The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 75th Annual International Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 27–May 1, 2022. Please submit an abstract no later than 11:59 p.m. CDT on June 2, 2021, to one of the 32 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, Affiliate Groups and partner organizations.

Thematic sessions and Graduate Student Lightning Talks (GSLT) 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; three 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 27–May 1, 2022). Instructions and deadlines for submitting to thematic sessions, GSLT and Open Sessions are the same.

List of Paper Sessions

  • American Government Architecture: Representation to Rebellion
  • Architectural (Hi)stories of Climate Change and Mobilities
  • Architecture and Iconoclasm
  • Architecture and Whiteness in the Early Modern World, 1300–1700
  • Architecture as an Expanded Practice
  • Architecture, Capital and the Financial Turn: 1970–2020
  • Architectures of the South: Lands, Bodies and Violence
  • Beyond Critical Regionalism: Coloniality and the Region
  • Beyond Ruin Porn: Digital Mediation and Industrial Heritage
  • Bodies, Buildings and Health in the Age of Empire
  • Electric Interiors from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
  • Environment: The Career of a Concept
  • Framing the Past: Ruins, Imagination and Architecture
  • Graduate Student Lightning Talks
  • Hadrianic Architecture and Classicism: Affirmations/Oppositions
  • Interconnecting West and East Asia: A Transcultural Study of the Architecture of the Dead
  • Landscape History Open Session
  • Large Construction Companies in a Global Context
  • Locating Museums of Medicine and Science Across Geographies
  • Mobility and Access in Modern Urban Landscapes
  • On the Reception of Chinese Architectural Culture
  • Open Session (3)
  • Race and the Rustbelt: How Race Shaped the Industrial Heartland
  • Re-spatializing Exclusion: Transnational Narratives of Resistance
  • Right About Now: Coming Correct to the Contemporary
  • Social Control
  • Syncretic Scientific Knowledge in Sacred Colonial Architecture
  • System Boundaries: Interior Environments Before Modernism
  • Tempered by Time: How Industry Shaped Pittsburgh
  • Temporality in Contemporary Architectural History
  • Visualizing Evidence: Encoding and Decoding Architectural Data
  • Water: Form, Substance, and Meaning in the Landscape
  • What's in a Discipline? Architectural History as Knowledge Project
  • Women in Architecture: The African Exchange

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 three (3) 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 author is expected to fund their own travel and expenses to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. SAH has a limited number of reimbursable conference fellowships for which Speakers may apply. However, SAH’s funding is not sufficient to support the expenses of all Speakers. Speakers and Session Chairs must register and establish membership in SAH for the 2022 conference by September 30, 2021 and are required to pay the non-refundable conference registration fee as a show of their commitment.