Proposal Portal

The Southern Historical Association is now accepting proposals for its 93rd Annual Meeting, which will take place at the Westin D.C. Downtown in Washington, D.C on November 4-7, 2027.

Call for Proposals

We invite proposals that represent the latest scholarship across all fields, periods, and approaches in southern history. At the same time, we are particularly interested in proposals that engage the present moment marked by the narrowing of democratic space and the contestation of historical knowledge. Across the United States, historians are witnessing efforts to curtail inquiry and silence interpretation: exhibits dismantled, courses restricted, books removed, archives threatened. These conditions feel immediate, but they are also deeply historical.

Southern history offers a long record of struggles over power, memory, democracy, and justice, as well as the forms of resistance that have confronted them. This year’s program seeks to foreground scholarship that situates the present within these longer trajectories while remaining open to the full range of work that defines the field today.
We welcome panels that explore themes including, but not limited to, authoritarianism, racial terror, immigration enforcement and detention, and the historical roots of carceral systems, alongside the varied forms of resistance, opposition, and organizing that have confronted these phenomena. We are especially interested in work that examines the intersections among communities whose histories are often studied in isolation. How have Black, Indigenous, Asian
American and Pacific Islander, Latinx, Muslim, Arab, and other marginalized groups in the South encountered one another, built coalitions, and imagined shared futures? How have histories of migration, displacement, and diaspora reshaped the region? What can we learn from queer and trans histories of organizing, care, and survival?

We also encourage proposals that place labor at the center of analysis. The South has long been a site of anti-labor politics, from plantation regimes to right to work policies, and from extractive economies to the policing of workers’ mobility and organizing. We are particularly interested in work that connects these histories to emerging economic formations, including the rapid expansion of data centers and artificial intelligence infrastructure across the region. What
histories of land use, labor discipline, environmental extraction, and state incentive regimes underwrite these developments? How might we understand these new technologies within longer histories of inequality, dispossession, and resistance in the South?

We also invite proposals that address the preservation of history in a time of erasure. We encourage panels that create space for work displaced or silenced elsewhere, including projects affected by institutional closures, funding cuts, or political intervention at national and local museums, historic sites, and archives. How have historians, curators, and communities worked to safeguard contested histories? What strategies have they developed to sustain access,
interpretation, and public engagement under constraint?

In bringing these conversations together, the program aims to foster scholarship that is historically grounded, analytically rigorous, and attentive to the stakes of our present. We welcome individual papers, complete panels, roundtables, and alternative formats that engage these themes in creative and critical ways.

Formats

For any multi-person submission, one member acts as the organizer, who submits a session​ overview of no more than 250 words, brief abstracts/descriptions for each contribution, and the​ participants’ vitas or resumes.

Traditional panels are composed of three 15-minute papers, a chair, and a commentator. (One panel member, designated the organizer, will submit a 250-word panel overview, abstracts for each paper, and the participants’ vitas.) To submit a traditional session proposal, click here.

Single paper submissions are accepted and, where possible, will be matched into panels by the Program Committee. However, complete panels have priority. (You may find H-South helpful in connecting with scholars to build panels.) To submit a single paper proposal, click here.

Roundtables are organized discussions including three to four discussants and a moderator, who responds and asks questions of the participants, one of whom is designated the organizer. Discussants focus on a specific field or topic in informal 8-minute remarks, but do not read a formal paper. The moderator asks questions to which they respond, leaving ample time for questions from the audience. (The organizer submits a 250-word statement on the main question under discussion and each participant’s vita.) To submit a roundtable proposal, click here.

The SHA is open to Alternative Session Proposals. Viable formats for alternative sessions include, but are not limited to, workshops, 'lightning' presentations, history slams, single-book panels, movie screenings, or other artist, performance, or activist presentations. To submit an alternative session proposal, click here.

SHA Participation

The 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.

2027 Program Committee Chairs
Crystal Feimster, Yale University
Hannah Rosen, College of William & Mary

Need Help Forming a Panel?

SHA's Graduate Student Council has created an easy-to-use, easy-to-search google form for folks looking to find chairs, commentators, and panelists with similar interests.