Leeds academics and researchers to take part in this year’s Association for Art History Annual Conference

Seven colleagues from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies are participating at the Association for Art History Annual Conference through convening panels and giving papers.

The Association for Art History’s Annual Conference 2025 will bring together international research and critical debate about art history and visual culture. A key annual event, the conference is an opportunity to keep up to date with new research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas.

The Annual Conference attracts around 400 attendees each year and is popular with academics, curators, practitioners, PhD students, early career researchers and anyone engaged with art history research.

Academics and researchers from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies are leading on two panel discussions for this year’s conference, which takes place from 9 to 11 April 2025 at the University of York.

One panel session will explore the writings of Griselda Pollock, Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. A separate panel will consider how interdisciplinary collaborations can unlock new avenues of knowledge.

Other colleagues from the school and wider faculty will participate in the conference through the delivery of papers on a range of topics.

Professor emerita Griselda Pollock. Image © University of Leeds.

Dr Elspeth Mitchell from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies will lead a panel on Reading the work of Griselda Pollock, alongside Professor Hilary Robinson from Loughborough University.

This panel will respond to, critique and put to work a range of critical concepts developed by feminist art historian and cultural analyst Professor Griselda Pollock. Pollock lectured at the University of Leeds from 1977 until her retirement in 2021, achieving her Personal Chair in 1990. She was formerly the Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and, in 2001, founding Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH). She is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Holberg Prize in 2020 and the Prix Mondial Nessim Habif in 2024.

The panel will explore her intellectual project, evidenced in a body of work of over 25 books and 200 essays. It is a project characterised by the sharing of feminist enquiry and knowledge, and the creation of concepts with which to develop, theorise, practice and critique feminist interventions; it is dedicated to writing of art’s histories while also radically challenging the discipline Art History. Artists under consideration have ranged from Bracha Ettinger to Lubaina Himid, Van Gogh to Marilyn Monroe.

Books by Griselda Pollock, Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds. Photo: Elspeth Mitchell.

Dr Elspeth Mitchell’s work explores practices and theories of feminism and visual culture. Elspeth said:

“Hilary and I are excited to bring together a panel of speakers whose research uses the work Griselda Pollock in different ways.

“We are delighted that Griselda will join us at the University of York as respondent to the panel.”

One of the papers in the session will be delivered by Postgraduate Researcher Evangelia Danadaki who will speak on Becoming matrixially aware: Griselda Pollock’s reading of Bracha L. Ettinger.

Bracha L. Ettinger in her studio. Photographed by Amit Berlowitz, 2009. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Rebecca Klarner and Julia Tuveri – both Postgraduate Researchers from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies – will be leading a panel titled How was it made? How interdisciplinary collaborations in Material Culture Studies and Art History can unlock new avenues of knowledge.

Rebecca Klarner is in the fourth year of a part-time Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Collaborative Doctoral Award, jointly hosted by the University of Leeds and the V&A. Rebecca is researching twentieth century ceramics and Wedgwood’s involvement in ‘the question of good design’. Rebecca said:

“We are really looking forward to bringing not only material culture studies but also craftspeople and other specialists and their knowledge and material intelligence into focus with our session. This is a further step towards including this specialist knowledge into how we as art historians are approaching objects.

“We’ve had a great response to the call for papers for our panel. As a result, we were able to choose eight papers across various media and time periods, showing that this can be a universal approach. We are looking forward to discussions and inspired thinking.”

Elspeth Mitchell and Rebecca Klarner from the University of Leeds are convening two different panels at the Association for Art History’s Annual Conference 2025.

Other speakers from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies giving papers at the conference include Dr Gill Park (Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curating) and Postgraduate Researcher Tom Vickery.

Tom Vickery will be participating in a panel on Community and Activism in the Global South. Tom’s paper – Nature, Archive and Community: Exploring generative kinship and solidarity within and beyond Luta Ca Caba Inda (The Struggle is Not Over Yet) and Mediateca Onshore – will address the relations of ecology and community within the Luta Ca Caba Inda (LCCI).

The LCCI is a contemporary archival arts project initiated in 2012 as an experimental digitisation of filmic material housed at the Bissau-Guinean Institute for Film produced in the late colonial and early postcolonial period.

The archive of the Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau

Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual, Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Photo by Tom Vickery.

In a panel on Social Science Frameworks for Looking at Art since 1960, Dr Gill Park will ask how the convergence of art history and social science methods can illuminate gendered experiences of migration. Gill said:

“My paper – Resistant voices, counter-visualities and migratory aesthetics – considers a new project I embarked on in May 2024 which seeks to investigate possibilities for transdisciplinary exchange between me (an art historian) and sociologist Dr Sylvia Gyan from the University of Ghana.

“The project focuses on the rights, representations and lived experiences of ‘kayayei’, a term used to describe adolescent girls who migrate from the Northern regions of Ghana to work as ‘head porters’ in the markets and e-waste recycling centres in Accra.

“Focusing on the deployment of narrative methods in contemporary artist video work, I will ask a number of questions, including how the words of migrant women can tell an alternative story to that captured by the dominant visual record.”