Art History 40: Image and Memory

This special issue of Art History, flagship journal of the Association for Art History UK, brings together for the first time all the past and present editors of the journal in a celebration of 40 years of publication. Together, the editors bring to the volume a series of contributions on the theme of Image and Memory as arguably the key to defining the conceptual practice of the discipline. Essays by John Onians, Neil McWilliam, Dana Arnold, Marcia Pointon, Deborah Cherry, Samuel Bibby, David Peters Corbett, Gavin Parkinson, Genevieve Warwick, Natalie Adamson present a collective engagement with the role of memory and the image across all disciplinary sub-fields. Looking both back onto the journal’s history and forward to prospective avenues of enquiry, the papers are variously concerned with situating art-historical or visual memory across a spectrum of disciplinary concerns. The papers pursue issues of recollection, reminiscence and memory such as the affect of nostalgia, the play of temporalities, echoes and reflections, oblivions and forgettings, or conversely the afterlives of forms, whether ephemeral or archival, in their survivals and half-lives, absences and presence; and objects such as monuments, anti-monuments or memorials, mnemonic objects or displays, souvenirs, mementoes, replicas and reproductions, fragments or ruins.
The Courtauld Institute Research Forum and the Association for Art History UK generously funded this as a day of papers to launch the special issue, http://courtauld.ac.uk/event/art-history-40-image-and-memory-40-years-of-art-historical-writing