The Fifteenth Biennial
Conference
18-20 March, 2027
Loyola University downtown campus, Chicago
Chicago (or Zhegagoynak, in the Potawatomi language) is a place connected both to the Great Lakes and to the Mississippi River watershed. It is a place where lakes, rivers, wetlands, and portages have long allowed passage to the Caribbean and points further south as well as to northern lakes, rivers, and the Atlantic Ocean. It is a multi-lingual place: where people spoke and still speak many Indigenous languages; many Indo-European languages; many of the languages spoken across Africa; and more. The region is a place of historic and continued place making for the Indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands the contemporary city was built and who call this place home, including the Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe; the Illinois Confederation: the Peoria and Kaskaskia Nations; and the Myaamia, Wea, Ho-Chunk, Sauk, and Meskwaki Nations; as well as the Menominee, Kickapoo, and Mascouten Nations. It has been a place of unfreedom for Black peoples taken to the Great Lakes by force and a place of freedom and homemaking for those who traveled through on the Underground Railroad or who moved north during the Great Migration. It is a site of relations among Black and Indigenous peoples, involving both intimacy and unfreedom. These relations are often narrated through the story of Jean Baptiste du Sable, the Black man often described as Chicago’s first settler, who is believed to have been born in Haiti and who in the late eighteenth century married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa, with whom he established a trading post near Lake Michigan. Finally, with the second largest community of Mexicans in the U.S. and, in recent years, a place of forced homemaking for many Venezuelan refugees, Chicago troubles nation state borders that have their origins in the early Americas.
These early and continuing histories of travel, translation, trade, intimacy, dispossession, unfreedom, fugitivity, and placemaking make Chicago a prime location for considering the capacious geographies, languages, temporalities, genres, and archives that characterize early American studies.
The Conference Program (PDF, as of 6 June) is now available. For more information about the panels, visit sea2023.exordo.com.
SEA 2023 will host a book exhibit free of charge to publishers. Publishers interested in exhibiting books should contact Ralph Bauer at bauerr@umd.edu.
Publishers and their authors who are registered participants may request a time on the conference schedule for a book talk at the exhibit. Contact Ralph Bauer at bauerr@umd.edu.
Calls and Announcements
More program information will be forthcoming; watch this space. Calls for papers are available on the SEA’s social media feeds and the EARAM-L listserv.
The Conference Program (PDF, as of 6 June) is now available. Additional information about the panels can be found at sea2023.exordo.com/programme.
Art History, Tulane University
Emerita, English, University of Maryland
History and Art History, George Mason University
Ben Bascom (West Virginia University), Ajay Batra (Vanderbilt), Christian Crouch (Bard College), Jenny Forsythe (Western Washington University), John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), Andrea Knutson (Oakland University), David Medina (Florida Atlantic University), Sarah Robbins (Tufts), John Nelson (Texas Tech), Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Lloyd Sy (Yale), Chris Trigg (Nanyang Technological University), Abram Van Engen (Washington University-St. Louis), Maria Windell (University of Colorado-Boulder), Rebecca Rosen (Murray State Universiy, SEAC representative), Kirsten Silva Gruesz (UC-Santa Cruz, SEA vice-president), Caroline Wigginton (University of Mississippi, SEA executive coordinator).
Thirteenth Biennial SEA Conference, 8–11 June 2023 — University of Maryland and Washington DC
Conference registration is now open. A current SEA membership is required for conference participation. Follow the steps below to register.
Visit uncpress.org to join or renew your SEA membership before registering.
Once your membership is up-to-date, register at sea2023.exordo.com/registration/new.
Program participants are required to preregister by 1 June in order to be included in the printed program.
Conference registration is now open. A current SEA membership is required for all conference participants.
Program participants must preregister by the deadline to be included in the printed program distributed at the conference.
Preregistration Deadline: 1 June 2023
For membership questions, contact SEA via the membership portal. For registration questions, contact the conference organizers.
Travel & Accommodations
The conference will take place at Loyola University’s Water Tower campus, near Michigan Avenue, the Newberry Library, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Water Tower campus is easily accessible from O’Hare and Midway Airports by public transit. Lodging options at different price ranges will be available, with information forthcoming in fall 2026. Travel grants will also be available, with information forthcoming.
