Although their EngagePitt™ campaign has concluded, if you would still like to make a donation to Contemporaneity, you may always do so here.

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Help our graduate editors publish Contemporaneity, a journal about art and visual culture that brings together contributors and readers from around the world.

Who we are:

Contemporaneity is an online journal edited by graduate students in the department of the History of Art & Architecture at Pitt. In each annual edition we publish scholarly articles, book and exhibition reviews, and creative works that explore the history and meaning of diverse visual material, which ranges from experimental film to sculpture and contemporary Indigenous art. Our authors explore how we can look at objects and their histories in entirely new ways. Explore the journal here.

Help us grow:

Our articles have been downloaded over 32,000 times! We’ve developed a multidisciplinary authorship and an international reader base in the US and abroad, including Great Britain,Germany, China, Ukraine, and Australia. Our goal is to continue to produce exceptional scholarship that is available to broad audiences.

With five years under our belt, we are ready and excited to professionalize and raise the profile of Contemporaneity. With your support, we can raise $6,000 to fund the next three journal editions, including:

• Professional copyediting for Edition 6 (2017) and Edition 7 (2018)
• International online advertising for two editions on eFlux to reach thousands of arts professionals
• Promotional and professional materials (business cards, posters, and publication events at Pitt)

Our editors-in-chief, Ben Ogrodnik, Nicole Scalissi, and Meredith North plan for the release of edition 5.

Our Scope:

Contemporaneity takes a prismatic approach to history and the present, and examines how the complexities of being in time find visual form across historical eras and around the world. Rather than focus on one historical era, type of art-making, or way of thinking, we explore visual culture thematically, a unique approach in arts publishing. This unique and expansive view is grounded by the idea of “contemporaneity,” the state of belonging to or the many ways of being within the same time.

Impact: 

As a peer-reviewed journal, Contemporaneity provides a forum for junior and senior scholars to develop under-researched topics in new ways, generating rigorous and lasting content across art history, film studies, anthropology, and their related disciplines.

Each edition takes Pitt graduate students a year to produce, and this process:

• Gives editors a competitive edge in the job market
• Builds our knowledge of the publishing process (essential to producing our own research)
• Strengthens the Pitt community! We collaborate with graduate editors in many humanities departments at Pitt
• Facilitates undergraduate learning through a professional internship program launched last year

                                                                        Our editorial team discusses summer editing                                                                            at Pitt's Visual Meeting Workshop

Contemporaneity is a concrete product of Pitt’s commitment to advance the frontiers of knowledge and creative endeavor, as well as the History of Art and Architecture department’s rethinking of the discipline and its potential.Read our most recent edition here, where you can also find our new vision statement.