Dublin Seminar 2026 – Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come

In June 2026, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. As this year’s seminar looks forward to its own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.

The 2026 seminar will feature a keynote address by Holly Jackson, Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and author of American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation. Programming for the Seminar will be in partnership with the Communal Studies Association as well as the Chicopee, Massachusetts, house museum dedicated to Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1888), second only in 19th-century popularity to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Other speakers will address how New Englanders have envisioned new futures during moments of crisis or uncertainty. How did people try to anticipate what the future held or if there was a future at all? How did imagining the future shape the present?