[We have the following CFP. DRE]
Call for Proposals: American Political History Conference, June 4-6, 2026, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, Washington D.C. Proposal Deadlines: December 31, 2025
“American Democracy as Political History: Challenges across the Past, Present, and Future"
A strong understanding of the past is critical to strengthening American democracy and to navigating the seismic shifts happening in our nation today. This conference will explore the social, economic, and cultural pathways that created this current political moment and provide essential insights on how to address pressing issues of polarization, injustice, inequality and democratic erosion. This event will bring political historians and other historically minded scholars into conversation with one another and the broader public to grapple with the democratic challenges facing the vast “American project” at the nation’s semiquincentennial. It will challenge the traditional categories of political history — liberal and conservative, elite and populist, rural and urban — as well as subfield divisions that have produced disciplinary silos. It will create opportunities to build networks, share new research, debate ideas, think about the contemporary implications of this research, and discuss strategies for public engagement.
We invite panel and paper submissions that reflect the diversity of the field of American political history, from the colonial era to recent history. We especially encourage roundtable and workshop ideas that will foster dynamic conversations about how we write and understand political history across time periods, subfields, and disciplines. We welcome sessions that challenge traditional paradigms in political history and address broad historical time periods. We especially encourage conversations that include scholars working in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. We also welcome historians from different arenas—including academia, public history, public policy, journalism, documentary film, television, podcasting, and radio—to launch conversations about the contemporary meaning and uses of history. More than just sharing specific historical insights, this conference aims to bring together an intellectual community of historians within and beyond academia to inspire conversations about the uses of history, the public responsibilities of historians to engage broader audiences, and the skills needed to do this.
The program committee is deeply committed to inclusion and diversity. Successful session proposals will be attentive to gendered, racial, and career diversity among participants. In service of this goal, we have limited funds available to support graduate students and contingent faculty. The conference will be held in-person, with provisions made for international scholars concerned about entry into the U.S.
Submissions should be up to 500 words with proposals for individual papers or panel, roundtable, or workshop sessions. Each proposal should also include a biographical statement for each participant of up to 150 words that includes contact information. Please submit proposals in one Word or PDF document to brownell@purdue.edu by December 31, 2025.
Program Committee:
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Purdue University (co-chair)
Nicole Hemmer, Vanderbilt University (co-chair)
Leah Wright, Johns Hopkins University (co-chair)
A.J. Bauer, University of Alabama
Kellie Carter Jackson, Wellesley College
Bobby Cervantes, Harvard University
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon
Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University
John S. Huntington, Houston Community College
Michael Koncewicz, New York University
Cecilia Márquez, Duke University
George Derek Musgrove, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Gautham Rao, American University
Rachel Shelden, Penn State University
This conference is made possible in part by funding from the Johns Hopkins Nexus Award grant.
