Proposal Portal

The 91st Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association will take place at TradeWinds Island Resort in St. Pete Beach, November 5-8, 2025. The proposal window will remain open until December 6, 2024.

Call for Proposals: History and its Stakeholders, Past and Present

The program committee for the 2025 conference has chosen a theme that embraces its location in Florida and links current issues with the past. We welcome papers that explore the stakes of living in or studying the South at any point in its history from any vantage point. We hope participants will speak broadly to what history–and southern history in particular -- has meant, means right now, and can mean in the future.

Today, history’s stakeholders include academics, classroom teachers, public historians, students, politicians, and private citizens. In the past, the South has had many stakeholders: those who were powerful both in their moment and in the archives, those who were excluded from power and -- often -- from the archive, and everyone in between. Even nonhuman actors have been and will be stakeholders in the rapidly evolving region we now call the South. Among the stakes we hope participants will explore are the definitions and borders of “South,” “southern,” and “Southern.”

Central to the theme of history and its stakeholders are the high stakes of meeting in Florida. In recent years, the Florida legislature passed multiple laws challenging open-ended historical inquiry and academic free speech. Other laws created medical challenges, legal hazards, and other threats to the dignity, health, and safety of both visitors and native Floridians, including African Americans, women, LGBTQ people, and Trans youths and adults. The SHA has a long history of convening in places where the stakes of history were impossible to ignore. As an organization and as individuals, the SHA has both risen to the occasion and fallen short of confronting Faulkner’s insight that the past “is not even past.”

We want the 2025 Annual Meeting to encourage the representation and free academic inquiry of all southerners and historians of the South. In conjunction with the Local Arrangements and Teaching Committees, we are thinking hard about how to do the work in St. Pete Beach. Because of the distinctive challenges that gathering in Florida poses, the Program Committee will provide a very limited number of opportunities for individuals to present their work virtually. Since we may not be able to grant all such requests, we ask that you apply for this accommodation only if you genuinely cannot present in person. To be clear, regular conference sessions will not be live-streamed or broadcast.

We hope this accommodation and our theme will yield an expansive, challenging, passionate set of panels. Join us in bringing transformational historical scholarship to St. Pete Beach!

A Note on Submissions

We are excited to read proposals for complete panels, roundtables, alternative academic formats, and individual papers. We welcome submissions from long-term members and first-timers, college professors, graduate students, independent scholars, museum professionals, public history practitioners, and K-12 teachers.

The proposal deadline follows the 2024 conference in Kansas City, and we encourage attendees to treat panels, the “Public Square,” the First Time Attendees Reception, and other events as opportunities to generate ideas and network.

• For any multi-person submission, one member acts as the organizer, who submits a session overview of no more than 250 words, brief abstracts/descriptions for each contribution, and the participants’ vitas or resumes.
• Traditional panels are composed of three 15-minute papers, a chair, and two commentators, one of whom may be the chair. To submit a traditional session proposal, click here.
• Traditional roundtables are coordinated discussions that include three to four discussants and a moderator, who responds and asks questions of the participants. Discussants have eight minutes each to address a specific field or topic but don’t read a formal paper. The moderator asks discussants questions while leaving ample time for audience questions. Moderators and chairs are responsible for ensuring that speakers keep within their time limits. To submit a roundtable proposal, click here
• Proposals for alternative academic formats must describe the format in the session overview. To submit an alternative session proposal, click here.
• Single paper submissions are accepted and, where possible, will be matched into panels by the Program Committee. To submit a single paper proposal, click here.

All proposals for the 2025 program must be submitted online before December 6, 2024. 

SHA Participation

The SHA's participation rules, adopted in 2019, specify that while chairs and commentators do not need to take a year off between program appearances, traditional paper-givers and roundtable participants must sit-out one year before again appearing on the program as a paper-giver or roundtable participant.

2025 Program Committee Chairs
Kirsten Wood
Andrew Frank

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