Conference Date: 17 March 2027
We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for Representations of Female Experiences in Pre-Modern Societies: A Global Perspective. Generously funded by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, this conference is open to postgraduate students and early career researchers in History, Ancient History and related humanities disciplines across M4C institutions and other universities, as well as independent scholars and the wider community.
We particularly encourage early-stage postgraduate researchers to share their work within a supportive, inclusive, and diverse academic environment.
Conference Theme:
Across ancient, medieval, and early modern societies worldwide, women’s lives, perspectives, and agency have frequently been recorded through the lenses of others—most often male elites, institutional authorities, or dominant socio-cultural structures. As a result, female experiences are regularly mediated through prescriptive texts, indirect representations, or obscured by the fragmentary nature of surviving material and textual evidence.
This conference aims to address these methodological and historical challenges by investigating how female experiences were recorded, interpreted, and reconstructed across diverse pre-modern contexts. By bringing together global perspectives across broad geographical and chronological boundaries, we seek to uncover both common patterns and distinct regional developments in how gendered lives were documented and understood.
We particularly encourage contributions that critically evaluate the methodologies used to recover “silent,” underrepresented, or marginalized historical actors. How do we read against the grain of biased or elite sources? How can material culture, visual arts, landscape, archival fragments, and comparative frameworks illuminate lives otherwise lost to conventional histories?
We invite proposals on topics including, but not limited to:
– Representations of femininity and gender across varied societies
– Power, authority, and agency
– Female communities and networks
– Religion and religious experiences
– Mobility, migration, and spatial dynamics
– Methods for researching, writing, and uncovering marginalised or forgotten communities and individuals worldwide
Format Options:
We envision that papers will be 20-minutes in length. Additionally, there will be a poster display (each poster should be formatted at A1 size, 59.4 × 84.1 cm) and a poster panel discussion, starting with a 5-minute overview of your poster, followed by questions.
How to Submit:
To submit your proposal, please complete our submission form. You will be asked to provide:
– Submission Type: (20-min paper or poster)
– A Provisional Title
– Abstract: Maximum 300 words
– A Short Biography: Maximum 100 words
To fill out the form, please follow: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=xcLLiu3Ix0KBabpDig2-L7pMTQFiF-pJk1rZ1HZb-dVUQzFUSEs4N08yNUFOMjMzREVLNDZOWVlHQi4u
Deadlines for submissions will be: 15 January 2027
We are committed to making this event accessible to all. Please let us know in the submission form if you require any adjustments or additional support to participate.
If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact Ben Colley at [email protected]