CfP: 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries

Where: San Antonio, Texas. When: October 24-26. Venue: Menger Hotel on historic Alamo Plaza

Frontiers and Borderlands of Exploration

Frontiers, where explorers, traders, and indigenous peoples encounter one another, expanding their geographic and socio-cultural understandings as well as political and economic relationships, is the theme of this year’s conference. The experience and the acquisition of knowledge between and by those crossing frontiers into unfamiliar territory as well as the transmission of this knowledge back to their homelands includes scholarly examinations of exploration, encounters, and resistance across colonial and exploratory frontiers globally.

SHD invites papers, 20 minutes in length, on all points of view of this theme broadly conceived, including: discovery, exploration, conquest, resistance, settlement, economy, and all aspects of cultural encounters. SHD welcomes proposals from scholars, independent researchers, and is particularly interested in submissions from graduate students and emerging scholars. While papers aligned with the conference theme are preferred, the selection committee will consider all paper proposals of high quality related to the themes of geographic explorations and discoveries as well as on the teaching of the history of exploration, broadly defined.

The audience at SHD meetings is diverse and includes academics and members of various professions who are interested in the processes and consequences of geographical exploration and discovery. Presenters are encouraged to use images (maps, paintings, photographs, etc.). For the benefit of the audience, any visuals presentations will be PowerPoint-compatible projections.

Please provide a proposal that includes the following components:

  • the title of the presentation
  • the author’s name and address, including email address and affiliation
  • an abstract summarizing the paper’s scope and conclusions (maximum of 500 words)
  • a statement about the originality of the contents of the paper: how much is new, unpublished material, based on research in primary sources, etc.
  • a statement indicating whether PowerPoint or other digital media will be used and whether internet access is necessary for the presentation
  • a brief biographic sketch of the author(s)
Paper proposals are due April 15, 2024