At CAA, Ringelberg presented on trans in-visibility for the session “Visibility and Visuality after ‘the Transgender Tipping Point”‘ and on the urgency of reckoning directly and honestly with the climate emergency in “No Art History on a Dead Planet” for the “Art History and the Apocalypse” session.

In Chicago, a symposium was held by the Wrightwood 659 as part of their opening of the groundbreaking exhibition , curated by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis. Fifteen art history scholars and curators each addressed a distinct geographic region’s visual and material culture as it represented understanding of gender and sexual identities during that time. Ringelberg was invited to cover the case for queer and trans art and artists in France.

And in June, Ringelberg traveled to Dijon, France, to discuss the work of nineteenth-century French artist Madeleine Lemaire as a botanical illustrator, showing how their floral paintings meld art and science in a way that offers an opportunity to recognize the failure of binary, hierarchical taxonomies to represent the true diversity of plants and humans. Some of Ringelberg’s discussion of plant biology developed from conversations with and materials generously supplied by Carl Niedziela of the Elon Biology Department.

These presentations were made possible through a research residency at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in spring 2024, and the Elon College, College of Arts and Sciences faculty travel funding.

The panel, sponsored by the affiliate organization The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA), was organized and chaired by Hyoungee Kong, Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Art History, NYU Shanghai.

Panelists Ty Vanover (UC Berkeley), Annie Ronan (Virginia Tech), Damien Delille (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France), and Karen Schiff (Fellow in Criticism, Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) presented a diversity of papers suggesting ways to queer 19-century histories and art objects, to which Ringelberg responded both individually and by drawing connections across the panel as a whole. Focusing on the importance of negotiating the relation of representation to embodiment and enfleshment, Ringelberg traced a less ontological, if not de- or non-ontological, approach to identity in the papers, as well as a decrease in focus on temporality versus materiality in comparison to prior scholarship in these areas, and encouraged future analysis of the way artworks and subjects were raced, classed, and given a life stage, as well as sexed and gendered, in the particular projects presented.

Ringelberg, along with associate curator of modern art and artist  spoke at the Aug. 19 event about the unique series in Warhol’s body of work in the contexts of race, trans visual culture and Black and Latinx queer and trans activism.

Their conversation was in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s blockbuster retrospective exhibition of Warhol’s work and in collaboration with Tate Modern, which, due to its scale, offers a rare opportunity to see a significant number of the works from the “Ladies and Gentlemen” series that are normally not exhibited.

Brummel wanted to highlight that series within the exhibition and lift up the portrait subjects who are generally overlooked within the vast range of Warhol exhibitions and scholarship.

Among the sitters were Marsha P. Johnson, renowned activist and co-founder of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), as well as Wilhelmina Ross, who performed alongside Johnson in the Hot Peaches Troupe and in Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company with Warhol regular Mario Montez.

While Warhol worked often with white drag queens and trans women such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, the “Ladies and Gentlemen” series features only Latinx and Black models and stands out from the bulk of Warhol’s massive body of portraits in doing so.

Ringelberg discussed some of the ethical problems in Warhol’s series and its reception, as well as offering a body of contemporary texts and authors through which the series could be better understood today, both art historically and in light of contemporary trans scholarship.

Wngz, a Tanzanian, Bermudian, Mohawk, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent empowerment storyteller and co-founder of ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company, spoke in terms of the relationship to her own experiences as an artist, activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada.

The panel was presented on zoom and the recording is now available to be watched on the .

Kirstin Ringelberg, professor of art history in the Department of History & Geography, presented on March 7, 2020, at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) “Green Conference” at University of Southern California Dornsife. The panel, on The Art of Botanizing, included Kristan M. Hanson of University of Kansas and Jacob H. Leveton of Northwestern University.

Ringelberg’s paper extended past work on the artist Madeleine Lemaire (1854-1928), including work published in the journal Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui as well as work presented at Elon, to considerations of the way flowers were understood and discussed anthropomorphically (relating to or like humans) in the late 19th century, as well as the way the ability to paint flowers was understood in scientific as well as aesthetic terms. Looking at the common confusions of flowers, humans, science, and art, Ringelberg argued that this period and its art promoted a more equitable valuation of the species and a resistance to anthropocentrism we have since lost.

Kirstin Ringelberg, professor of art history in the Department of History & Geography, presented on Feb. 15, 2020, at the national flagship conference for art historians.

Ringelberg’s paper argued for the revolutionary possibilities available to art historians in their scholarship, their ľĂľĂČČ and their ability to transform the discipline itself as well as the audience and contexts for art history from within generalist and ľĂľĂČČ-focused positions and programs.

The presentation “Notorious, Minor, Queer?: Madeleine Lemaire Obfuscated and Outed” was one of three papers in the panel “Queer Notoriety at the Belle Époque.” In the talk, Ringelberg revealed new information gleaned from archival research this last summer in Paris, France, and called on the interdisciplinary audience to acknowledge the heteronormative gaze of historical studies despite all proof to the contrary.

This paper is one half of a chapter that forms the framework of a book in progress in which Ringelberg deploys the artist Madeleine Lemaire’s artwork and history to question the ongoing heteronormativity and cisnormativity of art history and studies of the Belle Époque. The other half of the chapter was recently presented at the Feminist Art History Conference.

The conference, a standalone competitive feminist conference hosted by American University, was funded through the support of Robin D’Alessandro and Jane Fortune, and was initially created by feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. Ringelberg’s former students Nichole Rawlings ’10 (Art History major, Honors Fellow, and Lumen Prize Recipient) and Caitlin Glosser ’12 (Art History and French majors, Elon College Fellow) both attended American University for master’s degrees in art history, and are now successfully pursuing careers in the field.

The panel was the first panel in the flagship conference’s 106-year history to focus exclusively on trans, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming identities and modes of theorizing art history. Panelists included Eliza Steinbock (assistant professor, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society), Stephanie Kang (The Ohio State University), and co-curators and authors Stamatina Gregory (The Graduate Center, The City University of New York) and Jeanne Vaccaro (University of California, Davis). The panel considered questions of canonicity, archiving, and historicizing in relation to trans identities as well as applying a trans lens to existing histories of art.

Ringelberg also served as a panelist for “Routledge, Taylor & Francis Exhibitor Session: How to Get Published and How to Get Read,” a session designed to assist scholars in getting book proposals and journal articles proposed, written, edited, and published.

In the essay "Little Sister, Big Girl: Tabaimo and the Gendered Devaluation of Contemporary Japanese Art", Ringelberg points out the way English-language art writers use outmoded and offensive tropes to discuss contemporary Japanese artists.

Tabaimo, whose hand-drawn, projected animations are complex and variable, has been associated positively with kawaii (cuteness), anime, manga, and described as "demure." Ringelberg points out the way these same critics then diminish the value of such associations, gendering Japanese contributions to global art culture especially by women artists as superficial and feminine.

The essay joins three others and a set of book reviews in Volume 38 Number 2 of the feminist art journal. 

For the presentation, "Representing the Parisienne: Madeleine Lemaire In and Out of Style," Ringelberg argued in favor of re-engaging artists whose styles and personae were seen as fashionable in their own times. Using as primary sources the newspapers, arts journals and fashionable women's magazines of the Belle Époque that featured Lemaire as stylish and au courant both personally and artistically, Ringelberg noted the gendered and temporal problems in conceptualizing a period that erases such artists.