The Journal of the History of Ideas and the JHI Blog invite graduate students from all institutions, disciplines, and stages of their degrees to propose papers for our seventh annual Graduate Student Symposium to be held via video conference on Saturday October 4, 2025.
The event aims to convene a diverse group of graduate students from different disciplines working on a variety of topics, periods, genres, and regions. The theme for this year’s symposium is “Between the Text and Material History.” The symposium will explore the ways in which historians’ increasing engagement with visual and material—not only textual—sources extends the discipline’s intellectual realms. Though these more expansive research methods continue to grow in scope and frequency, entrenched Western sensibilities regarding what counts as “history” or a “text” continue to limit our discipline’s outlook. By turning towards print and material cultures, our symposium will aim to reveal the historiographical blindspots that such blinkered views have created. Dwelling in the theoretically productive space opened up by tensions between popular and “high” intellectual cultures will allow us to consider how the discipline might transcend these dichotomies and their concomitant modes of historical construction and narrativity.
Papers might engage with themes such as:
● The conceptual trajectory of so-called “material” histories
● Sociologies of intellectuals/ sociologies of knowledge
● Book and print history
● New philosophies or theories of history
● Genealogies, traditions, and rituals
● Scholarly and popular practices of reading
● Between “high” and popular culture
● Visual, performance, and artistic expression
● The constitution of memory and coalitions through “text” and “history”
● Simulation and technology in the environmental and life sciences
● “Hypertext” and intersections of media theory and intellectual history
Proposals should not exceed 500 words and should explicitly state how the paper responds to this call, the argument it intends to make, and the source base. Please also acknowledge the project’s context (e.g., a seminar paper, a dissertation chapter, article to be submitted to a journal, a fledgling idea, etc.).
Please send your proposal along with a CV in a Word doc file to blogjhi@gmail.com. The deadline for submission has been extended to June 16, 2025.
The symposium asks more of participants than typical conferences do and hopes to provide more as well. Before the event, each participant will pre-circulate an article-length paper (7,000–9,000 words). The event will consist of several sessions conceived as “workshops,” where presenters engage with each other and with invited scholars from their respective fields. Participants are expected to read and annotate one another’s papers before the event in order to inform lively, substantive discussions and generate suggestions for revision and continued research.
All questions can be directed to the JHI Blog editors at blogjhi@gmail.com.
