history
AAH Symposium – Beyond the Visual
Re-citing the Archive: Fieldwork, Fiction and the Politics of Memory
This paper proposes a speculative feminist historiography that re-cites the archive through embodied fieldwork, fictional personae, and the politics of memory. Drawing on site-specific research, situated within Brontë Country, West Yorkshire I explore how sensory gestures—walking, touching, re-enacting—activate archival fragments and reframe landscape as a mnemonic field. The archive here is not a static repository but a haunted space—one that migrates across media, bodies, and temporalities. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of archival practice — writing, walking, re-collecting, recollecting, reciting, re-citing and remembering, the archive, in this context, is a multisensory terrain and a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.
Central to this inquiry is the figure of Phyliss Dare, a fictional persona who enables a methodological slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. Dare operates as both structuring device and speculative method, enabling a mode of citation that foregrounds absence, polyphony, and narrative slippage. Her presence as explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer allows for a reframing of fieldwork as fictional encounter, one that destabilises linear historiography and opens space for embodied speculation. Through Dare the archive becomes a stage for performance, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded.
Rather than reconstructing a lost narrative or a singular past, the work proposes a historiography in which archival gestures become vehicles of resonance, resistance and reanimation. By triangulating fieldwork, fiction, and citation, I argue for a historiographic practice that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. This method foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter. In doing so, it offers a framework for engaging with historical material not only recovered as evidence, but re-situated within a living, shifting terrain where bodies landscapes and narratives converge.
Association for Art History Symposium
CFP | AAH | AUTUMN SYMPOSIUM 2025 | BEYOND THE VISUAL: FULL BODY IN BRITISH ART HISTORY – PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
I am pleased to announce my paper proposal Re-citing the Archive has been selected for the above symposium.
“Western aesthetics since Plato have privileged the visual over the corporeal, leading to a limited understanding of artefacts, both outside and inside the West. As anthropologist David Howes writes in The Craft of Senses, the conventional western hierarchy of the senses “heaps honors on vision as the ‘noblest sense’ while relegating touch to the lowest, most ‘primitive’ rung of the sensorium” (2011: 1). The bodily senses of smell, taste and touch have been viewed as ‘nonaesthetic’ while sight and sound are classified as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘intellectual’ senses and granted superiority on epistemic, moral and aesthetic grounds (Caroline Korsmeyer 2019: 358). Recently, the ‘sensory turn’ and the ‘material turn’ have challenged this paradigm.
The 2025 Autumn Symposium organised by the Doctoral and Early Career Committee will explore the complex interplay between the senses when creating and experiencing artistic objects. Our aim is to go beyond the traditional emphasis on the visual gaze and to investigate how other sensory experiences have shaped, and keep shaping, our understanding and appreciation of artistic practices. How can attending to meanings achieved by other bodily senses offer alternative ways to understand works of art?
We invite proposals for 12-minute papers, relating to questions such as:
- How are emotional responses to art evoked through the non-visual senses?
- Might a sensory approach to sculpture, crafted objects, textiles etc lead to a reinterrogation of what qualifies as art?
- How has the focus on the gaze influenced the reception of objects that appeal to other senses?
- What happens to the afterlives of artifacts crafted for tactile encounters or to oral storytelling when we experience them through the lens of visuality?
- What kind of role did visuality have in imperialistic agendas?
- How do contemporary artists draw from historical practices to forge new understandings of art that transcend the visual?
- What is or could be the role of the body in this new art history, and how can academia engage more closely with multi-sensory experiences of art?
We aim to address these questions by examining how different artistic theories, art forms, artisanal practices, and so-called ‘low art’ have engaged with the body and its senses. We welcome a wide range of perspectives and methodologies, from historical and theoretical inquiries to contemporary practices, such as explorations into oral traditions and folklore, materiality, museological and curatorial practices, theories of art, et cetera. Speakers will examine diverse artistic expressions in diverse chronological and geographical contexts, exploring the full sensory experiences they offer. By providing a platform for discussion across disciplinary lines, we hope to cultivate a deeper understanding of the complexity of artifacts in their production and their reception.”
Text reproduced from https://forarthistory.org.uk/events/cfp-aah-decr-symposium-2025-beyond-the-visual-full-body-in-british-art-history-past-present-and-future/ (accessed 20/09/25)
Episode 2: To Have and to Hold
I found a lock of hair in a glass case. The label said ‘Believed to be Emily’s’. Not Emily Brontë’s hair. Not a lock of hair. But hair, possibly Emily’s. The uncertainty is the most honest part. I think about the word believed, as if belief could bind the strands of hair to her scalp, as if glass could hold the heat of her breath. I hold it in my mind like a relic, a relic of a relic. Does the history of myself become parallel with the history of the object kept? What is this hinge or bridge that one builds to become the self that is now? I read Charlotte’s letters. I read Gaskell’s biography. I read the footnotes. I wonder how many women have been footnoted out of their own stories?
[Emily writes] She writes: “I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” I wonder if the same is true of objects. If they pass through us, staining the mind, altering the hue of memory. I wonder what Emily would have thought of her life behind glass. I wonder if Wuthering Heights was her own collection — of storms, of silences, of things too wild to hold. She never wanted to be seen, she wanted to vanish into the moor. And yet here she is, pinned like a butterfly. This is the trap: an anterior document, a document created to sustain an image, an image contained in a scene, a scene without a referent. What is occurring in this falling in together, apart, away?
There is a desire to recuperate the forgotten, the abandoned, the fragmentary, the lost but it is a fool’s errand. I am both wild goose and chase. I wonder if collecting is a form of violence or is it a form of love? The human heart has hidden treasures, in silence sealed, in secret kept. Surely to collect is to love without reciprocity, to name without being known, to hold without being held. But the collection is not a sanctuary, it is a séance, a summoning of what refuses to stay buried. The photograph is torn, the letter is foxed, the lock of hair curls like a question mark. Even the archive has a body and it is failing. I hold a stone from the path to Top Withens, it feels like a breath caught in the throat. It fits in my palm like a secret. Or a wound. Or a promise I can’t keep. I don’t know if it’s hers. I don’t know if it’s mine. But I keep it. To have. To hold. To lose. And still, it slips through.
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