Virginia Humanities Conference

So far, we have some truly outstanding panels already organized, including presenters from the Library of Congress, George Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Busboys and Poets, the Art in Transit project, James Madison University, the University of Mary Washington, Christopher Newport University, and our own Marymount–and more proposals are coming in every day! So far, we also have a rich range of disciplines and projects represented–and this is in addition to the keynote address and Bisson Lecturer, Steven Lubar, from Brown University. Here are some of the panel titles, just to whet your appetite:

• Humanities Data on the Web: The IMLS Museum Universe Data File, Wikipedia, and the US Museums Explorer
• American Memory at Twenty: Assessing an Online Public Humanities Legacy
• Poetry in the Public Sphere: #Poetry Off the Page
• Teaching Justice Through Storytelling: Uniting the Humanities and the Social Sciences in the Classroom
• Literature, Race, and the Politics of Identity
• Challenging Public (Mis)perceptions: Diverse Lessons from Humanities Students
• Immigrant Alexandria, New Media, and the Public

We are still accepting proposals for individual presentations (deadline: January 30), and we hope you will join us and encourage your students to do the same.

We are eager to welcome humanists, students, and scholars to Washington, DC, in 2015, and our website is now open for submissions! You can help promote the humanities and the VHC by sending colleagues and students to VAHumanitiesConference.org and distributing our CFP–the theme is “Humanities and/in the Public Sphere.” Deadlines are in December and January. We have also prepared this general VHC poster– Feel free to print one out and post it on your office door!

We are very pleased to announce that the 2015 Virginia Humanities Conference, which will be hosted at Marymount University just outside of Washington, DC, will be organized around the timely theme of “The Humanities and/in the Public Sphere.” The conference will take place April 10-11, and you can submit your proposals here!

The Virginia Humanities Conference invites proposals for papers, panel sessions, performances, and other presentation modes that explore the role of the humanities in the public sphere. Informed by current and ongoing discussions about the “crisis” in the humanities, this theme seeks to generate discussion around the public significance–ethical, moral, political, cultural, even economic–of humanistic study and creativity. Dr. Steven Lubar, Professor of American Studies and former Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, will give a keynote lecture on museum history and American culture, and the conference will be framed by group excursions to related events in the Washington, DC, area.

Possible topics for presentations include, but are not limited to:

• policy, politics and the humanities
• funding the humanities
• museum culture and tourism
• digital humanities and/or digital history
• education and the humanities
• debating the “crisis” in the humanities
• literature in the public sphere
• making sense of history
• technology and the humanities
• ethics and/in public humanities
• public art and humanities initiatives
• telling and/or collecting stories in public
• public performance and public art
• public humanities versus private humanities
• artistic performances that explore publicity in some dimension

Please submit a 250-word proposal for individual presentations, with working title(s), to Tonya Howe using the proposal form at https://vahumanitiesconference.org/?page_id=68 (or via email at thowe AT marymount DOT edu). Proposals for panel sessions should identify all participants and include both an overview and a brief abstract of each presentation. Deadline for receipt of panel proposals: December 15, 2014. Deadline for receipt of individual presentation proposals: January 30, 2015. For more information, please visit vahumanitiesconference.org.