Conference Chair: Patricia A. Morton, SAH 1st Vice President Elect, University of California, Riverside
Local Co-Chairs: Annmarie Adams, McGill University, and Martin Bressani, McGill University

The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 74th Annual International Conference in Montréal, Canada, April 14–18, 2021. Please submit an abstract no later than 11:59 p.m. CDT on June 3, 2020, to one of the 33 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks or the Open Sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; scholars in related fields; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations.

Thematic sessions and Graduate Student Lightning Talks are listed below. The thematic sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. If your research topic is not a good fit for one of the thematic sessions, please submit your abstract to the Open Sessions; two Open Sessions are available for those whose research topic does not match any of the thematic sessions. Please note that those submitting papers for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks must be graduate students at the time the talk is being delivered (April 14–18, 2021). Instructions and deadlines for submitting to thematic sessions and Open Sessions are the same.

  • Advocacy, Activism & Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968
  • Architectural and Urban History of the South Caucasus
  • Architecture of Extraction in the Atlantic World
  • Architecture of Spanish Italy
  • Building Non-Alignment: Neutralism and the Global South, 1950-80s
  • Chinoiserie: Imagining Self and Other in Architectural Culture
  • Coastal Landscapes and Politics of Leisure in the Global Sunbelt
  • Collecting the Uncollectable: Architecture in the Museum
  • Designed Landscapes through Time
  • Designing the Global Countryside
  • Diasporic Architectural Histories
  • Early Modern Production and Conversion of Architectural Knowledge
  • Earthly Desires: Ecofeminism and Spatial Histories
  • Emotions in Nineteenth-Century Architecture
  • Energy and Architecture: A History and Pedagogy for Our Times
  • Framing Questions and Stories on Archives of the Global South
  • Graduate Student Lightning Talks
  • Habitat 67 and Post-War Architecture
  • Identity, Memory, Values and Adaptive Reuse in Latin America
  • Labor and Landscape
  • Markets and Migration: Ethnic Spaces in the Urban Landscape
  • New Material Histories of Architecture
  • No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance
  • Open Session (2) 
  • Port Cities and Landscapes of the Sea
  • Rethinking Evidence
  • Revisiting Pilgrimage Spaces in the Middle Ages
  • The 60s: Canada Thinks Small?
  • The Architecture Exhibition as Cross-Cultural Contact Zone
  • The Didactics of the North American Model Home
  • The Establishment of a Field: Architectural Education in MENA
  • The Global Gothic
  • Transnational Histories of Architecture and Racial Violence
  • Utopias of the Self
  • What is the New Architectural Archive?

Submission Guidelines:

  1. Abstracts must be under 300 words.
  2. The title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
  3. Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
  4. Only one abstract per conference by an author or co-author may be submitted.
  5. A maximum of two (2) authors per abstract will be accepted. 
  6. Please attach a two-page CV in PDF format.

Abstracts should define the subject and summarize the argument to be presented in the proposed paper. The content of that paper should be the product of well-documented original research that is primarily analytical and interpretive, rather than descriptive in nature. Papers cannot have been previously published or presented in public except to a small, local audience (under 100 people). All abstracts will be held in confidence during the review and selection process, and only the session chair and conference chair will have access to them. 

All session chairs have the prerogative to recommend changes to the abstract in order to ensure it addresses the session theme, and to suggest editorial revisions to a paper in order to make it satisfy session guidelines. It is the responsibility of the session chairs to inform speakers of those guidelines, as well as of the general expectations for participation in the session and the annual conference. Session chairs reserve the right to withhold a paper from the program if the author has not complied with those guidelines.

Please Note: Each speaker and session chair is expected to fund their own travel and expenses to Montréal, Canada. SAH has a limited number of Annual Conference Fellowships for which speakers and session chairs may apply. However, SAH’s funding is not sufficient to support the expenses of all speakers and session chairs. Speakers and session chairs must register and establish membership in SAH for the 2021 conference by September 30, 2020, and are required to pay the non-refundable conference registration fee as a show of their commitment.