Turner 250: Call for Papers

2025 marks two hundred and fifty years since the birth of Romantic painter JMW Turner (1775–1851). Conscious of the future, he took care to secure his legacy. But what is that legacy?

Timed to coincide with the Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain and to help bring celebrations of Turner’s 250th anniversary year to a close, this conference will take Turner’s art and life as a starting point for exploring what it means to research Turner and to curate his work today.

Thanks in part to the gift of the Turner Bequest, Turner is one of the most highly documented artists, and his life and work have inspired extensive scholarship, exhibitions, and creative responses across a range of art forms. We want to open up discussions about how we tell his story in 2025, how we display and respond to his work, and how singular works – such as The Slave Ship – or entire bodies of work have generated their own afterlives. What new contexts can we use to read and reinterpret his work? How much does our focus on Turner through a monographic lens help or hinder fresh perspectives? Where will studies of Turner take us next?

Reflecting Turner’s own approach to his art, the event will encourage dialogue between historical and contemporary perspectives, and across different disciplines, to consider Turner in his own time and the resonances and interpretations of his vision today.

We welcome presentations in a variety of forms – such as illustrated talks or short videos. Each presentation should last around fifteen minutes, whether it is a spoken paper or another form of contribution.

We invite proposals on any topic, but are particularly interested in the following themes:

• Curating Turner now: What do audiences want? What do they already know about Turner? What impact does staging a Turner exhibition have on public engagement and attendance?
• Turner’s contemporaries: Who were his peers, and who has been overshadowed?
• Turner contemporary: Artists inspired by Turner or responding to his legacy in their own work.
• Researching Turner in an age of climate crisis / eco-critical turn.
• The artist’s bequest / the monograph: What opportunities and challenges come with an artist’s bequest or a concentrated focus on a single figure?

Submission Guidelines

Please submit the following by 12 midnight (BST) on 31 July, with “Turner 250” as the subject line, to pmc.events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk:

• A 250-word abstract describing your proposed contribution
• A 250-word biography

Please combine your abstract and biography into a single Word document and send it as an email attachment. Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered.

We will provide a speaker’s fee of £150 and cover reasonable travel and accommodation costs. If you have any access requirements or need adjustments, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Key dates

Deadline for submissions: Thursday 31 July at 12 midnight (BST)
Conference date: 4–5 December 2025

Organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and supported by The Manton Foundation Fund for Historic British Art.