Art History x Urban Humanities

What do the urban humanities have to say to art history and vice versa? In their field-defining 2020 volume, Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, Dana Cuff, et al. describe the urban humanities as a scholarly praxis that marshals “urban studies, design, and the humanities to interpret and intervene in the city through engaged scholarship attentive to the settings of everyday life.” Building on this foundation, 2023 saw the launch of the newly established Urban Humanities Network, a consortium of campuses, organizations, and professionals collectively shaping this emerging field. Given this important inflection point, this session brings together urban humanists and art historians to understand how these two fields speak to each other—and how they don’t. Their commonalities are striking: generations of art historians have examined the city as a dynamic factor in artistic production and have deployed approaches central to the urban humanities such as mapping, microhistory, place-based inquiry, and spatial justice. Furthermore, histories of material space and architecture are germane to both fields. Yet, art historians do not often seek to intervene in cities—a key characteristic of the urban humanities. While thematically and methodologically similar, certain epistemological commitments concerning the practice of research and the nature of evidence separate these two fields. This session seeks papers that, through their content, illuminate the intersections and/or the divergences between art history and the urban humanities and asks how practices from each might contribute toward a broader effort to de-colonize these disciplines.