Date:
Location: Boston, MA , United States
SEQUITUR Issue 12.1
Fall 2025
https://www.bu.edu/sequitur
CFP: “Currents”
Deadline: September 26, 2025
The editors of SEQUITUR, the graduate student journal published by the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University, invite current and recent MA, MFA, and PhD students to submit content on the theme of “Currents” for our Fall 2025 issue.
This issue invites submissions that consider how artistic activity and material culture make visible, help detect, and even resist the invisible forces at work in our world. When used in the scientific fields of meteorology or hydrology, currents describe the perpetual motion of air and water. In the study of the humanities, the term might connote a prevailing trend or the zeitgeist of a particular historical moment.
Furthermore, scholarship in the blue humanities frames oceanic and cultural currents as part of an assemblage, suggesting that the ocean’s liquid perpetual motion and heterogeneous material composition are more than just a backdrop for human culture. At its surface, the ocean has served as a site of imperial conquest, extractivism, and militarization, but is also a site of migration, diaspora, and resistance. Scholars Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg even use the concept of the ocean, and all that it intermingles with, as a “Hypersea” to describe how the ocean exceeds its liquid form, perpetual cycles, or a specific body of water by permeating and shaping physical matter, such as the atmosphere and our bodies, but especially our imaginations. Peters and Steinberg’s work provokes further consideration of what art historical scholarship might look like when informed by natural and social currents that exceed their boundaries and inscribe one another.
From 17th-century Dutch still life painters’ fascination with the products of colonial and transoceanic trade to contemporary work such as Hito Stereyl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014), which draws parallels between liquid currents and the fluidity of financial assets, identities, and borders in a digital world, artists, architects, and collectors have responded to the questions and conditions shaped by natural and social currents. This issue seeks to collect scholarship spanning antiquity to the present that grapples with such currents as complex, historical assemblages and asks where art might serve as a tool to interrogate them.
Possible subjects may include, but are not limited to:
Currents, Movement, and Temporality: Flow; perpetual motion; flux; swell; direction; circulation; pushing and pulling; present; contemporary; prevailing; instant; prediction; ongoing; trends
Currents and Systems: Weather patterns; transoceanic drift; mapping; hydrocommons; oceanic and atmospheric ecologies; rivers; oceans
Currents and Culture: (Un)intended distribution (shells, marine salvage, etc.); spirituality and religion (ritual, baptism, purification, etc.); contact zones; migration; undercurrents
Currents and Scholarship within the Oceanic Turn: transoceanic imaginaries (Elizabeth DeLoughrey); a “poetics of planetary water” (Steve Mentz); tidalectics (Kamau Brathwaite); the Undersea, and other theoretical methods (including works of Stacy Alaimo, Hester Blum, John R. Gillis, Epeli Hau’ofa, Melody Jue, Astrida Neimanis, Serpil Oppermann, or Philip Steinberg, among many others)
SEQUITUR welcomes submissions from graduate students in the disciplines of art history, architecture, archaeology, fine arts, material culture, visual culture, literary studies, queer and gender studies, disability studies, memory studies, and environmental studies, among others. We encourage submissions that take advantage of the digital format of the journal.
Founded in 2014, SEQUITUR is an online biannual scholarly journal dedicated to addressing events, issues, and ideas in art and architectural history. SEQUITUR, edited by graduate students at Boston University, engages with and expands current conversations in the field by promoting the perspectives of graduate students from around the world. It seeks to contribute to existing scholarship by focusing on valuable but often overlooked parts of art and architectural history.
Previous issues of SEQUITUR can be found here.
We invite full submissions in the following categories. Please submit your material in full for consideration in the publication:
Feature essays (1,500 words)
Content should present original material that falls within the stipulated word limit (1,500 words). Please adhere to the formatting guidelines available here.
Visual and creative essays (250 words, up to 10 works)
We invite M.Arch. or M.F.A. students to showcase a selection of original work in or reproduced in a digital format. We welcome various kinds of creative projects that take advantage of the online format of the journal, such as works that include sound or video.
Submissions should consist of a 250-word artist statement and up to 10 works in JPEG, HTML, or MP4 format. All image submissions must be numbered and captioned and should be of good quality and high resolution.
We invite proposals for the following categories. Please write an abstract of no more than 200 words outlining your intended project:
Exhibition reviews (500 words)
We are especially interested in exhibitions currently on display or very recently closed. We typically prioritize reviews of exhibitions in the Massachusetts and New England area.
Book or exhibition catalog reviews (500 words)
We are especially interested in reviews of recently published (1-3 years old) books and catalogs.
Interviews (750 words)
Please include documentation of the interviewee’s affirmation that they will participate in an interview with you.
Plan to provide either a full written transcript or a recording of the interview (video or audio).
Research spotlights (750 words)
Short summaries of ongoing research written in a more casual format than a feature essay or formal paper.
For research spotlights, we typically, but not universally, prioritize doctoral candidates who plan to use this platform to share ongoing dissertation research or work of a comparable scale.
To submit:
Email all material to sequitur@bu.edu
Include in the email:
Your proposal or submission
A recent CV
A brief 50-word bio
Your contact information in the body of the email: name, institution, program, year in program, and email
“SEQUITUR Fall 2025” and the type of submission/proposal as the subject line
Additional reminders:
All submissions and proposals are due September 26, 2025.
Please remember to adhere to the formatting guidelines available here.
Text must be in the form of a Word document, and images should be sent as .jpeg files.
While we welcome as many images as possible, at least ONE must be very high resolution and large format. All other creative media should be sent as weblinks, HTML, or MP4 files if submitting video or other multimedia work.
Please note that authors are responsible for obtaining all image copyright releases before publication.
Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their submission or proposal the week of October 15, 2025, for publication in January 2026.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the SEQUITUR editors at sequitur@bu.edu.
