Call for Papers – IMC Leeds 2026

Panel Series: The Materiality of the Late Medieval Book: Production, Reading, and Transition.

Deadline for submissions: 14 September 2025

We invite proposals for papers for a series of panels at the International Medieval Congress (IMC), to be held in Leeds, 6–9 July 2026. This session series will explore the materiality of the late medieval book between c. 1350 and 1540, with a particular emphasis on approaches that take the physical object as the foundation of scholarly inquiry. This strand aims to foreground the book as a material artefact – not simply as a vehicle for text or image, but as a made, handled, and interpreted object. We seek contributions that begin with codicological, palaeographical, artifactual, or structural features of books – bindings, layouts, quire structures, scripts, substrates, wear patterns, or added matter – and use these material traces to investigate broader questions of cultural practice, intellectual history, devotional life, or reading habits.

Papers may address, but are not limited to:

• Material production: physical construction of books, use of specific materials (parchment, paper, pigments), regional or institutional practices
• Reading and handling: how physical features shaped reading practices and reader interaction; evidence of use such as marginalia, damage, repairs, signs of wear, and ownership traces; and the repurposing, circulation, or afterlives of books
• Transitions and continuities: how the rise of print engages with manuscript materiality – including hybrid books, printed texts with manuscript additions, and conservative or experimental formats that blur traditional boundaries
• Methodologies: new approaches to studying the physical book as evidence and object

We particularly welcome work grounded in close analysis of specific manuscripts, printed books, or fragments. 

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with your name, institutional affiliation, and a brief biographical note (max. 100 words), to Janne van der Loop, (jannevanderloop@uni-mainz.de) by 14 September 2025.

Selected papers will form part of a multi-session strand proposal for IMC 2026. Applicants will be notified of the outcome around 20 September 2025. For questions or further information, please contact Janne van der Loop (jannevanderloop@uni-mainz.de) or Ad Putter (A.D.Putter@bristol.ac.uk)

We look forward to papers that place the material form of the late medieval book at the centre of scholarly interpretation.

Contact Email

jannevanderloop@uni-mainz.de

Modern states of Central and Eastern Europe have written strong narratives of national identities based on the idea of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. Formerly part of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires, they sought detachment from the Imperial past even if their history and identity were decisively shaped by it. This session aims to reflect on how the material heritage of marginalised groups has been appropriated, neglected and destroyed, but also on how it survived despite the official policies. It further focuses on the art historiography and on what was written in and written out of official narratives. Proposals are invited on any type of material heritage and writings that shed light on the survival and neglect of the minority’s heritage in Central, Eastern Europe and the neighbouring regions. Potential questions to be addressed are: How have new narratives of national art and architecture excluded other narratives? How were the diverse artistic traditions of the Roma communities racialised as less-developed foreign cultures throughout Eastern Europe, from Czechia to Greece? What happened under new nation-states to the cultural diversity of majority-Muslim regions such as Dobrogea and Crimea or with the Ottoman heritage of Yugoslavia? How was the material heritage of various “non-official” communities preserved and promoted despite states’ desires?

Contact Information

Cosmin Tudor Mine

Contact Email

cosmin.minea@phil.muni.cz

URL

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2026/webprogrampreliminary/Session16745.html

Call for Papers
31st International Conference on the History of Cartography
Bridging the Past and Present in Cartography
Prague & Brno, Czechia | 7–11 July 2026
www.ichc2026.org

The Faculty of Science of Charles University, the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Moravian Library in Brno, the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University, and the Czech Geographical Society, under the auspices of the Czech Cartographic Society, are pleased to invite proposals for papers and posters for the 31st International Conference on the History of Cartography. ICHC is the only academic conference solely dedicated to advancing knowledge of the history of maps and mapmaking, regardless of geographical region, language, period or topic. ICHC promotes free and unfettered global cooperation and collaboration among cartographic scholars from many academic disciplines, curators, collectors, dealers and institutions through illustrated lectures, presentations, exhibitions, and a social program. In order to expand awareness of issues and resources, each conference is sponsored by a leading educational and cultural institution.

The biennial conferences are organized in conjunction with Imago Mundi CIO. ICHC 2026 builds upon Czechia’s robust tradition of research in the history of cartography and related disciplines, a tradition that has flourished for more than a century.

Proposal submission now open: Please submit proposals for paper and poster presentations at www.ichc2026.org

Under the broad rubric of Bridging the Past and Present in Cartography, ICHC 2026 welcomes paper and poster presentations on the following themes.

