Paper Submission Deadline: January 13, 2025 by 12 p.m. EST

Dublin Seminar Date: June 27–28, 2025

Location: Historic Deerfield

“Recalling the Revolution in New England”

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (founded in 1976) is pleased to announce the subject of its 2025 gathering, Recalling the Revolution in New England, to be held June 27–28 at Historic Deerfield. The conference keynote will be provided by Dr. Zara Anishanslin of the University of Delaware, author of the forthcoming book  The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution.

On September 11, 1765, political leaders in Boston attached a plaque to a majestic elm and named it “Liberty Tree” to honor its role in an anti-Stamp Act protest the previous month. New Englanders thus started to commemorate the events of the American Revolution even before they had any idea there would be such a revolution. Over the following centuries, people from New England shaped the national memory of that era through schoolbooks, popular poetry, civic celebrations, monuments, and more.

On the 250th anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife welcomes proposals for papers and presentations that address the broad range of ways the people of New England have looked back on the nation’s founding—and what they forgot, or chose to forget, in the process.

The annual Dublin Seminar is a meeting place where scholars of all kinds—academics, students, museum and library professionals, artisans and craftspeople, educators, preservationists, and committed avocational researchers—join in deep conversation around a focused theme in New England history, pooling their knowledge and exchanging ideas, sources, and methods in a thought-provoking forum.

The 2025 Seminar invites proposals for papers and presentations that illuminate how the peoples of the region have commemorated, memorialized, documented, invoked, fictionalized, and even forgotten the American Revolution through the Bicentennial period. Papers should examine events and trends in New England and adjoining regions.

The Seminar encourages papers grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and original research, particularly material and visual culture, manuscripts, government and business records, the public press, oral histories, and public history practice or advocacy. Papers addressing such contemporary themes as gender dynamics, racial dimensions, and environmental aspects of Revolutionary commemoration are strongly encouraged.

Some possible topics might include:

• Efforts to recover the stories of marginalized participants in the American Revolution
• The processes of local commemoration in orations, pageants, reenactments, and more
• Recreating and depicting the American Revolution in popular fiction, theater, prints, and toys
• The collecting and preservation of Revolutionary-era artifacts and material culture
• Activating, maintaining, and interpreting historic sites, battlefields, monuments, homes, and other spaces
• The formation and activities of historical societies and heritage organizations
• Contesting the memory and meaning of the American Revolution

The Seminar will convene in Deerfield, Massachusetts on June 27–28. This will be a hybrid program with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees. The program will consist of a keynote address and approximately fifteen 20-minute presentations. Speakers will present on site at Historic Deerfield. Speakers will be expected to submit the text of their presentation at least a week before the conference.

To submit a proposal, please send (as a single email attachment, in MS Word or as a PDF, labeled LASTNAME.DubSem2025) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and the archival, material, or visual sources on which it is grounded, followed by a one-page vita or biography.

Email proposal to: dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org.

Deadline: Noon EST, Monday, January 13, 2025.

Dublin Seminar presenters are expected to submit their papers (approximately 7,000 words) for consideration to the Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar by October 14, 2025. The scholarship proposed for presentation should be unpublished and available for inclusion in this volume to be published about eighteen months after the conference.