Call for Papers: 2025 Conference on the Civil War/Porter Fortune Symposium:
New Directions in the Legal History of the Civil War Era
The Center for Civil War Research and the History Department at the University of Mississippi seek papers for the 2025 Conference on the Civil War, to be held October 16-18, 2025, in Oxford, Mississippi.
The conference features a keynote address by Ariela Gross (UCLA) and a special roundtable with Cynthia Nicoletti (UVA), Gautham Rao (American University), and Anne Twitty (Stanford University).
The mid-19th century saw a revolution not only in the written laws and constitutions that governed Americans, but in the ways in which Americans interacted with those laws and the people who administered them. The laws governing slavery and those emerging from it first tore the nation apart then posed significant challenges to its reconstruction. Americans likewise confronted severe legal questions as they prosecuted a cataclysmic conflict, one that brought the state and its armed forces into intimate contact with civilians of all stripes. Meanwhile, the changing ways in which Americans worked, moved, and understood their place in the world required fundamental reconsiderations of their relationships to government, capital, and one another–all of which necessarily involved the law.
This conference seeks to build on the work of historians who have begun critical re-evaluations of the legal history of the Civil War era. Papers may represent traditional legal histories, as well as military, social, and cultural histories demonstrating Americans’ encounters with the law. We welcome individual papers or full panel proposals exploring topics including, but not limited to:
- The law and slavery in the United States
- Efforts at or movements for legal and constitutional reform
- Women, gender, and the law
- Legal and political culture
- The laws of war
- Labor, capital, and the law
- The law and Reconstruction
Interested participants should submit a paper title, 250-word abstract, and one-page CV to civilwar@olemiss.edu by Friday, June 6, 2025. Panel proposals should include a CV and abstract for each participant; a commenter and/or chair is not required. The Center for Civil War Research offers stipends to offset costs for presenters lacking institutional travel support.