1) Maps and Tourism

Encompasses the role of maps and related works in promoting tourism to regions or particular destinations and in the experience of touristic places.

2) Maps as Artefacts

Investigates the nature of maps as cultural objects that circulate within the marketplace and other networks, and that are variously collected and preserved within institutions of memory (GLAM).

3) The Third Dimension: Representing Elevation on Maps

Explores the particular strategies developed to represent the earth’s crumpled surface of hills and valleys for specific tasks, from military and geological mapping to forest management.

4) Mapping the Past: Historical Cartography at the Turn of the Digital Era 

Pursues interdisciplinary and critical perspectives on the ideological implications of new digital technologies in mapping the past, including the risks of distortion and of the instrumentalisation of historical content for political or ideological purposes.

And any other aspect of the history of cartography

Papers: Paper presentations will comprise 15 minutes for presentation, followed by a short discussion.

Posters: Posters will be installed for a dedicated session on the second morning of the conference and will remain on display through the remainder of the conference.

Panel proposals: We welcome the proposal of organized sessions. However, proposals for paper presentations, whether by one or more presenters, must be submitted and evaluated individually. Therefore, if a proposed paper is intended for an organized session, please include the information at the end of the submission form. The session’s organizer must also submit a separate proposal for the session that lists all the papers and presenters.

Workshops: In addition to the academic programme, four thematic workshops will be organised.

Scholarships: The Kislak Family Foundation will provide scholarship opportunities for up to 5 participants. More information at https://ichc2026.org/fellowship/.

Conference Language: The language of the conference is English, and all proposals and presentations must be prepared and delivered accordingly.

Key Dates:

• Opening of the call for papers: 15 July 2025
• Deadline for submission of proposals: 14 November 2025
• Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2026
• Early Bird Registration: until 15 April 2026

Estimated Registration Fees:

• Regular: 340 EUR
• Students: 150 EUR

Conference Venues: ICHC 2026 will convene in the historical campus of the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague (Albertov); the Moravian Library in Brno; and the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University (Brno). Participants will have the opportunity to engage with key cartographic collections and take part in thematic exhibitions, guided tours, field trips, and social events.

Inquiries: ichc2026@hiu.cas.cz

The International Conferences on the History of Cartography: 

London (1964, 1967); Brussels (1969); Edinburgh (1971); Warsaw (1973); Greenwich (1975); Washington, DC (1977); Berlin (1979); Pisa, Florence, Rome (1981); Dublin (1983); Ottawa (1985); Paris (1987); Amsterdam (1989); Uppsala, Stockholm (1991); Chicago (1993); Vienna (1995); Lisbon (1997); Athens (1999); Madrid (2001); Cambridge, MA, Portland, ME (2003); Budapest (2005); Bern (2007); Copenhagen (2009); Moscow (2011); Helsinki (2013); Antwerp (2015); Belo Horizonte (2017); Amsterdam (2019); Bucharest (2022); Lyon (2024); Prague, Brno (2026)

Contact Information

The Czech Geographical Society / Česká geografická společnost, z. s.
Albertov 6, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia 

Contact Email

ichc2026@hiu.cas.cz

URL: https://ichc2026.org/

Re:assemblages Symposium (Lagos, 4-5 Nov 25)

Alliance Française de Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria, Nov 4–05, 2025
Deadline: Aug 15, 2025

Guest Artists Space Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation

Provocation: What does it mean to think with African and Afro-diasporic art archives as living, contested, and future-shaping spaces?

The 20th century can be read as a formative ecotonal space—an unsettled, generative borderland where networks fractured and reformed, collaborations ignited, and tensions gave way to new modes of relation. Within this compressed terrain, distinct ecologies of African and Afro-diasporic thought and practice took shape, producing postcolonial libraries, and archives that carried with them emergent aesthetic and epistemic registers—unfinished, insurgent, and alive with possibility.

Marking the inaugural symposium of the Re:assemblages programme, this two-day gathering brings together the African Arts Libraries (AAL) Lab and Affiliates Network, archivists, curators, scholars, artists, librarians, and wider audiences to contemplate how postcolonial African and Afro-diasporic art archives and libraries act as ecotonal sites, their everyday lives, and futures.

