SHS Annual Conference 2025
Black Country Living Museum
7th July, 2025 – 9th July, 2025
Our next annual conference will be held in person at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. Our call for papers is open now.
What to Expect
Our next annual conference will take place at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley.
This will be the first annual conference that we have held at a museum or public history institution. The Black Country Living Museum is an open air museum in Dudley in the West Midlands, which tells the story of one of the very first industrialised landscapes in Britain. Featuring reconstructed shops, houses and industrialised areas ranging from 1850 to 1950, it’s a uniquely immersive heritage experience which seeks to give you a feel of industrialising Britain. Find out more about it here.
This conference is designed as an in person event and will include events exploring the museum’s collection.
The programme will be organised thematically and incorporate panels of three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers.
We are working with the Black Country Living Museum to keep the costs as low as possible. There will be a discounted rate for postgraduates and those working outside academia, as well as a generous package of bursaries. The conference is not designed to make a profit.
Call for Papers: Deadline 17 January 2025
We warmly welcome proposals for individual papers and panels from new and established historians, working inside and outside Higher Education.
Our conference is organised by eight thematic strands, which range across time and space. They are:
- Bodies, Sex and Emotions
- ‘Deviance’, Inclusion and Exclusion
- Difference, Minoritization and ‘Othering’
- Heritage, Environment, Spaces & Places
- Inequalities, Activism and Social Justice
- Life Cycles, Families and Communities
- Politics, Policy and Citizenship
- Work, Leisure and Consumption
Your abstract should address at least one of our strands and indicate which is your first preference. The full details of each strand are available here.
Abstracts for individual paper should be no more than 250 words. Panel proposals should include an overarching title alongside the individual details.
Click here to submit a single paper proposal
Click here to submit a panel proposal
Could you be a Strand Convenor?
We are looking to hear from anyone who is interested in putting themselves forward as a strand convenor. Convenor duties include reviewing abstracts, and programming and chairing sessions. There are vacancies for convenors in most strands.
We are keen to ensure balance within strands (in terms of research interests, but also in terms of career stage and type of work) and to encourage more convenors from under-represented groups.
This is a voluntary opportunity that has the potential to shape the Social History Society for years to come. To find out more about what this role involves, please click here.
If you are interested in becoming a convenor, or would simply like to find out more, please get in touch via socialhistorysoc@gmail.com
Keynote: ‘“Such trifling things”: Writing about Nothing in the eighteenth century’ by Professor Karen Harvey
Our 2025 keynote will be given by Professor Karen Harvey, the distinguished historian of British social and cultural history.
Harvey is an historian of the British long eighteenth century. She has ongoing interests in the body and sexuality, masculinity and material culture, as well as expertise in digital humanities. She also has considerable experience in public engagement and working with a range of partners, from schools to museums. Her most recent major research project is the Leverhulme-funded ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680-1820‘ (2021-25) which uses thousands of familiar letters by men and women to explore the relationships between the physical body, self and social identity. The project puts people’s experiences of their bodies at the centre of the analysis, providing a history of the inhabited body and of the inhabitants’ vocabulary for this. It also reconsiders the relationship between letters and the body, arguing that epistolary culture produced a distinctive form of embodiment.
