Call for Proposals
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
Co-sponsors: The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Thanks to decades of scholarship, we now know much more about the connections between the Atlantic world’s late eighteenth-century revolutions. Given the complexity of these events as they unfolded in America, France, and Haiti, however, there is still much work to be done. This conference will explore and deepen these connections. The organizers invite proposals from scholars in any discipline working on the French and Haitian Revolutions in an Atlantic context. The conference coincides with a spring 2026 exhibition in the Kislak Center: The Time to Right All Wrongs: France, Haiti, and Philadelphia in a Revolutionary Age. Drawing upon Penn’s collections of French and Haitian revolutionary documents, the exhibition will explore these revolutionary movements, which brought many refugees from both France and the Caribbean to Philadelphia in the 1790s.
We welcome panels of papers and roundtable sessions on the revolutionary upheavals that shook both metropolitan France and French colonies and populations in North America from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Proposals may focus on any individual revolution or use comparative and transatlantic approaches that foreground the circulation of revolutionary ideas, images, books, goods, individuals, and practices, whether from the American Revolution to France or from the French and Haitian Revolutions to elsewhere in the Americas.
The conference will pay particular attention to the reception of French and Haitian revolutionary ideas and personages in early republican Philadelphia. Participants might address the discursive, visual, and material legacies of the Francophone world’s revolutions as they shaped political debates, print culture, and community formation in early national America.
Areas of particular interest include, but are not limited to:
- The exchange of revolutionary ideas within the American, French, and Haitian public sphere, especially as mediated through print culture
- The impact of revolts in France and its colonies on international relations and diplomacy in the Atlantic world
- Patterns of displacement, migration, and settlement triggered by revolutions in France and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on movements toward Philadelphia
- The emergence of commemorative practices surrounding the French and Haitian Revolutions
- The transformative effects of all these revolutions on the social and political status and material condition of women, free blacks, the enslaved, and Indigenous nations, as well as other social groups
By September 30, 2025, applicants should submit a 300-word abstract outlining their central questions and contribution, accompanied by a one-page CV, through the form linked below. Proposals for individual papers, panels of papers, and roundtable discussions will be accepted. Panel presenters will be asked to prepare a paper of no more than 9,000 words, which will be pre-circulated to participants, as well as a fifteen-minute presentation summarizing the paper’s arguments and evidence. The organizers intend to pursue publication of these papers following the conference. Roundtable discussants will not be asked to prepare papers or formal presentations. Acceptance notifications will be sent by December 1, 2025.
Image Credit: Marcus Rainsford (artist), Inigo Barlow (engraver), “View of a Temple erected by the Blacks to commemorate their Emancipation,” in Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti … ([London]: James Cundee, 1805). Rare Book Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania
Funding for this conference has been generously provided by the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial.