The Re:assemblages Symposium invites inquiry into the ecologies of African and Afro-diasporic art libraries and archives energised by the radical potential of The Short Century, a temporal arc spanning 1945 to 1994 that centers Africa in postwar decolonisation, new diasporic formations, and the modernist movement of the 20th century. The symposium asks: 
– What forms of care, friction, and futurity emerge in the gaps, silences, and transitional zones of the postcolonial archive and library? 
– How might we read these spaces not as sealed enclosures, but as ecotonal formations? 
– How can we cultivate publishing ecologies within them that disrupt extractive knowledge regimes and nurture situated ways of learning?

Symposium Themes and Provocations 
The symposium is framed by the conceptual currents of Re:assemblages 2025–26—Ecotones, Annotations, The Living Archive, and The Short Century, each offering methods to inhabit postcolonial art archives and libraries, their gaps, inventories, silences, and thresholds.

Ecotones are transitional zones—spaces between distinct ecosystems, knowledge systems, and epistemologies. Deriving from the Greek tonos (tension) and eco (home), Ecotones asks: 
– What does it mean to inhabit the boundary, the in-between? 
– What knowledge is generated at points of contact, friction, and leakage? 
– How can archives, spaces shaped by colonial histories, diasporic flows, and post-independence reimaginings be read as ecotones? 
– How might ecotonal approaches help surface marginalized voices, and foster new reading ecologies, and ecotonal practices of publishing?

Annotations takes as its point of departure the marginalia, footnotes, redactions, and fragments that often surround, rather than centre, dominant historical narratives. Here, annotation is not merely a supplement, but a method. Influenced by the speculative rigour of Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation and John Keene’s poetic logic, this theme embraces annotation as a radical archival gesture: a way of writing beside, between, or against the grain. Initially conceived to activate the archives of pan-African festivals FESMAN, Zaire ’74, PANAF, FESTAC ’77, Annotations draws on various frames to ask: 
– How can annotation operate as a feminist, intertextual, and multisensory method? 
– What does it mean to annotate across silences, across generations, across space? 
– How can annotation serve as an act of resistance, a tool of memory, and a speculative strategy for working across archives—especially those that are fragile, informal, or deliberately incomplete?

The Living Archive challenges static, institutional models by emphasizing process, activation, and embodied memory. Here, the archive is not simply a place of preservation and linear histories, but a site of performance, encounter, and transformation. Artists and cultural workers draw from and contribute to archives in ways that are iterative, unstable, and alive. The Living Archive draws on artistic-led methods to ask: 
– How have artists inhabited museum collections, libraries, and archives? 
– What new languages and forms emerge when archives are accessed through gesture, voice, kinship, or editorial experimentation? 
– What gestures and practices are required to keep an archive alive?

(The Short Century: Symposium contributions under this theme will be presented by US based fellows of The Short Century Intensive, a research fellowship hosted by G.A.S. Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation, with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.)

Submission Guidelines 
We welcome proposals responding to the themes, Ecotones, The Living Archive, and Annotations, especially those that go beyond traditional academic formats. Contributions may take the form of talks and panels, performances or readings, listening sessions or screenings, workshops or roundtables, or collaborative, and intermedia presentations.

Please submit the following materials via the Application Form (https://forms.zohopublic.eu/yinkashonibarefoundation/form/CallForPapersReassemblagesSymposium202526/formperma/IxSHtFlylwPAXokwh8jGlIglobYZUCY2EVFpg9rH3yY) by 15 August 2025: 
– Abstract (300–500 words): Include a clear title. Indicate the theme you are responding to (Ecotones, The Living Archive, or Annotations). Outline the form and content of your contribution. 
– Supporting Material (3-5 items): Relevant images, video/audio samples, or links connected to 
your abstract. Please include captions and brief descriptions. 
– Biography (max. 250 words) 
– Website (and or links to professional work) 
– Curriculum Vitae – PDF, 3 pages maximum.

Selected participants will be notified in the first week of September. Selection will be made by our Advisory Committee, with preliminary shortlisting conducted by the Planning Committee.

Contact and FAQs 
For questions and inquiries, please contact: library@guestartistsspace.com.

We will offer travel and accommodation grants for five Africa-based participants. While we cannot cover travel and accommodation for other contributors, we will provide invitation letters to assist with funding and visa applications.

The symposium is scheduled to coincide with Lagos Art Week and ART X Lagos, a city-wide platform for contemporary art from Lagos and beyond, encompassing exhibition openings, art fairs, public programmes, and related cultural events.

