[Ahs-grads] CFP - graduate conference - Worms for Brains

[Iselda Salgado]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Claire Bishop <cbishop at gc.cuny.edu<mailto:cbishop at gc.cuny.edu>>
Subject: CFP - graduate conference - Worms for Brains
Date: June 9, 2025 at 11:31:10 AM PDT

Dear friends and colleagues,
Please find attached a CFP for a graduate conference this fall organized by GC doctoral students, on the rather wacky theme of worms and the “worms eye view.” I’d be so grateful if you could forward it on to your graduate students, administrators of graduate listservs, and any artists/performers whose interests might fit.
Have a great summer everyone -
Claire



Claire Bishop
Professor, PhD Program in Art History
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
NY NY 10016



WORMS FOR BRAINS

A graduate student conference organized by doctoral students in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, 14 November 2025

This conference takes up “the worm” as a wide-ranging prompt to wriggle through the fields of art, culture, and history. Worms fertilize their native ecologies. Wormholes enable leaps through time, space, matter, and medium. These protean organisms zigzag between matrix and matter – consuming, transforming, producing, and regenerating.

By taking seriously the paradigmatic grunt worker as an emblem for the reconstructive potential of decomposition, we seek to update our current modes of scholarship. The “worm’s eye view” de-hierarchizes, retrieves the overlooked or stepped-on, and apprehends the fundamental components of the earth that (largely out of sight) continually refurbish a globalized world. Can a conference be like a compost pile in which heterogeneous materials intermingle and decompose into nutrient-rich soil out of which new life can emerge?

We are seeking proposals that take up worms, either directly as a subject or more conceptually as a theoretical springboard, from actual invertebrates to metaphorical worms, and every figurative invocation in between. This is a call to think trans-historically and across disciplines, primarily for graduate students (in disciplines including, but not limited, to Art History, History, Media Studies, Languages, Literatures) but also extending to practicing artists and collectives.

Here are a few possible prompts:

●  Conservation, archival practices, and integrated pest management

●  Decomposition, entropy, and states of decay

●  Defying taxonomy (Darwin’s Worms)

●  Eco-criticism, Land art, Earthworks

●  Grunt work (à la Bullshit Jobs)

●  Hierarchies of scale and size, vertical and horizontal

●  The iconography and symbolism of worms

●  On screen in myth, science fiction, and porn: from Nordic lindworms to the colossal sandworms of Dune to worm vore

●  Performance & embodiment (earworms, dancing the worm, anyone?)

●  Regeneration and reproducibility (printmaking, clones)

●  Symbiosis, roots, migration (all rhizomatic paradigms welcome)

●  Worm's-eye-view / A Worm’s Perspective

●  Wormholes in the space-time continuum

...and beyond!

Interested participants are invited to submit a 350-word abstract and a CV for a 15-20 minute presentation by August 1, 2025 to arthistoryworms at gmail.com<mailto:arthistoryworms at gmail.com>. Please contact us with any questions.
The conference will take place at CUNY Graduate Center on Friday, November 14, 2025.

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