Call for Papers // Unseeing the Evil Eye: Powers and Politics of the Apotropaic 29. November – 1. December 2023 Since the mid-19th century, the ghost of apotropaism has haunted the humanities. Coined by classicist Otto Jahn (1813–1869), the term quickly gained traction in historical scholarship denoting actions or objects conceived as provocative, obscene, and therefore offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of the time. Depictions of threatening animals, glaring faces and disembodied eyes, exposed genitalia and arcane symbols, accordingly, served as protective devices warding off evil by mirroring its appearance. Patterns of ‘irrational’ behavior in this reading transcend culture and history linking past artistic phenomena with present ‘superstitions’ as much as non-Western cultures. In art history, the apotropaic continues to be evoked for the uncommon, whenever visual and textual evidence seems insufficient, or it undergirds ambitious theories on art’s efficacy. Ethnological and archaeological museums often situate the apotropaic within ‘everyday’ culture, while art institutions shun the anonymous in favor of artist genealogies and iconographic themes. With recent attention to our discipline’s colonialist stakes and a push towards cultural and methodological diversification, the evil eye is due for a critical review. This three-day international conference considers anew the relationship between contentious materials and anxious historians, and gauges the apotropaic’s potential for recuperating non-canonical art and non-normative aesthetics. Its approach is two- fold: on the one hand, speakers are invited to center the term’s nineteenth-century historiographic and museum legacies, its colonialist attitudes, as well as the moral politics that sustain its use to the present moment; on the other, we solicit interdisciplinary contributions examining its place within current philosophical and psychological debates, empirical aesthetics, curatorial strategies, as well as critical postcolonial, queer, and disability studies. With its long history of pooling marginal