The committee for the 49th annual UBC AHVA Graduate Symposium invites graduate students to submit abstracts that reflect upon, investigate, or challenge the theme of “perspective,” across all of its diverse meanings. We will be joined by Dr. Amy Knight Powell, Chair of the Art History Department at the University of Southern California, as our keynote speaker.

The elucidation of spatial depth and distance, whether with illusionistic or symbolic intentions, preoccupies art history, determining breakthroughs and delineating hierarchies across eras and geographies. As a mode of seeing, organization, or analysis, a certain perspective can catalyze belief systems and schools of thought. The very act of drawing a line and casting the net of a grid is laced with the historical violences of map-making, inscribing, and ordering. Conversely, the naturalization of one form of vision, the privileging of the ocular, and other singular angles invites counternarratives: Who is precluded from visibility and representation? What will always disrupt the schema? What insights are to be gained by greater openness, self-reflexivity, and embodiment in art interpretation? To put into perspective conjures a relational co-consideration; with perspective, we look back to critically re-evaluate long-held ideas, reflecting upon the past work of writers, theorists, historians, curators, and artists to imagine things otherwise—and peer forwards, to not-yet-forged pathways, methods, and hoped-for futures.

The committee welcomes abstracts from across all art historical specializations that creatively and imaginatively engage with perspective. This may be through or beyond any of the following potential topics:

• New approaches to artists, artworks, or art movements
• Science, technologies, and theories of vision or space, and their use or influence on art-making techniques (e.g., photography, the camera obscura, cartography, diagrams)
• Theories and histories of spectatorship and modes of aesthetic experience; meditations on vision, the act of looking, the gaze
• Machine vision and surveillance
• Dimensionality and techniques of visual and spatial construction beyond “twodimensional” and “three-dimensional”
• Multi-sensory approaches and accessibility
• Retrospectives, re-evaluations, and historiography methods
• Expansive points of view: underrepresented agents and actors of history
• Individual and cultural memory
• Systems of regulation or control, as well as resistances and interruptions to imposed order
• A study of an object through the lens of an alternate discipline
• Utopian projects, future horizons

We also warmly invite interdisciplinary approaches and submissions affiliated with other disciplines, including (but not limited to) architecture, museum and curatorial studies, music, and cultural studies.

Graduate students are asked to submit their applications via email to grad.symposium@ubc.ca by June 10ᵗʰ, 2026. In a single (1) PDF file, authors should include their name, paper title, an abstract (250-350 words), and a copy of their CV or personal statement, specifying school name, program, and year of study. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by June 22nd, 2026.

Paper presentations will take place in-person at UBC Vancouver campus on October 22-23, 2026. Presentations will not run longer than 20 minutes. Selected papers will be eligible for publication in Wreck: the University of British Columbia’s Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.