Call for Abstracts: Histories of Nostalgia
Deadline for abstracts: Saturday, February 8, 2025
Panels For the American Historical Association, January 2026 Meeting

Subject Fields

American History / Studies, European History / Studies, Early Modern History and Period Studies, Atlantic History / Studies, British History / Studies

The rise of MAGA drew scholarly attention to the politics of nostalgia, and subsequent events, most especially Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, have reaffirmed its power. This series of panels seeks to bring together an array of perspectives on and approaches to instances of nostalgia in Europe and North America, beginning in the early modern period. At a moment when nostalgia is seen as a tool of the right, these panels will explore a wider spectrum of how appeals have been made to tradition.

Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition serves as a model for the types of investigation we hope to bring together, but we are casting a wider net, looking at nostalgic uses of the past on two continents over four centuries (1500-1900.) We hope to elicit submissions focusing on the motivations for and uses of nostalgic evocations of the past. Whereas The Invention of Tradition emphasized practices, especially ritual practices, we also encourage submissions from those working on appropriations and reinterpretations of the past in other forms. 

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

· Historical representations (art, film, etc) that communicate political messages

· ceremonies that consciously evoke the past

· political or religious rhetoric and its appeals to tradition  

· historical monuments/ memorials  

· contests over a particular historical event

· efforts to link a political figure with a particular predecessor

In your paper proposal, please specify the period/ circumstances in which your nostalgic interpretation occurred, the historical referent which this nostalgia evokes, and/ or if (as in the case of “Make America Great Again”), there is no precise referent. 

Please send a brief cv (up to 250 words), a presentation title, and an abstract of the proposed presentation (up to 300 words) to Elizabeth McCahill (elizabeth.mccahill@umb.edu) and Nicole Breault (nabreault@utep.edu).

Please detail any audio/visual requirements that you might need.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is Saturday, February 8, 2025. We will send notifications of our plans for panels by February 11, 2025 and submit panels to the American Historical Association for consideration for the January 2026 Meeting. For more information about the AHA, please see the conference website: https://www.historians.org/events/annual-meeting/

Contact Information

Elizabeth McCahill, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Boston (elizabeth.mccahill@umb.edu) and Nicole Breault, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at El Paso (nabreault@utep.edu)