The Fifteenth Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference will be held March 18-20, 2027 in Chicago, at the Loyola University downtown campus. Many more details to follow; watch this space.
About the Conference
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.
Calls and Announcements
Location and Logistics
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.
Common Reading Initiative
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 order through Bookshop.org and select your local store here: https://bookshop.org/pages/bookstores.
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.)
Conference Committees
Program Committee: Ben Bascom (West Virginia U), Ajay Batra (Vanderbilt), Christian Crouch (Bard College), Jenny Forsythe (Western Washington U), John Garcia (American Antiquarian Society), Andrea Knutson (Oakland U), David Medina (Florida Atlantic U), Sarah Robbins (Tufts), John Nelson (Texas Tech U), Jonathan Senchyne (U of Wisconsin-Madison), Lloyd Sy (Yale), Chris Trigg (Nanyang Technological U), Abram Van Engen (Washington U-St. Louis), Maria Windell (U of Colorado-Boulder), Rebecca Rosen (Murray State U, SEAC representative), Kirsten Silva Gruesz (UC-Santa Cruz, SEA vice-president), Caroline Wigginton (U of Mississippi, SEA executive coordinator).
Common Reading Initiative Committee: Stacey Dearing (Siena U), Cate Denial (Knox College), Keri Holt (Utah State U), Don James McLaughlin (U of Tulsa), Chloe Northrop (Tarrant County College), Ana Schwartz (U of Texas-Austin), Courtney Murray Ross (James Madison U).
Local Host Committee: Madison Bastress (McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, The Newberry Library), Melissa Adams Campbell (Northern Illinois U), Caroline Egan (Northwestern U), Mar Garcia (Northeastern Illinois U), Jeff Glover (Loyola), Matthew Kruer (U of Chicago), Hayley Negrin (U of Illinois-Chicago), Eric Slauter (U of Chicago), SJ Zhang (U of Chicago).