This year's Harmsworth Conference of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford is The Meanings of Independence: The American Declaration in Global Context, 1776-1826. It meets March, 19-20, 2026, and is convened by Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire, and Patrick Griffin, Notre Dame University.
The Declaration of Independence, whose 250th anniversary Americans will observe in 2026, is the United States’ founding text, but it was also a transformational international text. Although Congress’s main purpose was to declare thirteen of Britain’s American colonies to be free and independent states, the Declaration’s words and example spoke to audiences well beyond the new union’s borders. Convened by Eliga Gould and Patrick Griffin, Harmsworth Professors, respectively, for 2025-26 and 2022-23, this conference will explore some of the implications of that wider message. In addition to the response to the Declaration in Britain, Ireland, and Europe, we anticipate presentations that focus on North America’s Indian country, Haiti and the Caribbean, Sierra Leone and West Africa, and China and British India. Participants will be encouraged to approach their topic from the broadest possible social and cultural contexts, paying particular attention to how categories of race and class, as well as gender and sexuality, mediated what independence meant. As the choice of 1826 as the conference’s endpoints, we hope to include presentations on the Spanish American Revolutions that extended the quest for independence throughout the Western Hemisphere. 1826 was also the year that two of the main architects of American independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died, both on July 4.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, will deliver the keynote.
--Dan Ernst