Call for Papers 2021 SHAFR Conference
Arlington, VA, June 17-20, 2021
“Variations on a Theme”
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) invites proposals for its first-ever “hybrid” annual conference.
In June 2020, SHAFR Council decided that next year’s meeting would operate both onsite and online. The onsite conference will be smaller—recognizing the contingencies of the current public health situation—but registrants will be able to access and participate in the conference from offsite locations. The resulting event will be both local and delocalized, synchronous and asynchronous.
In order to facilitate planning, the program committee will organize next year’s annual meeting around themed sessions. Each session will include traditional panels as well as a signature roundtable and a networking exercise that brings graduate students and junior scholars into dialogue with senior and mid-career scholars. The objective will be to bring onsite and online participants into a sustained, multidirectional conversation about topics of shared importance among U.S. foreign relations historians. Throughout, we hope to apply the best practices from remote and hybrid learning to next year’s conference.
The 2021 meeting will highlight themes drawn from recent conference programs. Each theme will explore U.S. foreign and/or international relations through a different prism:
- Borders,
- Capitalism,
- Decolonization,
- Development,
- Domestic Politics,
- Empire,
- Environment,
- Gender & Sexuality,
- Ideas,
- Immigration,
- Law,
- Race,
- Religion,
- Rights,
- Science & Technology,
- Security,
- Strategy, and
- War & the Military.
In addition to inviting proposals that speak to these core themes, the program committee welcomes proposals with other emphases. We hope that the “hybrid” format will celebrate SHAFR in all its diversity and showcase a broad range of methodological, temporal, and geographic approaches.