About 
Re:assemblages is a roaming body and multi-year programme designed to foster experimentation and collaboration within African art libraries. In 2025–26, its second chapter opens with a provocation: What does it mean to think with African and Afro-diasporic art archives as living, contested, and future-shaping spaces? The programme forges vital connections between artists, publishers, and research institutions in Africa, while responding to the urgent need for a global forum to advance dialogue around archives that remain under-resourced, dispersed, and shaped by enduring colonial legacies that continue to determine their access, preservation, and visibility.

The programme is curated by Naima Hassan and coordinated by Samantha Russell, with contributions from Maryam Kazeem, Ann Marie Peña, and Jonn Gale, and funding from the Terra Foundation of American Art. 

For further details, view the concept note here (https://www.yinkashonibarefoundation.com/Portals/0/Reassemblages%202025-26%20Programme%20Concept.pdf). Previous outcomes of the 2024 edition can be found here (https://www.guestartistsspace.com/Reassemblages).

Organised by Guest Artists Space Foundation & Yinka Shonibare Foundation.

Advisory Committee
Dr. Beatrix Gassmann de Sousa, Natasha Ginwala, Dr. Rangoato Hlasane, Patrick Mudekereza, Serubiri Moses, and Dr. Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan.

Planning Committee
Moni Aisida, Jonn Gale, Naima Hassan, Belinda Holden, Maryam Kazeem, Siti Osman, Samantha Russell, and Ann Marie Peña.

Re:assemblages 2025–26 is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and Afreximbank under the auspices of the Afreximbank Art Program.

Contact Information

Naima Hassan

Re:assemblages Curator

Associate Curator and Archivist

G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive

Contact Email

library@guestartistsspace.com

URL: https://www.guestartistsspace.com/News/call-for-papers-reassemblages-symposium-2025

Lessing’s Materials/Materialities

Lessing Society Sponsored Panel 

ASECS Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, April 9-11, 2026 

In May 1770, Lessing assumed the office of librarian at the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel, known today as the Herzog August Bibliothek, a position he held until his death in 1781. As librarian, he was responsible for reorganizing the library’s holdings, which consisted of over 100,000 volumes, and for expanding the library’s collection on a very limited budget, which he accomplished by selling off or exchanging duplicates (Doublettentausch). Although born of necessity, this concern with the materiality and exchange value of the book mirrors the frequency with which material goods and objects are foregrounded in Lessing’s oeuvre, including rings (Minna von Barnhelm, Nathan der Weise), letters (Miß Sara Sampson), textiles (Nathan der Weise), and paintings and sculptures (Emilia Galotti, Laokoön). Today, our understanding of Lessing’s biography and his cultural significance continues to be shaped by the materiality of objects displayed in archives and collections in Wolfenbüttel, Kamenz, and beyond. In both Lessing’s oeuvre and in the collections and archives that frame his legacy, the (in)authenticity of an object’s provenance is central to its interpretation – most notably in the Ring Parable, in which the symbolic overdetermination of the three rings is linked to their exchangeability. 

This panel draws attention to the role of material objects and materiality in Lessing’s life, works and reception. Inquiries could address topics such as:

• Representations of material objects, collections, and collectors in Lessing’s works (e.g., the rings in Nathan der Weise, the Laokoön sculpture, the painting of Emilia Galotti)
• Library and museum collections connected with Lessing, such as the Herzog August Bibliothek, the Lessinghaus Wolfenbüttel, and the Lessing-Museum Kamenz
• The materiality of books, periodicals, and correspondence (e.g., paper, marginalia, writing utensils, ephemera)
• Inventories and the (re)classifying of objects, e.g., Lessing’s reorganization of the library in Wolfenbüttel 
• Dupes, frauds, and fakes; exchanges and exchangeability (e.g., the Doublettentausch, the three rings in the Ring Parable) 
• Lessing’s involvement with theater and its material objects (props, costumes, actors’ debts)
• Money, gambling, and lottery tickets 
• Correspondences and collections of letters 
• Materiality and the spirit/matter distinction in Lessing’s theological writings 

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short CV to Mary Helen Dupree (mhd33@georgetown.edu) and Francien Markx (fmarkx@gmu.edu) by September 15, 2025. 

Redaktion: Constanze Baum – Lukas Büsse – Mark-Georg Dehrmann – Nils Gelker – Markus Malo – Alexander Nebrig – Johannes Schmidt

Diese Ankündigung wurde von H-GERMANISTIK [Lukas Büsse] betreut – editorial-germanistik@mail.h-net.msu.edu

Contact Information

Mary Helen Dupree, mhd33@georgetown.edu

Francien Markx, fmarkx@gmu.edu

Contact Email

mhd33@georgetown.edu