CONFERENCES

50th Annual Conference:
Western Society for French History
San Francisco, CA
November 2024

Call for Papers

50th Annual Conference

Western Society for French History

San Francisco, California

November 14-17, 2024

The fiftieth annual conference of the Western Society for French History will be held from November 14-17, 2024 in San Francisco, where, legend has it, the idea for the Western was cooked up in 1973. The theme for this year’s conference is “Pasts, Presents, and Publics.” The organizers hope to highlight the many ways that historians speak to issues of contemporary importance, as well as the relationship between the public sphere and the history of France and the Francophone world.

The chair of the Program Committee and President of the Society is Professor Emily Marker. Deadline for proposals: May 1, 2024. Please use this form to submit your proposals. Questions may be addressed to the program committee at WSFH50@wsfh.org. Local arrangements co-chairs Naomi Andrews (nandrews@scu.edu) and JP Daughton (daughton@stanford.edu) can be consulted regarding site-specific questions.

The conference will be held at the Parc 55 Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Reservations are open and can be booked at this dedicated site.

In keeping with the conference theme, we are excited to announce the Newman Plenary Lunch on the politics of art restitution. It will feature Felicity Bodenstein, Lecturer at the Sorbonne University (Paris), Natasha Becker, the Inaugural Curator of African Art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and John Monroe, Professor of History at Iowa State University. In lieu of a traditional evening plenary, we plan to celebrate the anniversary of the Society on Friday November 15, an event that will include awarding the Tyler Stovall Mission Prizes for 2023 and 2024 and a retrospective of the development of the society over its first 50 years, among other less serious activities! Members are encouraged to contribute to our collective memory project by filling out this form.

We welcome sessions that focus on France and the Francophone world from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. The WSFH encourages proposals from colleagues in related disciplines and the participation of advanced graduate students. Graduate students who would like assistance in forming a panel should reach out to the program committee.

In honor of the anniversary of the Society, which helped pioneer the inclusive format of panel that we know and (sometimes) love today, the organizers especially seek alternative formats for scholarly engagement. In that spirit, we offer some guidelines and some ideas:

Traditional panels should include three papers and a chair. Comments are welcome if they constructively engage with the scholarly dialogue within and among the papers, but they are not required. If your panel prefers to have four papers, then a comment is unnecessary and should be avoided so there will be time for discussion and questions from the audience.
Round tables should have no more than four presenters, and we strongly encourage a set of discussion questions that a chair can pose rather than short papers that are never really short enough! Again, we want to privilege questions and discussion among our scholarly colleagues over prepared comments.
We are interested in pioneering a series of salons or affinity group sessions anchored by a pair or trio of scholars who are working and teaching in a common temporal, thematic, or methodological orientation. We especially welcome volunteers to help organize such gatherings. If you are interested in (co-)hosting one of these sessions, please reach out to the program committee at WSFH50@wsfh.org ahead of the deadline.
We plan to reserve at least one session dedicated to discussion of late-breaking events. If you are interested in being part of the team who will work on pulling such a session together – again, in real time –please reach out to the program committee at WSFH50@wsfh.org ahead of the deadline.

With respect to access to conferences: The WSFH is committed to making the conference experience as accessible as possible for all, and thus we encourage members of the community who are attending and might need accommodations to be in touch with us in advance of the conference about anything we can do to help. With regards to virtual participation, please consult our virtual attendance policy here.

Future Conference Locations

2025 Paris, France (in association with a range of societies)
2026 Memphis, TN

Previous Conference Programs

Click on the links to find recent conference programs. Any scholars who can provide electronic copies of programs from earlier conferences should contact the WSFH secretary.

Conferences