Proposal PortalThe 91st Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association will take place at TradeWinds Island Resort in St. Pete Beach, November 5-8, 2025. The proposal window will remain open until December 6, 2024. Call for Proposals: History and its Stakeholders, Past and PresentThe program committee for the 2025 conference has chosen a theme that embraces its location in Florida and links current issues with the past. We welcome papers that explore the stakes of living in or studying the South at any point in its history from any vantage point. We hope participants will speak broadly to what history–and southern history in particular -- has meant, means right now, and can mean in the future. Today, history’s stakeholders include academics, classroom teachers, public historians, students, politicians, and private citizens. In the past, the South has had many stakeholders: those who were powerful both in their moment and in the archives, those who were excluded from power and -- often -- from the archive, and everyone in between. Even nonhuman actors have been and will be stakeholders in the rapidly evolving region we now call the South. Among the stakes we hope participants will explore are the definitions and borders of “South,” “southern,” and “Southern.” Central to the theme of history and its stakeholders are the high stakes of meeting in Florida. In recent years, the Florida legislature passed multiple laws challenging open-ended historical inquiry and academic free speech. Other laws created medical challenges, legal hazards, and other threats to the dignity, health, and safety of both visitors and native Floridians, including African Americans, women, LGBTQ people, and Trans youths and adults. The SHA has a long history of convening in places where the stakes of history were impossible to ignore. As an organization and as individuals, the SHA has both risen to the occasion and fallen short of confronting Faulkner’s insight that the past “is not even past.” We want the 2025 Annual Meeting to encourage the representation and free academic inquiry of all southerners and historians of the South. In conjunction with the Local Arrangements and Teaching Committees, we are thinking hard about how to do the work in St. Pete Beach. Because of the distinctive challenges that gathering in Florida poses, the Program Committee will provide a very limited number of opportunities for individuals to present their work virtually. Since we may not be able to grant all such requests, we ask that you apply for this accommodation only if you genuinely cannot present in person. To be clear, regular conference sessions will not be live-streamed or broadcast. We hope this accommodation and our theme will yield an expansive, challenging, passionate set of panels. Join us in bringing transformational historical scholarship to St. Pete Beach! A Note on SubmissionsWe are excited to read proposals for complete panels, roundtables, alternative academic formats, and individual papers. We welcome submissions from long-term members and first-timers, college professors, graduate students, independent scholars, museum professionals, public history practitioners, and K-12 teachers. The proposal deadline follows the 2024 conference in Kansas City, and we encourage attendees to treat panels, the “Public Square,” the First Time Attendees Reception, and other events as opportunities to generate ideas and network.
All proposals for the 2025 program must be submitted online before December 6, 2024. SHA ParticipationThe SHA's participation rules, adopted in 2019, specify that while chairs and commentators do not need to take a year off between program appearances, traditional paper-givers and roundtable participants must sit-out one year before again appearing on the program as a paper-giver or roundtable participant. 2025 Program Committee Chairs |