OAH Call for Proposals
April 3–April 6, 2025
Sheraton Grand Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
We welcome proposals for the 2025 OAH convention in Chicago in all categories of styles and forms: three-paper sessions; panels and roundtables; state of the field; chat rooms; lightning rounds, and workshops. The three-paper session, along with roundtables, have long been the most popular forms for sessions, but we urge contributors to experiment with other formats to encourage more interaction.
In a departure from past practice, this OAH meeting will have no single theme. We welcome all questions, themes, and fields, new and old, in the comprehensive subject of United States and American history. We invite proposals focused on categories and specializations of history by gender, race, sexual orientation, region, chronology, or area study. All of these areas of inquiry are at the center of our craft. At the same time, no one need design a session to fit a theme, large or small. We welcome all kinds and methods of studying American history.
We are hopeful that this approach might lead to more interaction across sub-fields, prompt us to discuss big and difficult questions, and make us stretch with discomfort. Embedded within the program will be a few ideas that the OAH calls presidential streams of subjects. These themes may include the crisis for secondary history teachers; censorship, identity, freedom of speech in publishing and curriculum; new challenges and opportunities for historical prose and writing; the fate of the American public school/university; regions that do or do not define us; artificial intelligence and research and writing; why elections and political parties matter; how and why the Constitution is at the center of public discussion and protest; immigration, past and present; the Midwest and how to find and study it; readership, large and small; the politics of teaching American history; the place of shocking events in historical consciousness; and finally, whether the United States will endure its current divisions, and what might be the role of the OAH in monitoring and shaping that story. Proposals may indicate whether they might fit into one of these themes, but we invite proposals on all topics.