Call For Papers: When Worlds End

The History of Art Students’ Association (HASA) at the University of Toronto is pleased to open the call for papers for our Ninth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium!

The theme of this year’s symposium is “When Worlds End.”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

William Butler Yeats

Through art, we have seen the world end many times over, and with it comes a sense of foreboding and unease of a future unknown. Over millennia, humanity has shown itself to have a morbid fascination with tragedy, the inevitability of death, and the beauty of the eternally damned. It is this preoccupation with haunting thoughts that has prompted the most macabre imagery in the art historical canon. Artists have a unique ability to tap into our deepest anxieties and fears, prodding at questions that we wish to never know the answer to. In many ways,…