Neoclassicism in the Extended Field: A Global Project
CALL FOR PAPERS
Online Symposium
Neoclassicism in the Extended Field: A Global Project
28-30 May 2026
Co-chaired by:
Faraz Olfat - PhD candidate, Department of the History of Art, Yale University.
Rebecca Yuste - PhD candidate, Department of Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University, and Junior Fellow, Garden and Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks.
Co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art, Yale University and the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University.
Keynote Speaker: Meredith Martin, Professor of Art History, NYU
Neoclassicism—rooted in the aesthetic, philosophical, and political traditions of Greece and Rome—stands as a defining current of the long nineteenth century, especially the period from 1750 to 1860. Often linked to state-building, emerging national identities, and the rise of secular modernity, the movement was shaped significantly by figures such as Robert Adam, Jacques-Louis David, Angelica Kauffman, Thomas Jefferson, Antonio Canova, and Abbé Laugier. Their ideas circulated broadly, aided by expanding imperial networks, print culture, and the development of photography. As a result, Neoclassical forms and ideals appeared far beyond Europe, taking shape in the colonial Americas, the Middle East, South Asia, and across the African continent. Art academies and new modes of image dissemination further amplified access to classical models once limited to travelers and on-site observers.
This conference asks what happens when Neoclassicism moves beyond its traditionally understood geographic center in Western Europe. How was the movement introduced, promoted, adapted, and transformed in non-Western contexts? How did Greco-Roman traditions intersect with existing local architectural, artistic, and archaeological legacies? And in what ways did Neoclassicism participate in, or respond to, global imperial structures?
We invite papers that expand, complicate, or challenge established narratives of Neoclassicism across media from the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum through the first decade of the twentieth century. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Transmission of Neoclassical design through colonial networks
Photography, pattern books, architectural treatises, and academic training (including the École des Beaux-Arts)
Governmental architecture, libraries, financial institutions, religious monuments, private residences, or unrealized projects
Theoretical or historiographic studies that question conventional boundaries of the movement
We welcome contributions that offer new perspectives, illuminate understudied regions, or reconsider the global dynamics that shaped Neoclassical expression. As this will be an online symposium, we are especially eager to hear from scholars working in Asian, African, and Latin American geographies.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 word along with a CV to faraz.olfat@yale.edu by the 1st of February, 2026.
We will communicate decisions by the beginning of March.
For any questions or concerns contact Rebecca Yuste at:
SAH Virtual: Case Studies in the Global Beaux-Arts
Scholars agree that Beaux-Arts classicism was the dominant architectural language of empire. Though typically associated with the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Beaux-Arts architecture manifested in various contexts and across geographies, languages, identities, and cultures. This style—a recognized design language with a set of rules and standards—has been translated, repeated, and transplanted. Students from across the globe, especially from the Americas, came to study at the École, bringing back what they had learned to their communities of origin. In settler colonial societies, like the United States, the style appears among the enclaves of the marginalized, like Black Americans asserting their national identity at state and city fairs. Britons used Beaux-Arts-inspired civic and commercial buildings across their empire from Ireland to Africa to make their geographic reach visible. In the global south, like Japanese colonial-era Taiwan, the colonized locals appropriated the styles of planned Beaux-Arts districts to create their own modern vernacular. Beaux-Arts architecture as a global phenomenon appeared well into the twentieth century.
As such, as historians concerned with globalizing our profession, studying the Beaux-Arts allows for documentation of this style’s widespread effects on individual cultures and regions. How did subaltern architects employ Beaux-Arts principles of order, rationality, symmetry, and typology in their own contexts, even after liberation? Did the monumentality of classicism take on new meanings in recently transformed societies, and (if so) how?
With this history in mind, each speaker will explore the globalization of the Beaux-Arts by recentering this style within architectural history. These case studies rely on archival research and close attention to visual form to highlight the duality of agency and coloniality in Beaux-Arts empire building.
Session Organizer: Charlette M. Caldwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Papers and Presenters:
Anchors of Empire: The Neo-Baroque from Northern Ireland to South Africa, Pollyanna Rhee, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Faces of A Colony: Japanese Colonial Planning in Taiwan and the Emergence of a Modern Vernacular, Meng-Hsuan Lee, Columbia University
The Argentine Pavilion’s Transatlantic Voyage: A Transplanted Beaux-Arts, 1889, Rebeca Yuste, Columbia University and Dumbarton Oaks
Beaux-Arts Jim-Crowism: William Sidney Pittman’s Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, Charlette Caldwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Colonial Compositions: Beaux-Arts Designs on the Maghreb, c.1878, David Sadighian, Yale University
CAA: Neoclassicism in the Extended Field
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