We at The Metropole are still mourning the end of this last month’s excellent SACRPH conference, and so have eagerly begun to look ahead towards next year’s UHA Conference in Columbia, South Carolina. Jessica Elfenbein and Robin Waites of the Local Arrangements Committee and LaDale Winling and Elaine Lewinnik of the Program Committee assure us that we are not being premature in our enthusiasm–the deadline to submit paper proposals will be upon us sooner than we think! Check out the CFP below and leave a comment if you’re looking for urbanists to join a panel.
The Ninth Biennial Conference of the Urban History Association
“Cities at the Crossroads”
Columbia, SC
October 18-21, 2018
http://www.urbanhistory.org/Columbia2018
The Urban History Association invites submissions for sessions and papers on all aspects of urban, suburban, and metropolitan history. We welcome proposals for panels, roundtable discussions, and individual papers.
The conference theme, “Cities at the Crossroads,” reflects the growing interdisciplinarity of the field of urban history, the role of cities as meeting places, and the contemporary challenges of urban political isolation and tension over issues such as climate change, immigration, segregation, and inequality.
We encourage submissions that explore the diversity of the study of cities, including contributions from other disciplines and from historians who interpret notions of “urban” broadly and synthetically, whether politically, geographically, socially, or culturally. The program committee welcomes proposals for innovative workshops or non-traditional sessions. Successful panel and paper proposals need not adhere strictly to the conference theme, and the program committee will pay special attention to panels marking the anniversaries of events in or profoundly affecting cities, such as the Kerner Commission Report, the Fair Housing Act, or the 1968 Paris uprising.
Each proposal should have the following format:
Individual paper submissions should include an abstract up to 150 words with up to four keywords, along with a one-page CV, including address and email. These should be submitted as a single PDF file.
Panel submissions should include a cover page indicating the lead contact, with telephone and email, and the names of the session Chair and Commentator; a one-paragraph overview of the session’s themes and significance, plus a description of the format (eg panel, roundtable, workshop); a 100-word abstract for each proposed paper; and a one-page CV for each participant, including address and e-mail, all submitted as a combined, single PDF file.
The submission deadline is February 15, 2018. The program committee also plans for a graduate student workshop and a poster session, which will have a separate proposal deadline of May 1, 2018, with details forthcoming.
Please direct inquiries to Program Committee co-chairs LaDale Winling at Virginia Tech and Elaine Lewinnek at California State University-Fullerton (Columbia2018UHA@gmail.com).
The Metropole 
With SACRPH in Cleveland and the SSHA in Montreal concluded and with planning for UHA’s Columbia, SC conference under way, it might be appropriate to consider for a moment how conferences might be improved.
Although expensive, they continue to be reasonably well attended because making a conference presentation remains for many academics a still useful way to demonstrate your academic interest and activity to those making promotion and tenure decisions. The problem is that since the success or failure of a conference is largely determined by how many attend, all too many papers of questionable value are accepted. And with so many panels scheduled during any given time slot, attendance can be disappointing. Then too by clinging to the ancient convention of reading papers out loud, sessions often prove tedious beyond words.
A modest reform would give priority to papers posted in advance. The presentation would entail explaining the basic ideas and argument and how they might fit into the larger historical framework; you know what you are supposed to do in a decent class.
This blog could play an important role in sustaining and strengthening conferences not only by celebrating them as joyful convocations, but also by singling out a few worthy and perhaps exciting papers and exchanges in various sessions.
Jim Wunsch
Empire State College (SUNY)
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