AHNCA board member/members S. Hollis Clayson and Niharika Dinkar are soliciting proposals for the AHNCA session they are co-chairing at the 2027 College Art Association conference, New York, February 3–6, 2027

Electric Cities: Illumination and Representation

The session proposes to explore relationships between the visual arts and urban spaces across the globe transformed by artificial light during the long 19th century. We are interested in examining the imperial legacies of illumination projects which have supported the problematic categories of “Cities of Light” and “Hearts of Darkness.” The session thus seeks to invite critical conversations between ostensibly luminous imperial centers and darkened colonial outposts, attending to the rhetorics brought into being by the entanglement of political power and regimes of light. We hope to interest scholars who work on cities in addition to, or instead of, better-studied imperial capitals: Paris, London, Berlin and Brussels.

We also hope to attract papers that study how aesthetic production is implicated in the circulation and distribution of lighting technologies and infrastructure. Targeting these issues places the session within the scholarship on global environmental humanities. The session seeks to discover how an analysis of the effects and technologies of artificial lighting might also enact new methodologies for the study of the 19th-century visual arts. How might we reassess canonical art historical narratives of modernity in view of the interconnected networks between people, lighting, structures, spaces, industries and resources that impact forms of visual representation?

Chairs: S. Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University and Niharika Dinkar, Boise State University

Submit your presentation abstract (250 words) to the session chairs before August 31

Full CAA timeline

August 31: Deadline for CFP submissions

September 11: Deadline for chairs to invite applicants to participate in their sessions

September 16: Deadline for chairs to notify applicants of decisions by email and finalize sessions with confirmed applicants

Early October: Registration opens and the conference schedule is announced

December 5: Access accommodation requests for in-person and/or remote participants are due to CAA

February 3–6, 2027: CAA 115th Annual Conference  in NYC