Coming soon: New Edited Volume “Echoes, Ripples, Wake. Casting Art and Flesh”

What happens when we look at plaster casts not as copies, but as objects with histories and meanings of their own?

On 19 October 2026, De Gruyter Brill will publish Echoes, Ripples, Wake: Casting Art and Flesh, edited by Yaëlle Biro, Associate Curator of African Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Noémie Etienne, University of Vienna.

Bringing together perspectives from art history, anthropology, and material studies, the volume takes a fresh look at plaster casts and their changing roles across time and space. From the Renaissance to the digital age, its international case studies explore questions of replication, authenticity, canon formation, and the circulation of forms and images.

The contributions examine casts made from artworks, architecture, and human bodies, considering them as points of contact between art and science, memory and violence, creation and appropriation. Particular attention is given to colonial and racialized casting practices and to the afterlives of casts in museums, archives, and contemporary debates around restitution.

Rather than understanding casts as secondary to their originals, Echoes, Ripples, Wake approaches them as generative objects that shape knowledge, heritage, and cultural imaginaries in their own right.

The publication will be accompanied by an event at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris in November. More information about the date and time will follow.

Echoes, Ripples, Wake: Casting Art and Flesh
Edited by Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Etienne
De Gruyter Brill, 2026