Dear scholars and friends of Netherlandish art,
As I assume the role of editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, I would like to extend enormous gratitude to Alison Kettering, whose final issue, Winter 2021 (vol. 13:1), has just been published. Under Alison’s stewardship, and with the help of dedicated associate editors, a pioneering online journal has become a leading peer-reviewed, open-access venue for research in our field. JHNA now competes with established print journals in the publication of rigorous art historical scholarship. The journal has also become known for showcasing cutting-edge conservation studies and digital projects. Key factors to the journal’s success are the heightened prestige of online publications in our field and JHNA’s extraordinary image capabilities. My goal is to advance JHNA as a publisher of original, innovative scholarship on Dutch, Flemish, German, and Franco-Flemish art and material culture from the medieval period through the eighteenth century.
Again, I would like to signal the openness of JHNA to approaches and methodologies that broaden and deepen our understanding of Netherlandish art while reflecting our historical moment. We live in an era of heightened sensitivity to social injustice. Too, braving a pandemic of unimaginable proportions, we have become all the more aware of the power of art and the need for human creativity. In the academy and the museum, research on Netherlandish art has fostered an expansive view of art and society around the world, begun the process of recovering histories that have been neglected or suppressed, and made room for the marginalized. Our field is rethinking the knowledge value of collecting and connoisseurship, and examining the impacts of money and the lack thereof. Without losing sight of the traditional canon, we are expanding our focus to include objects and art forms not previously studied. In collaborations among conservators, scientists, and art historians, we are gaining new insights into the creative process and the object and its materials.
To carry forward these lines of inquiry and others yet to be imagined, JHNA is initiating a series state of the field/question articles, essays, and conversations. Already underway are essays on fifteenth-century devotional art, gender, economies of Netherlandish art, the object and world trade, and the historiography of Blackness. Further topics might address questions of social justice, broadly conceived, and their relevance to researching, exhibiting, and teaching Netherlandish art. They could be reflections on the state of thinking about such current themes as art and science or materiality. Critical assessments might be timely and narrow (say, a response to the Rembrandt year exhibitions) or broad stock-taking essays on our traditional subfields. If you would like to propose a contribution, or suggest topics or potential authors, including yourself, please contact me at editor@jhna.org by May 1, 2021. Informal exploratory emails are welcome, as are proposals of up to 500 words.
Most important, for JHNA to thrive, I urge you to submit your latest research, whatever its approach. And please encourage others to submit. For guidelines on submitting a manuscript, proposing a special issue, and proposing a digital art history project, see: https://jhna.org/submissions/
For the latest issue of JHNA, see https://jhna.org/issues/vol-13-1-2021/; for a special issue, see https://jhna.org/issues/vol-12-1-2020/; and for a digital art history project, see https://jhna.org/issues/vol-11-2-2019/.
I and the associate editors, Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Dagmar Eichberger, and Bret Rothstein, and our new managing editor Jennifer Henel, look forward to bringing exciting new scholarship to readers of JHNA.
Perry Chapman