Local Host Committee: Madison Bastress (McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, The Newberry Library), Melissa Adams Campbell (Northern Illinois University), Caroline Egan (Northwestern University), Mar Garcia (Northeastern Illinois University), Jeff Glover (Loyola), Matthew Kruer (University of Chicago), Hayley Negrin (University of Illinois-Chicago), Eric Slauter (University of Chicago), SJ Zhang (University of Chicago).
The SEA 2023 Biennial Conference will take place 8–11 June 2023, on the campus of the University of Maryland and in various locations in Washington DC.
The most convenient airports are DCA (ca. 90 min. to UMD by Metro) and IAD (ca. 120 min. by Metro). BWI is also an option but requires additional travel by train or bus before connecting to Metro.
For those arriving by train, the Metro ride from DC's Union Station (via the Red and Green Lines) is ca. 45 mins. A free University shuttle bus runs from the College Park Metro Station to campus.
College Park Marriott Hotel — five-minute walk from the main conference venue.
The Hotel at the University of Maryland — ca. 15–20 min. walk from the main conference venue.
On-campus visitor parking is available for those arriving by car. There are also other hotel options in College Park along Baltimore Ave., accessible by bus.
Graduate students and independent scholars may reserve single-occupancy dorm rooms at $325.00 for 3 nights (6/8–6/11). Linens and towels included. 20 early arrival spots (Wed.) available for an additional $115.
To reserve a dorm room (first come, first served): email Ralph Bauer at bauerr@umd.edu. We have not contracted for room blocks at any hotels — it is important that you reserve your room as soon as possible.
Common Reading Initiative
Laila Lalami
The Moor's Account (2014)
The “invented memoirs” of Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico, the enslaved Black man who was one of four men to survive the Narváez expedition in 1527.
Led by Professor Dana A. Williams, President of the Toni Morrison Society, Dean of the Graduate School, and Professor of African American Literature at Howard University.
Students are invited to participate virtually or in person — attending the plenary talk and open student dialogue with Prof. Williams.
The SEA Common Reading Initiative Committee has reviewed proposals for Common Reading Initiative texts—we received many excellent suggestions, and we thank those who proposed a book for the Initiative. We are excited to announce the 2027 SEA Common Reading, Laila Lalami’s 2014 novel The Moor’s Account. A work of historical fiction, The Moor’s Account is the “invented memoirs” of Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico, the enslaved Black man who was one of four men to survive the Narváez expedition in 1527. Lalami’s work engages and reimagines literary texts like Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación from the perspective of one of the people mentioned only a few times across the text.
The committee envisions The Moor’s Account as a work that will allow conference attendees to consider the early Americas as a hemispheric and transatlantic geographic and cultural space, to engage with the multi-lingual archive of early American literatures (from multiple Indigenous languages to Spanish to Arabic), to learn from scholarly conversations about Blackness and racial categories before 1700, to teach with place-based approaches that center the Indigenous nations across whose homelands the expedition traveled, and to take up methodological questions around archives and speculation. We’re also anticipating that the book can invoke conversations about relationships between Chicago—and the Great Lakes more broadly—and the Caribbean (Chicago’s connection to the Caribbean is often narrated through the story of Jean Baptiste du Sable, the Black man believed to be born in what is now Haiti, who established a trading post near Lake Michigan with his wife, a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa).
We encourage SEA members to engage with the Common Reading by assigning The Moor’s Account in your AY 26-27 courses, and we are planning to develop teaching resources and to hold a Zoom workshop in fall 2026 to discuss approaches to teaching the book. If you’d like to support your local bookstore when you order the book, you can select your local store through Bookshop.org.
The Common Reading Initiative Committee also recognizes that SEA members hold much scholarly and pedagogical expertise about Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación and about The Moor’s Account. We invite you to propose panels or individual papers on approaches to teaching and researching the two texts. We will also send a call later in the spring for participants for the pedagogy workshop to be held in fall 2026. (The full call for papers and information about how to submit is coming soon.)
Siena University
Knox College
Utah State University
University of Tulsa
Tarrant County College
University of Texas at Austin
James Madison University
Contact Information
Fifteenth Biennial SEA Conference, 18-20 March 2027 — Chicago
Kelly Wisecup
Northwestern University
SEA President
kelly.wisecup@northwestern.edu
For inquiries about conference registration, the book exhibit, book talks, dormitory reservations, or program participation, please contact Ralph Bauer directly at bauerr@umd.edu.