Bulletin Board

June 11-12, 2027 
American University, Washington, D.C.

September for proposals: September 15, 2026

The Program Committee is accepting proposals for interdisciplinary workshops related to the four subthemes of the conference: (Trans)Genders, Mobilities, Voices, and Pedagogy and Public Humanities.

Below you will find guiding questions and subtopics that may be useful for preparing a proposal. Workshops must be interdisciplinary and led by two to four specialists whose expertise represents at least two disciplines. The workshops are driven by discussion, facilitated by short readings and other materials. Those seeking colleagues with whom to develop a proposal may make use of the SSEMWG listserv and an online document linked below.

Resistance and Resilience looks back to the past and the ways in which early modern people exhibited these qualities to the present, in which resistance, resilience, and solidarity have become necessary tools for our scholarship and pedagogy; and to the future as we consider how to instill these values in the next generation of scholars and teachers.

The conference poses questions such as: How does trans studies ask us to resist and complicate cis understandings of gender in early modernity? How can we complicate conceptions of mobility to consider both movement and immobility within feminist frameworks of power, coercion, and opposition? What does it mean to speak up against authority, and what are the consequences for both speech and silence? Finally, how do we practice and model resistance and resilience in the classroom and out?

Submitting a Proposal

We welcome proposals for workshops. These are 90-minute sessions organized by a group of two to four leaders who circulate readings, questions, and other materials in advance. Leaders spend no more than twenty minutes framing the issues and opening the conversation, then facilitate active participation and focused discussion. Workshops must be interdisciplinary and are often comparative, and all allow participants to share information and ignorance, pass on knowledge, ask advice, and learn something new. All workshop organizers are expected to register for, attend, and participate in the entire conference, not just their workshop.

Those who wish to propose a workshop can seek collaborators in a different discipline by posting a inquiry to the SSEMWG listserv at emw-l@listserv.umd.edu, or by adding their name and details to this spreadsheet.

Proposals will comprise the names, disciplines, and contact information for all workshop organizers; a statement of intent of no more than 300 words, including a description of how discussion will be generated; and copies of any materials to be distributed to attendees in advance, not to exceed 30 pages plus illustrations and other non-textual materials.

Submit your materials here by September 15, 2026.

Notifications will be made in November.

For more information, see the event website.

November 13, 2026

Submission deadline: September 30, 2026

This symposium approaches the body as a site at which violence and power are represented, materialized, negotiated, and contested. We invite papers that examine bodily duress across historical periods, geographic regions, media, and methodological traditions. Violence may be understood in its overt forms, including warfare, punishment, incarceration, torture, enslavement, and forced displacement, but also through less visible or spectacular conditions such as surveillance, labor, illness, environmental degradation, colonial administration, social discipline, and institutional control.

How have artists and image-makers represented bodies subjected to violence, pressure, or constraint? How might visual culture normalize, aestheticize, conceal, or expose the operations of power? In what ways do images participate in the production of bodily difference, vulnerability, disposability, or criminality? How are violence and duress embedded not only in representations of the body but also in artistic materials, modes of production, architectures, institutions, archives, and systems of display?

We also encourage approaches that move beyond the representational. How might violence alter the body’s ontological status, its relation to personhood, subjectivity, sovereignty, or the more-than-human world? What forms of knowledge emerge through bodily endurance, fragmentation, opacity, refusal, care, or repair? How do injured, disciplined, absent, transformed, or resistant bodies challenge established distinctions between subject and object, presence and disappearance, agency and subjection?

By attending to both spectacular violence and the prolonged pressures that shape embodied life, Bodies Under Duress seeks to examine how art and visual culture make structures of power visible while also opening spaces for resistance, survival, remembrance, and transformation.

See the CFP for more details on how to apply.