cultural forms and even to the present day, art historical reflections on the discipline’s relationship to archives have tended to focus on how archival lack corresponds to colonized cultures’ losses. This colloquium brings together art historians who write with different attitudes, affects, and methodologies in approaching colonial and postcolonial archives. These approaches will be anti-melancholic, oriented toward not past destruction but present construction. If art history always already acknowledges the deferment of full, replete meaning in its object of study, and has traditionally honored the unusual powers of the artwork, our colloquium hopes to push the discipline’s latent potential for writing beyond grief. 

Speakers: 

Jennifer Nelson, convener, associate professor of Art History, University of Delaware 

Mia Bagneris, associate professor of Art History and Africana Studies and director of the Africana Studies Program, Tulane University 

Allison Caplan, assistant professor of History of Art, Yale University, on “Feathers in the Archive” 

Ximena A. Gómez, assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on “Generative Possibilities of Erasure” 

David Young Kim, professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, and visiting faculty at the University of Zürich, on “Found in Translation: Vasari, Life-Writing, and Art History” 

Shawon Kinew, assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, on “St. Paul & Me” 

Free. Advance registration strongly encouraged. Register here. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.