SAHGB | Architectural Historiography in the British Isles: National and International Perspectives

The Second Annual Mark Girouard Symposium

15 November 2025 – The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Organised by Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, The Courtauld Institute of Art, and The University of Kent.

Convenors: Manolo Guerci (University of Kent), Kyle Leyden (Courtauld Institute) and Elizabeth McKellar (SAHGB)

We are pleased to announce the second annual Mark Girouard Symposium, established last year alongside the SAHGB’s Girouard Fund, which supports publications in architectural history. The first symposium in 2024 focused on Mark Girouard’s own writings and contributions to the discipline. This year, we move on to consider the historiography of British and Irish architectural history more broadly and its place in the world.

Since 1980, studies of the historiography of architectural history, as well as the institutional and cultural frameworks within which it is situated, have grown enormously. The symposium seeks to examine how the discipline has developed over the past forty years and to ask what forms architectural history takes today in Britain and Ireland. We are particularly interested in how British and Irish architectural history has been perceived from outside the British Isles, as well as how home-grown academic traditions have shaped current thinking beyond these shores.

We would particularly welcome submissions in the following areas:

• European and global perspectives on British historiography

• The contribution of counter-narratives since the 1980s to the re-shaping of the discipline

• Operational histories which consider how architectural history has been used in areas such as: building heritage/historic preservation or architectural design

• Alternative methodologies such as community or oral history

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract for a 20-minute paper, with a title, your affiliation (if any) and a short biographical summary to Manolo Guerci (mg316@kent.ac.uk) and Kyle Leyden (Kyle.Leyden@courtauld.ac.uk) by 13 June 2025.

Selected papers will be confirmed by July.