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 Friday.

PANEL 3: 9 AM–12 PM
In 1980, Carlo Ginzburg analyzed a modern medical-semiotic paradigm predicated upon clues that emerged simultaneously among the detective, the psychoanalyst, the forensic scientist, and the art connoisseur. Expanding from this line, this panel aims to think broadly about the largely unacknowledged medical models underpinning the writing of art history and perpetuating harm within it. Not least we will explore the diagnostic basis and disciplinary power of the interpretive act. By incorporating perspectives of disability studies, the history or sociology of medicine, and critical medical humanities, among others, we hope to propose new ways of writing that either account for these origins or seek how, in practice, to repudiate them.  
 
Speakers: 

Suzanne Hudson, co-convener, professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California 

Victoria Papa, co-convener, associate professor of English and Visual Culture, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts 

Amanda Cachia, assistant professor, Arts Leadership, Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts, University of Houston, Texas, on “Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism” 

Fiona Johnstone, assistant professor in Visual Medical Humanities, Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK, on “Art History and Critical Medical Humanities” 

Raphael Koenig, assistant professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut on “Hans Prinzhorn: Between Medical Case Studies and Art Historical Style”  

Hannah Zeavin, assistant professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, on “Composite Cases”

PANEL 4: 1:30–4:30 PM
How has art historical writing shifted in recent years to account for the author’s lived, embodied experience? How have scholars borrowed from autobiography, creative nonfiction, life-writing, and auto-theory to open the discipline to new ways of writing art history that emphasize an author’s positionality––their groundedness in history, class, sexuality, gender, race, time, space, and place? This session seeks to uncover the wide-ranging possibilities, risks, and potential shifts to our thinking about the art object when art historical writing asserts a self. 

Speakers: 

Sarah Hamill, convener, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College 

J. Vanessa Lyon, professor of Art History, Bennington College, on “Blackness Thirteen Ways: On Finding Myself in Art History” 

Iris Moon, associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art, on “The Bluest I: Writing Melancholy Wedgwood” 

Ren Ellis Neyra, associate professor of English, Wesleyan University, on “A Disturbance that Does Not Yield” 

Jordan Reznick, assistant professor of American Studies, Grinnell College, on “Looking with the Ancestors”  

Jennifer Stager, assistant professor of Art History, Johns Hopkins University, on “Casting Knucklebones, Conducting Clouds”

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