CFP Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference 2027
The next Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference will take place in Boston from 14–17 July 2027. Individual paper proposals are due to panel chairs by 15 September 2026.
Judith Noorman will chair the session Introducing the Connaisseuse. The Functional Reality of Product Specificity and Household Consumption as a Knowledge Domain. The session introduces the figure of the connaisseuse to reconsider how “The Real” operates in Netherlandish art. Rather than treating realism primarily as a pictorial or epistemological problem, it asks how the realistic depiction and material specificity of objects solicited and rewarded informed viewing. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which artists engaged with women’s domains of knowledge and practices of discernment, and to how the connoisseurial practices of household managers compare to those of art historians today.
The conference programme includes several other sessions that may be of particular interest to researchers working on women and gender. These include Frima Fox Hofrichter’s session Gender and Biography, which considers how experiences such as marriage, pregnancy, childcare, and household management shaped the lives and careers of women artists, and Joyce Zhou’s Women, Art, and Making the Dutch Colonial World, which centers women’s making in colonial contexts shaped by Dutch activity and asks how these practices might complicate distinctions between Dutch and local, fine art and craft, and artist and artisan, while also reshaping the contours of Netherlandish art history.