Location
Milner Hall, Winchester
Call for Papers
The Committee of the Southern History Society invites contributions to a conference on the above broad theme to be held at Milner Hall, Winchester on 18 October 2025, 10am-5pm. We warmly encourage proposals from a wide range of disciplines and approaches and from early career researchers and doctoral students as well as established scholars.
Proposals for individual contributions of 20 minutes in length should be submitted as 250 word abstracts to cindy.wood@winchester.ac.uk. Proposals for panel presentations of three 20 minute papers will also be welcome.
We hope to publish some of these contributions as papers in a themed edition of the Society’s peer reviewed journal, Southern History, in 2026.
Abstract submission deadline: 1 September 2025
We suggest contributions under the following broad subject areas but have no wish to be restrictive
- The making of the Elizabethan poor laws
- Transition from old poor laws to new
- Going ‘on the parish’
- The lives and work of poor law officials
- Paternalism, moral economy and laissez-faire
- Poverty and the domestic sphere
- Operation of the Vagrancy Acts
- Violence and scandal in poor law institutions
- Pauper agency and resistance
- The parish poor house
- The writings and things of the poor: pauper letters and pauper inventories
- Provisioning the poor
- Representing the poor in popular culture: painters, poets and song-writers
- Poverty and assisted migration
- The material culture of poverty: museums and their collections
- Poverty and the welfare state
- Gender, poverty and poor relief
- Alms and almshouses
- Funeral doles