Job Offer from December 08, 2025
We are pleased to announce the open call for the second edition of The Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine, titled Art History in the Expanded Field.
The Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine is a two-year scholarly initiative dedicated to rethinking the foundations and future directions of art history in Ukraine. The Seminars serve as a platform for early-career researchers from Ukraine and international scholars to collaborate on critical and practice-oriented reflection on art historical methodology. It aims to foster deeper awareness of how knowledge is produced, transmitted, and situated — and to explore how disciplinary practices might be reconfigured in response to both local contexts and global shifts within the humanities.
The second edition, Art History in the Expanded Field, will be dedicated to rethinking the established hierarchies and universalities in the field and discussing the multivocal, horizontal, and situated approaches. Departing from the critical need to overcome the domination of homogenizing discourse within the discipline and its epistemological implications, we invite the participants to explore together the possibilities of art history beyond the established universal rankings, categories, or binaries, discovering neglected and unobvious decentralised connections and entangled developments.
We invite research proposals from Ukrainian and international scholars that resonate with a conceptual framework of the seminar and involve research on Ukrainian art from a transcultural perspective, aimed at exploring the complexity of artistic practices and phenomena beyond the national paradigm of art history.
Possible (but non-exclusive) areas of research
- regional, transregional, transcultural connections and elective affinities in art history
- non-diachronic art history
- paradoxical identities and challenges of national art history narratives
- opacity and invisibility in art history
- cultural transfer beyond center-periphery, invention-imitation dichotomies
- entangled objects and object biographies
- hybridity, mutation, and symbiotic life of images
- circulation of images within the networked digital environment
- shifting dichotomy of art/non-art
Structure
The second edition of The Methodology Seminars will bring together 10 early-career scholars working in art history or related fields. The initial phase of the second Seminar will take place online from March to June 2026. During this period, participants will work together in eight biweekly webinars focused on theoretical readings curated by the organising team, while concurrently developing their individual research projects. In-between the webinars, there will be 3 theoretical sessions, delivered by experts, introducing the main concept and ideas to be further explored by the readings. In June and July, each participant will receive personalised feedback on their work during a one-on-one session with an invited international senior expert.
The second Seminar will conclude with a week-long residency in Lviv at the Research Centre Ukraine — Max Weber Foundation (September 28 – October 2, 2026), where participants will present their work-in-progress research, showing its development throughout the Seminar. The presentations should clearly demonstrate how they employ the theoretical and methodological tools explored during the webinars.
Eligibility
Eligible are students with a master’s degree as well as doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in art history and related fields from Ukraine and abroad. The working language of the seminars is English. The participants of the first edition of The Methodology Seminars are eligible to apply.
Application
To apply, candidates must submit:
- A CV (PDF)
- A motivation letter (PDF, max. 2 pages)
- A short research proposal (PDF, max. 2 pages)
Applications must be submitted via the following platform: https://recruitment.biblhertz.it.
Applications are accepted until January 18, 2026.
Results of the selection process will be communicated by mid-February. For more information, please see here. For any inquiries please contact methodologyseminar@gmail.com.
Terms of participation
Each selected participant will receive an honorarium of 500 EUR, awarded upon successful completion of the seminar. Travel, accommodation, and per diem expenses for the on-site portion of the program will be fully covered. Participation in all the webinars is mandatory. Every other week, an assigned moderator from the group will gather written feedback of one or two pages from participants and prepare a concise summary and questions about the assigned readings. Webinar topics will be biweekly in the late afternoon, each lasting two hours. The final schedule will be shaped in consultation with the selected participants. We ask all applicants to ensure their full commitment to the program and active contribution to the group’s collective work.
Throughout both the online and in-person components of the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine, participants will be supported by international experts, whose names will be announced at a later date.
The academy is funded by the Connecting Art Histories initiative of the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles, supported by the Research Centre Ukraine — Max Weber Foundation, Lviv, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana — Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, and organized by Kateryna Filyuk PhD, Lesia Kulchynska PhD, and Oleksandra Osadcha PhD.