That HECAA meets only every five years makes it a useful yardstick of changes within the discipline. If HECAA at 25 reflected a burgeoning trend towards reimagining scholarship on eighteenth-century art and architecture in more expansive global terms, HECAA@30 remained fixed on the vast world beyond Europe but with an…
Material Art History and Black Feminist Pedagogies – by Kathryn Desplanque
“Entering the classroom determined to erase the body and give ourselves over more fully to the mind, we show by our beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that passion has no place in the classroom.”bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge,…
The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Karen Lipsedge
In June 2024, British author Bernadine Evaristo used her invitation to speak at the Sir Thomas Gresham Annual Lecture Series to talk about the power of stories. As Evaristo summarized so eloquently, “We are stories. Stories are us. We breathe stories. We create stories. Stories are made up about us…
The Ethics of Study and Display of Ivory Objects – by Deepthi Murali
In 2014, Prince William suggested that all ivory objects from Buckingham Palace be destroyed. His intent was to send a clear message against elephant poaching in Africa. Purposeful destruction of raw and worked ivory as a way to deter poachers has become a common tactic amongst nations; one of the…
Who (or What) Speaks in a Global History of Art? – by Dawn Odell
Reflecting on the HECAA at 25 conference in Journal18 five years ago, Nancy Um proposed a new agenda for a global eighteenth-century art history. The field should, Um wrote, “query, perhaps even destabilize, the easy relationships that are often assumed between people, places, and things, rather than reifying an assumed…
Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead From HECAA@30 – by Jennifer Van Horn
Absence, silence, invisibility. Given the vibrant exchanges that took place at HECAA@30, representing many of the important dialogues happening across eighteenth-century art histories, it feels strange to center an essay on absence. Yet, the recuperative possibilities of art history, visual culture studies, and material culture studies, necessitate that scholars of…
Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803-1821) – by Damiët Schneeweisz
Editor’s note: This essay by Damiët Schneeweisz is a pendant to David Pullins’s Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box. Together, Pullins and Schneeweisz unpack two paint boxes that belonged to Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754-1820) and Charlotte Daniel Martner (1781-1839), bringing out how these boxes tie the material history of…
Freeing our Historical Imaginations – by Christen Mucher
I keep a large classroom map from the 1950s hanging on my living room wall. Titled “Beginnings of European Ascendancy to 1600,” it’s an outsized lesson on the politics of historical imagination. The map traces the “Great European Discoveries” across space in colorful lines originating in Spain, Portugal, England, and…
Big History – by Stephanie DeGooyer
According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, the first human communities were far more “complex,” “quirky,” and “interesting” than early modern political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau made them out to be. No community was ever completely brutish or egalitarian, they argue. For example, the introduction of…
Yes, We Do Know Everything – by Tony C. Brown
Between the title (“The Dawn of Everything”) and the subtitle (“A New History of Humanity”) we have, perhaps, the book in nuce: a big headline claim (everything!) announcing what seems a more limited offering (of humanity), itself presented in familiar fashion (it is a history), though, like all good commodities,…