Shii News – Academic Items

1. Call for contributions:

Workshop: The Theft of Art? Art Theories in Light of Global Art History

(University of Strasbourg, 8 January 2027)

Building on Jack Goody’s (2007) highly influential thesis of The Theft of History, this workshop aims to address an “institution” that this critique of the Eurocentric historiographical model imposed on “the rest of the world” left largely unaddressed: the institution of art. By asking why art has escaped this ambitious and coherent theory in terms of its self-reflexivity and decentring, the workshop intends to put forward the hypothesis of a theft of art in the sense of a process of conceptual capture through which the authoritative, hegemonic, European theorising and historicising doxa has normalised its own, situated, artistic experience while obscuring its minority, or “provincial”, status, thus “stealing” the plurality of artistic concepts, terminologies, languages, and narratives produced by other cultures. Despite its heuristic value, Goody’s theft thesis, along with his work on the image—particularly his theory of the cognitive contradiction caused by representation (Goody, 1997; Chevalier & Mayor, 2009)—paradoxically appears to be a case in point of the cognitive contradictions embedded in discourses on art that purport to be self-reflexive and decentred, yet which perpetuate Eurocentric, asymmetrical and hierarchical frames of reference and teleological narratives. This workshop proposes to scrutinise this paradox.

Despite significant efforts toward decentering, particularly through translation (e.g. Art in Translation), and circulation and “fragment” studies (e.g. Cooke, 2022; Kaufmann et al. 2015; Saint-Raymond, 2022), Eurocentric paradigms continue to shape both art theories and art history, including world art history (Summers, 2003) or global art history (Elkins, 2007). Art theories that incorporate discourses based on non-European artistic and visual experiences remain extremely rare (e.g. D’Souza and Casid, 2014). For example, Emmanuel Alloa’s (2010–2017) anthology of thirty texts by philosophers, theorists, and art historians unfortunately features only three contributors from non-Western fields, none of whom are art historians. In his hypothesis of four forms of “worlding” (mondiation) and ontological inferences, Philippe Descola (2021) groups the entire world into three categories (animism, totemism, analogism), assigning “modern” Europe a category of its own (naturalism). He also approaches world cultures holistically while viewing Europe from an evolutionary perspective (moving from analogism to naturalism). In this view, Europe appears not only as the only region in the world with a history, but also as the culmination of history. Although Descola denies having such an intention, he shows “a respect tinged with humility” only towards Western art historians, but makes no room for discourses on naturalism, realism, or comparable concepts developed within other cultures, which challenge his categories (e.g. Weiss, 2020). As for world or global art history, it is still typically written from the West. It is even common for specialists in Western art to be entrusted with the task of representing the discourses on art (in translation) and mediating the arts of non-Western cultures (e.g. Belting 2012; Elkins 2015), while specialists in non-Western arts and non-Western voices all too often remain in the “margins” (e.g. Gupta & Ray 2007; Juneja 2023), without this peripheral position being sufficiently recognised as a potential source of critical renewal. This creates a situation of cognitive dissonance. Although art theory and history increasingly claim global scope, their conceptual apparatuses and modes of knowledge production remain deeply grounded in Western frameworks that merely reinforce the “Great Divide” (Latour, 1983) and its hierarchies, between European, especially “modern”, and non-European and “pre-modern” or “traditional” artistic productions. This is particularly due to the scarcity of effective collaboration between specialists trained in different theoretical and historiographical traditions.

This workshop seeks to scrutinize this dissonance with a view to contributing to moving beyond it. Adopting the alter-globalist approach to art history initiated by Piotr Piotrowski (2015), it proposes to continue to explore its two main axes of research: on the one hand, “dissection” of Eurocentrism and Occidentalism and both their “repressive practices” and denial mechanisms in art theories and art history; on the other hand, “resistance to centralistic and exclusive art-historical activities” through “inter-epistemological dialogue” from a horizontal and comparative perspective. The workshop format aims to encourage in-depth discussion at the intersection of art theory and global art history, drawing on multi-situated research across a variety of geographical areas, historical periods, textual and visual sources, and artistic and sensory experiences. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

The manifestations of Eurocentrism and the Great Divide in theories of art and the image; the forms of epistemic violence embedded in these theories and in global art history; art history as an imperial resemanticization of non-Western art.
The impact of normative and Eurocentric theoretical frameworks and narratives on the interpretation of artistic practices and regimes of the image that fall outside these frameworks.
The relevance and limitations of major Western theories of art and the image (e.g. philosophy of art, Kunstwissenschaften, Bildwissenschaften, Visual Studies, Gaze studies, as well as anthropological theories with a universalist aim (e.g. Goody, 1997; Belting, 2004; Descola, 2021)), for the analysis of non-Western arts and images.
Alternative conceptions of art and the image that challenge binary oppositions (e.g. iconic/aniconic, realism/imagination, exteriority/interiority) by shifting the focus to other culturally and historically situated spectra, following the models of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s research on figurative representation in ancient Greece (Vernant, 1990), Jean-Claude Schmitt’s work on medieval European images (Schmitt, 2023), as well as research in ethno-aesthetics and multimodal ethnography (Collins et al., 2020).
Comparative approaches to discourses on art and the image situated within diverse geographical, historical, cultural and artistic contexts.

Organisation and contact details:

Nourane Ben Azzouna, Associate professor, UMR 7044 Archéologie et histoire ancienne : Méditerranée – Europe, University of Strasbourg, Fellow, University of Strasbourg Institute of Advanced Studies, benazzouna@unistra.fr

Scientific committee:

Nadia Ali, Associate researcher, Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans, Aix-Marseille Université

Monica Juneja, Professor, Center for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg

Julie Ramos, Professor, UMR 3400 ARCHE Art, civilisation et histoire de l’Europe – University of Strasbourg

2. KNOW workshop: Polymathy and Problem-Solving in the History of Islamic Knowledge; 2-4 June 2026
I’m pleased to announce the upcoming workshop Polymathy and Problem-Solving in the History of Islamic Knowledge, which will take place at Ghent University on 2–4 June 2026. This is an in-person event and registration is required. The full programme is available on the KNOW project website: https://erc-know.ugent.be/en

The workshop brings together researchers working on the history of Islamic knowledge, with a particular focus on how Muslim scholars engaged with concrete intellectual problems across disciplinary boundaries. Rather than approaching disciplines as fixed and isolated domains, the workshop explores the dynamic ways in which scholarly practices, methods, and concepts travelled across different fields of knowledge. Through a series of pre-circulated papers and discussion-based sessions, participants will reflect on polymathy, problem-solving, and the practical organisation of knowledge in Islamic intellectual history.

The workshop is organised within the framework of the ERC project KNOW: Polymathy and Interdisciplinarity in Premodern Islamic Epistemic Cultures (1200–1800 CE) at Ghent University.

If you wish to stay informed about forthcoming events and publications, please consider joining our mailing list (via the link above).

With best wishes,

Islam Dayeh

3. UCLA

Woman Life Freedom in the Mirror of Scholarship: Responses from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Utrecht University

English Lecture

Monday, June 8, 2026 at 11:00 am Pacific Time

Online via Zoom

Registration Required:

https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_y6a-WJxYTX-wwqBuhAYndg