Cultures of Aestheticism will feature a series of conferences that cover a fairly broad historical span, starting with the emergence of British assimilations of ideas about art for art’s sake (from French sources such as Théophile Gautier) in the 1850s and 1860s to the legacies of the Aesthetic Movement to interwar and post-war cultures around the world. The critical questions raised by aestheticism reverberate through many of the most decisive interventions into critiques of aesthetics (notably Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory), and their reappearance is evident in recent postmodern debates about “the new aestheticism.” The conference series will address the growth of l’art pour l’art in ways that expand our understanding of this movement beyond its more familiar cultural, disciplinary, and geo-political contexts.