The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 77th Annual International Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 17–21, 2024. Please submit an abstract no later than 11:59 p.m. CDT on June 6, 2023, to one of the 33 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks or the Open Sessions for the Albuquerque conference. 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 session selection committee reviewed the submitted proposals and composed a program that represents a range of time periods and a wide regional distribution. If your research topic is not a good fit for one of the thematic sessions, please submit your abstract to the Open 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 17– 21, 2024). Instructions and deadlines for submitting to thematic sessions, GSLT, and Open Sessions are the same.

List of Paper Sessions

  • Afterlives of Ancient Athletic Complexes from Late Antiquity to Modern Times
  • Architectural Modernism in the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands
  • Architecture and Education in African Socialism
  • Architecture and Trans Experience
  • Beyond Food: Uprooting the Architecture of Agriculture
  • Carceral Architectures
  • Contested Ground: Architectures of Black American Religious Spaces
  • Daylight and Circumstance in Architecture
  • Fiction, Poetry and Memoir as Architectural (Hi)story-Telling
  • Gender and the Architecture Exhibition
  • Global Histories of Disability and Deafness in Architecture
  • Graduate Student Lightning Talks
  • Horror Stories: Architecture and Modern Anxiety
  • Indigenous Education: Spaces of Tradition, Resistance, and Sovereignty
  • Institutions of Life: Architecture and the Life Sciences
  • Intellectual Histories of the Nineties, the Noughties and the Tens
  • Landscape Urbanism and Ancient Greek and Roman Cities: A Multidisciplinary Approach
  • Learning from Mid-Century Passive Designs
  • Lessons in Critical Reconstruction: Preservation versus the “Cult of Imitations”
  • Lost Interiors: Interpreting the Ephemeral
  • Mapping Late Ottoman Architecture, Ideas, Objects, and People in Flux
  • Modernism and Healthcare in Africa
  • Nuclear Modernism and the Modern Southwest
  • Occluded Presence: Asserting Indigeneity within Asian Built Environments
  • Open Session
  • Plants as Technological Objects; Plants as Technological Subjects
  • Protests and Urban Form: Beyond the Plaza
  • Recent Architectural Historical Scholarship on Indigenous North American Architecture
  • The Architecture and Engineering of Infrastructure in the United States, 1870–1940s
  • The Architecture of Television
  • The Long Histories of Land, Value, and Climate Change
  • The Politics of Landscape: J.B. Jackson in the Contemporary World
  • Transnational Mobility, Space, and Place-making in the Global South
  • Under Construction: Architectural Histories of the Building Site
  • What Might Have Been: Writing Diasporas’ Alternatives Futures

Submission Guidelines:

  1. Confirmed 2024 session chairs are not eligible to submit to the Call for Papers.
  2. Abstracts must be under 300 words.
  3. The title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
  4. Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
  5. Only one abstract per conference by an author or co-author may be submitted.
  6. A maximum of three (3) authors per abstract will be accepted. 
  7. 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 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 Albuquerque, New Mexico. SAH has a limited number of 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 2024 conference by September 30, 2023, and are required to pay the non-refundable conference registration fee as a show of their commitment.