#21 REVOLUTION (Spring 2026)

July 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, a turning point in the American Revolution (1775-1783). The French Revolution (1789-1799), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and the unsuccessful United Irishmen’s Rebellion (1798) followed in quick succession. For this commemorative year, this issue of Journal18 proposes to examine afresh the material and visual cultures of what historians have termed the “age of revolutions.”

Taking a cue from the Declaration itself—a document that interrogated the very practice (and malpractices) of representation—we invite new questions about familiar material. What images and objects, actors and artistic media, have been privileged and marginalized to date in art histories of revolution? How did visual and decorative images purporting to document the American Revolution both foreground and obfuscate the fundamental contradiction of a political freedom that depended on systems of enslavement, colonization, and Indigenous displacement?

The French revolutionary government officially promised liberty and equality for all, yet women were formally excluded from political life (while simultaneously benefiting from new measures that significantly increased their social welfare), and slavery continued until France was forced to end it, temporarily, in 1794. How were the asymmetries and inconsistencies of the French Revolution embedded or elided in its civic performances and its official and unofficial image-making campaigns, production of ephemera, and circulation of luxury goods? What about absences in the visual and material record?

How might new scholarship on the visual history of the Haitian Revolution—the most successful revolt of enslaved peoples in history—interrogate its comparative underrepresentation during the eighteenth century and within the discipline of art history, arguably contributing to what the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as its historical “silencing”? How might art history stretch beyond the Atlantic rim to consider the global contexts of the age of revolutions and the manifestations of revolution beyond Euro-America during this period?

We welcome proposals for contributions that engage these questions and related matters of revolutionary memory, violence, justice, absence, and reinvention. Submissions may take the form of full-length articles, shorter pieces focused on single objects, photo essays, interviews, or other formats.

Issue Editors
Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware
Kristel Smentek, MIT

Proposals for issue #21 Revolution are now closed.

#22 ARCHIPELAGO (Fall 2026)

“Antillean art,” remarked St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, “is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.” Walcott’s Nobel lecture, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, offers a compelling meditation on the interplay between art, history, and the archipelago as a space of fragmentation, multiplicity, and interconnectedness. In dialogue with Walcott’s reflections, Italian philosopher and politician Massimo Cacciari has framed the rise of early Cycladic culture in the Aegean Sea as the archetype of sociocultural relationality in Europe, inviting a reconsideration of the Archipelago as a model of geographical, as well as political negotiations. 

As the eighteenth century witnessed the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the anchoring of European empires across Atlantic, African, Indian, and Mediterranean archipelagic complexes, the insights of Walcott and Cacciari challenge us to rethink how eighteenth-century art and architectural practices in archipelagic spaces were shaped by tensions between isolation, connection, empire, displacement, autonomy, and exchange. While offering an opportunity to reconsider the intertwined histories of colonialism, slavery, and territorialism, focusing on archipelagic structures can help “decenter” Western narratives. An archipelagic perspective is also critical to understanding how island societies navigated and negotiated their cultural identities and agency outside, or in spite of, colonial structures. 

This issue of Journal18 explores how archipelagic thinking informs the study of eighteenth-century art, architecture, and material culture. How might concepts of creolization, diaspora, and tidalectics, in the words of Kamau Brathwaite, reshape our understanding of artistic production and circulation? In the fragmentation of archival repositories, what can eighteenth-century objects and built environments made within archipelagic spaces reveal about the experiences of the people who lived there? How did eighteenth-century objects negotiate relationships between islands, oceans, and continents? How did artistic and architectural practices in the archipelago both reflect/reinforce and resist colonial power? 

We encourage contributions that explore the metaphorical and material implications of the archipelago in artistic practices, cartography, and networks of exchange and use. We welcome interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to object study in the form of full-length articles or shorter pieces focused on single objects, interviews, or other formats.

Issue Editors
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia

Proposals for issue #22 Archipelago are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: September 1, 2025.

To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, cd2bv@virginia.edu, and vogiatzaki@arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by February 1, 2026. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

More future issues will be advertised soon.