Spaces and Places: Exploring Physical and Conceptual Environments of History

Friday – 6 March 2026

History Graduate Student Association (HGSA) – Western University

Extended deadline: 16 January 2026

These diverse environments are not a neutral backdrop for historical processes but are instead an active force, structuring power, facilitating conflict and exchange, cultivating identities, and mediating memory. They can be sites of communication and cooperation just as easily as they can divide and separate. Human history is intimately tied to its innumerable environments, be they material or social, ecological or imagined. We welcome submissions from graduate students of all disciplines who engage with the topic of spaces and places in a historical context and explore how these environments can construct, constrain and illuminate the past.

Possible topics include:
• Built environments and material worlds
• Liminal spaces such as frontiers, borders, ports and other contact zones
• Conceptual or symbolic spaces in history: utopias, dystopias and imagined futures
• Natural and ecological spaces, climate change and environmental exploitation
• Imperialism, power and control over space
• Places of memory (i.e. museums and historic sites): designation, construction and maintenance

Both works in progress and submissions outside this theme will also be considered. To apply, please submit an abstract no longer than 250 words and a brief 150-word academic biography to hgsagradconference@gmail.com by January 4, 2026 January 16, 2026.

Feature Image: “Near Downtown London, Ontario” by Ken Lund is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.