Attending to Early Modern Women and Gender: Resistance and Resilience

June 11–12, 2027, American University in Washington, D.C.

Call for Workshop Proposals

Deadline: September 15, 2026

The Program Committee is accepting proposals for interdisciplinary workshops related to the four subthemes of the conference: (Trans)Genders, Mobilities, Voices, and Pedagogy and Public Humanities. 

Below you will find guiding questions and subtopics that may be useful for preparing a proposal. Workshops must be interdisciplinary and led by two to four specialists whose expertise represents at least two disciplines. The workshops are driven by discussion, facilitated by short readings and other materials. Those seeking colleagues with whom to develop a proposal may make use of the SSEMWG listserv and an online document linked below. 

Resistance and Resiliencelooks back to the past and the ways in which early modern people exhibited these qualities to the present, in which resistance, resilience, and solidarity have become necessary tools for our scholarship and pedagogy; and to the future as we consider how to instill these values in the next generation of scholars and teachers. 

The conference poses questions such as: How does trans studies ask us to resist and complicate cis understandings of gender in early modernity? How can we complicate conceptions of mobility to consider both movement and immobility within feminist frameworks of power, coercion, and opposition? What does it mean to speak up against authority, and what are the consequences for both speech and silence? Finally, how do we practice and model resistance and resilience in the classroom and out? 

Submitting a Proposal

We welcome proposals for workshops. These are 90-minute sessions organized by a group of two to four leaders who circulate readings, questions, and other materials in advance. Leaders spend no more than twenty minutes framing the issues and opening the conversation, then facilitate active participation and focused discussion. Workshops must be interdisciplinary and are often comparative, and all allow participants to share information and ignorance, pass on knowledge, ask advice, and learn something new. All workshop organizers are expected to register for, attend, and participate in the entire conference, not just their workshop.

Those who wish to propose a workshop can seek collaborators in a different discipline by posting a inquiry to the SSEMWG listserv at emw-l@listserv.umd.edu, or by adding their name and details to this spreadsheet." 

Proposals will comprise the names, disciplines, and contact information for all workshop organizers; a statement of intent of no more than 300 words, including a description of how discussion will be generated; and copies of any materials to be distributed to attendees in advance, not to exceed 30 pages plus illustrations and other non-textual materials. 

Send the proposal to both Program Committee co-chairs by September 15, 2026:

Notifications will be made in November. 

SUBTHEMES

Guiding question(s):

What does it mean to think with trans studies about, or incorporate trans studies into, the study of early modern women / women writers and artists? 

What new insights can be gained from historical materials pertaining to early modern women—texts, images, and objects, for example—when they are interpreted through a trans lens?

What does trans resistance / resilience mean in the context of the study of early modern women writers and artists? Does trans studies need to resist this field, or can it be in solidarity with the field? 

Subtopics:

trans studies; intersections of transness with other identities or areas of study (race, nationality, class, religion, (dis)ability, (a)sexualities, queerness, etc.); multiple genders beyond the binary; meta-discussions about the intersections and/or tensions between trans studies and the study of women writers and artists; trans thriving and/or surviving

Guiding Questions:

What does it mean to consider mobility as a form of resistance to patriarchal or colonizing forces and how might we characterize mobility as a type of resilience? 

How can we investigate mobility as both a concept that idealizes the possibility of movement while also analyzing the structures that make mobility and movement difficult or impossible? How can we disrupt the linearity of mobility?"

What changes when we consider mobility as something that is not always indicative of freedom or agency, but as something that can be imposed by way of displacement, enslavement, or forced migration? 

Subtopics: 

movement across spaces and borders; restrained movement; physical mobility; critique of terms used for mobility; mobilizing movement(s); movement and the lack thereof; social mobility; mobility as disruption of linearity; mobility upward and downward; travel; sojourn; migration

Guiding Questions:

Considering voice broadly as a sound, an act, or a representation (depictions, music, speech, text), how can we examine the ways in which gender, sexuality and other intersecting identities constituted the content, meaning, and/or reception of early modern voices?

Who gets to speak? Who is silenced or overlooked?

How might we consider silence as a kind of speech or the ways in which those who are underrepresented in the historical record may have given voice to their experiences and exercised agency?

Subtopics:

metaphorical or representational, sounded, and musically composed, written or epistolary voices; voice as a bodily sensation and as something that reverberates between bodies; relationship between ability to speak and class, (dis)ability, ethnicity/race, gender, and/or (a)sexualitities; silence, both voluntary and enforced; relationships between voice, agency and identity; voices of protest, dissent, and complicity. 

Guiding Questions:

What kinds of resistance and resilience do we practice as we teach about early modern women and gender, race and indigeneity, and sexuality and trans studies in the current cultural, political, social and technological environment?

What do early modern women have to teach us about resistance and resilience today?

How can we advocate for our field, our research, and our students to our publics (university administrators, elected officials, and the broader public)?

Subtopics:

how to teach targeted topics; making early modern women accessible; continuing relevance of the premodern in teaching, the public arena, and the material environment; teaching in the community; resistance, resilience, and acceptance in the face of new technologies