The Society of Early Americanists seeks submissions for its 2027 biennial conference, to be held in Chicago, March 18-20, 2027. We welcome proposals for individual papers and fully constituted panels, roundtables, or workshops on any aspect of the literatures and cultures of the early Americas. Proposals are due May 26, 2026 on the conference ex Ordo site: https://sea2027.exordo.com/.
Call for Proposals
SEA welcomes proposals on any aspect of early American studies, and we especially encourage panels that attend to the multi-lingual early Americas; to the connections among the Midwest, Caribbean, and Latin and South America; to relations between the “early” and the now; and to speculative approaches to early American literatures and archives.
We encourage proposals for individual papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and innovative presentation formats. We will give priority to panels that reflect a range of institutional affiliations, career stages, and disciplinary backgrounds. Panels will be 90 minutes in length. When submitting, please keep in mind SEA’s policy that a participant may appear in the program twice as long as they are fulfilling different roles (i.e. a presenter or respondent in one panel and a chair or organizer for a second panel).
We especially welcome panels, workshops, or roundtables related to the 2027 Common Reading, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (a fictional retelling of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación from the perspective of the enslaved man Estebanico).
We encourage panel organizers to post calls for participants to the SEA list-serv (earam-l@listserv.kent.edu).
How to Submit
All proposals should be submitted through exOrdo: https://sea2027.exordo.com/.
For submissions of individual papers, please use the Submit your Abstract button and follow the instructions to submit your abstract.
Chairs proposing a panel or roundtable should use the Submit your Panel button and follow the instructions to submit your panel description and information. A step by step guide to submitting a panel is at this link.
If you would like to submit a paper for a panel stream, please submit directly to the panel stream chairs (contact information is below).
We also welcome proposals for hands-on workshops that share skills or practices (these might include pedagogical practices, making (prints, textiles, ink, food, etc.) in the classroom, topics around academic freedom and mutual aid, writing about the past, etc.).
All participants must become a member of SEA and register for the conference. You can become a member by navigating to this link (all memberships include access to the Early American Literature journal).
Panel Streams
Black Diasporic LIteratures and Cultures
Organizers: ajay.batra@vanderbilt.edu; lp949@drexel.edu; sjzhang@uchicago.edu
Early American Environments
Organizers: sheila.byers@ell.ox.ac.uk; Antonia_Halstead@brown.edu; lloydkevin.sy@yale.edu
Early American Forms and Formalisms
Organizers: daniel.couch@afacademy.af.edu; davidlawrimore@isu.edu; michelle.sizemore@uky.edu
Early Modern Latin American Studies
Organizers: bauerr@umd.edu; candrang@vt.edu; rolazo@ucsc.edu
History of the Book in the Americas
Organizers: acataldo@mwa.org; jbdibbell@gmail.com; dicuirci@umbc.edu
Indigenous Studies
Organizer: kwalkiewicz@ucsd.edu; zballew@wisc.edu; dubos.6@osu.edu; allysonmlaforge@gmail.com; anthonytrujillo@g.harvard.edu
Contemporary Religion and Early America
Organizers: jaym@georgefox.edu; cptrigg@ntu.edu.sg; Hannah-Wakefield@utc.edu
See the conference page for additional information about the conference.