Crafting Place

University of Michigan History of Art Graduate Student Symposium

Abstract submission deadline: December 1, 2025

While “placemaking” originates in contemporary discourses on urban planning and community development, scholars across the humanities have begun to explore how this concept can illuminate the spatial/placial practices of earlier worlds. In premodern contexts, place was often made not only through architecture and landscape but also through the movement, use, and display of portable objects, images, and materials. This symposium seeks to explore how objects—whether enduring or ephemeral—participated in the making and unmaking of place in premodern contexts. We invite papers that engage with theoretical frameworks such as new materialism, actor-network theory, and ecocriticism to consider the agency of objects and their various entanglements with human and non-human actors. How did visual and material practices help define, disrupt, or reimagine placial experiences? How might we understand place as a relational and processual formation shaped through the interactions of people, materials, memories, and meanings? We especially welcome submissions that address the tensions between materiality and immateriality; that consider the mobility of objects and materials; that engage questions of (dis)placement; or that reflect on the politics of presence and permanence. Through case studies from across global premodernities, this symposium aims to reconsider the boundaries of place and the many forces—seen and unseen—that bring it into being.

Abstracts concerning the premodern period from all geographical contexts are welcome. Submissions will be considered for 20-minute presentations in English. Please send a title and abstract (300 words or less) through the Google Form link by December 1, 2025.