Leeds academics to take part in Association for Art History Annual Conference in Cambridge
Colleagues from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies are participating in panels and receiving fellowships at this year’s Association for Art History Annual Conference.
The Association for Art History Annual Conference 2026 will bring together international research and critical debate about art, art history and visual cultures. This key annual event is an opportunity to keep up to date with new research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas.
Academics from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies are leading on two panel discussions and leading a workshop for this year’s conference, which takes place from 8 to 10 April at the University of Cambridge.
One panel session will explore ‘How British is British Surrealism?’ with a paper by Dr Anna Reid (Senior Lecturer in the History of Art) on ‘Eileen Agar at Puerto de la Cruz’.
Anna’s paper will examine the political aesthetics of works by the Argentine-British artist and surrealist Eileen Agar (1899-1991) made in the Canary Islands (northern Tenerife) in the 1950s. Anna will ask how and to what extent the queer and surrealist aesthetics of Agar’s charged and dreamlike works intervene in or transcend the colonial and exoticist visual culture and landscape of ‘British’ northern Tenerife.
Photograph of Eileen Agar at El Dynamico, the village café in Puerto de la Cruz, 1952–6. © The estate of Joseph Bard. Photo: Tate. Image released under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED.
A separate panel on ‘Art History Warmed up?’ will bring feminist, decolonial and materialist perspectives to bear on questions of climate, image-making and planetary survival.
Convened by Dr Elspeth Mitchell (Lecturer in Feminism and Visual Culture) and Dr Gill Park (Associate Professor in Contemporary Art and Curating), this session is focused around Hito Steyerl’s proposal in Medium Hot (2025) of temperature as a conceptual framework for understanding art’s entanglement in planetary-scale crises, infrastructures and networks.
The panel aims to foster dialogue around the role of art and the writing of its histories in a world becoming increasingly unliveable, focusing on what art can do – not just to represent crisis, but to propose new modes of inhabiting and resisting it.
This is part of the work of the Feminisms Research Group at the University of Leeds, which is mobilising feminisms to reorient and consider the urgent questions of race, language, sexuality, labour, ecology, embodiment, coloniality and decoloniality.
Feminist Art Making Histories Workshop, Loughborough 2024. Photo: Hilary Robinson.
Elspeth Mitchell and other team members behind the Feminist Art Making Histories oral history archive will lead a workshop on ‘archiving precarious histories of art’.
The session will launch the Feminist Art Making Histories collection of fifty oral histories with artists, curators and writers which explores the encounter between art and feminism across Ireland and the UK, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The workshop will also offer an opportunity to discuss the challenges of working on precarious histories of modern and contemporary art.
Participants will consider questions such as ‘what role can or does the art historian or the curator play in capturing precarious histories?’.
Feminist Art Making Histories Team at Kettle's Yard. Photo Amy Tobin.
A highlight of the annual conference is the formal conferral of Association for Art History Fellowships.
The Association for Art History Fellowship programme recognises individuals who have made outstanding contributions to art history and its wider public understanding. Honourees include academics, curators, educators, artists, and those who promote and support the subject through public engagement and advocacy.
This year’s new Fellows include campaigner for art education, Abigail Harrison Moore (Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Leeds), London-based artist, educationalist and University of Leeds alumna Sutapa Biswas, and independent curator and art consultant Adrian Lock.
Professor Abigail Harrison Moore leads art and art history teachers in a Discovery Day on the University of Leeds campus as part of Art Teachers Connect 2025. Photo by Andy Lord. Image © University of Leeds.
Through leading advocacy for and access to Art History for over 30 years, Abigail Harrison Moore’s work has generated significant, evidenced, impactful change. She has advanced the Art History Association’s values of inclusivity, excellence and advocacy in all of her work to ensure that every young person – irrespective of background or educational experience – has access to art history.
Abigail’s Fellowship will be presented on Friday 10 April by art historian Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, a curator and senior academic who gained her PhD from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies in 2019.
Sutapa Biswas will have her fellowship conferred on Wednesday 8 April and will be presented by Gill Park and Elspeth Mitchell.
Park and Mitchell nominated Biswas for her profound and sustained contribution to contemporary art and to the field of art history, which has reshaped how we understand imperialism, gender, knowledge and power in visual culture.
More information
Find out more about the Association for Art History’s Annual Conference 2026.
Read about this year’s Association for Art History Fellows.
Feature image
Churchill College, University of Cambridge, England (UK). Sculpture: Southern Shade by Nigel Hall. Photo by Vysotsky. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
