The University of California, Riverside’s Art History Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce its 14th Annual Conference, Materiality of Objects.

This conference invites graduate students to examine materiality as an active force rather than a passive surface. Matter speaks: their voice awakening the impulse to make. Objects are encountered through the body and the senses: handled, worn, repaired, and transformed over time. 

We welcome papers that attend to objects as physical and spatial presences and as agents embedded in systems of circulation, power, and belief. How do materials anchor art in specific places and ecologies? How do objects move through economic, colonial, religious, and institutional networks? How do processes of extraction, touch, decay, and repair entangle symbolic meaning with lived experience?

Please submit your abstract and CV to ahgsa.ucr@gmail.com by March 31, 2026, at 11:59 pm PST. We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for in-person 10-12-minute paper presentations. Proposals from graduate students and independent scholars across the humanities will be considered, including Art, Art History, Anthropology, Classics, Literature, Dance Studies, Ethnic Studies, Global Studies, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Music, Religious Studies, and Philosophy, among others. Contact us at ahgsa.ucr@gmail.com with any questions. Selected speakers will be notified in April 2026