Graduate Student Art History Symposium

While working on the Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929), Aby Warburg characterized his art historical practice as a “ghost story for grown-ups.” As scholars, we are often all too familiar with recurring images, motifs, and ideas that persist in the canon or emerge from the archive as if of their own volition. Similarly, many communities have their own traditions and tales of spirits or spectral encounters that linger in visual culture. Many studies across the humanities have attended to the culture of the afterlife, both literally and figuratively. In his book Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida introduced the theoretical framework of “hauntology” to consider elements of the social and cultural past that endure and reappear in a manner of ghostliness. Furthermore, sociologist Avery Gordon contends that such hauntings are an index of “dispossession, exploitation, and repression” that reemerge in order to demand being addressed. This symposium seeks to lift the veil by critically engaging with hauntings, afterlives, and ghostliness as both cultural phenomena and a conceptual model for art historical inquiry.