Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender (RSA)

The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender (http://ssemwg.org) will sponsor up to three panels at next year’s annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), to be held in San Francisco, on 19-21 February 2026.  The SSEMWG supports and promotes inclusive and creative scholarship on women and gender across the early modern world. We are committed to interdisciplinary, intersectional approaches that are historically sensitive and theoretically exploratory.

The Society is soliciting proposals for pre-formed panels (or roundtables) in any discipline that explore women and their contributions to the cultural, political, economic, or social spheres of the early modern period and whose interest in it includes attention to gender and representations of women. Proposals that include young/emerging scholars are especially welcome.

If you have an individual paper proposal, or if you find yourself a presenter or two short of a panel or roundtable, you can seek additional panelists by posting a CfP directly to the RSA. You may also send your ideas to Lora Walsh (ljwalsh@uark.edu). Depending on how many individual proposals arrive, I might suggest a grouping of individual papers into a session. I also might circulate a list of brief abstracts to the SSEMWG network.

Sponsorship of a panel or roundtable by the SSEMWG signifies that it is pre-approved and automatically accepted for presentation at the RSA annual meeting.

Proposals for a pre-formed panel or roundtable should be sent to Lora Walsh (ljwalsh@uark.edu), SSEMWG associate organization representative for RSA, by no later than 1 August 2025  with the following materials, assembled into a single Word document (no PDFs, please). Careful adherence to these guidelines is necessary for the RSA submissions portal:

Please note: At RSA, chronological boundaries are held to 1300-1700. Individuals may not be listed as presenting authors or respondents on any other RSA panels. Presenters’ email addresses should be updated with RSA. Most paper presenters in sponsored sessions should be members of the sponsoring organization or discipline group. Also, per RSA rules, all panels and roundtables must include at least one scholar who is postdoctoral, and participants who are currently graduate students “should present material directly related to their advanced degree, not term papers.” For complete RSA guidelines for panel and roundtable proposals, please consult https://www.rsa.org/page/ConferenceSubmissionsGuide

Applicants for SSEMWG panel sponsorship do not need to be Society members at the time of submission, but, if successful, all members of the panel should join the Society before the 2026 RSA meeting. Membership dues rates are based on income and can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/emw/member-sub.  Participants are also expected to be/become RSA members and to register for the conference and are responsible for covering their own travel and lodging costs. Limited travel grants are available to members of the Renaissance Society of America (visit www.rsa.org/).