Conference: Law, Culture, and Humanities 27th Annual Conference, Georgetown University, June 17-18, 2025 (Call for Papers deadline: January 31, 2025)

Call for Papers: Law, Culture, and Humanities 27th Annual Conference, Georgetown University, June 17-18, 2025

Speech Matters

We live in a golden or an iron age, depending on one’s point of view, for laws regulating speech. The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments around the world to reckon with floods of dis- and misinformation. The global rise of the far right has brought with it a need for new legal tools to combat threats, harassment, and hate speech. And in the United States, state and local governments have attempted to suppress speech by or about unpopular subjects through means ranging from book bans to felony prosecutions. For this year’s Law, Culture, and Humanities Annual Conference, we invite papers on how the law conceptualizes, regulates, commodifies, or instrumentalizes speech (broadly defined not just as language but as expressive activity). In particular, we welcome papers that use humanistic tools for making sense of speech and expression—concepts from rhetoric, narrative theory, aesthetics, genre studies, and more—to tackle new or persistent legal puzzles.

Submission Guidelines

We encourage the submission of fully constituted panels, as well as panels that reimagine or experiment with models for academic presentation, such as roundtables, author meet reader sessions (which may include multiple books and their authors in conversation), collaborative presentations, multi-panel streams, etc. Individual proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words. Please note that online presenters should organize a full panel (we will not be accepting individual papers for online presentations this year) and that, though we traditionally accept most papers, we may need to limit the number of online panels we accept, depending on demand. Panels, whether virtual or in-person, should include three papers (or, exceptionally, four papers). Please specify a title and designate a chair for your panel. The panel chair may also be a panel presenter. It is not necessary to write an abstract or proposal for the panel itself. To indicate your pre-constituted panel, roundtable, or stream, please ensure that individual registrants provide the name of the panel and the chair in their individual submissions on the registration site. All panel, roundtable, or stream participants must make an individual submission on the registration site. When submitting a proposal, we also ask that registrants identify two keywords to help us align sessions with each other.

Mode

The twenty-seventh annual conference will emphasize the LCH tradition of in-person conversation. While we encourage participants to join us in Washington, D.C., we recognize that in-person attendance may be prohibitive for some. To that end, we will also accept the submission of virtual panels. Since we will not be providing technical support for virtual participants, panel chairs will be responsible for providing Zoom links that will be listed in the program. All plenary sessions will be available streaming online as well as in person.

How to Submit?

Submissions may be made through the website the link of which is given below.  Creating a Panel: Contact Our Graduate Coordinators Early. While participants may submit individual paper proposals that the Program Committee will later combine into full panels, we strongly encourage applicants to create full panels prior to submission. Pre-formed panels may cohere better, and allow collaborators to craft focused scholarly exchanges. Panels comprising a diversity of institutions, academic ranks, disciplines, and identities are often the most rewarding. If you would like support in finding others who might be interested in forming a panel, please contact our Graduate Coordinators, Aditya Banerjee ([email protected]) and Jack Quirk ([email protected]) with “LCH panel” in the subject line. The Graduate Coordinators will act as intermediaries, and may be able to put you in contact with others working on related topics. We especially encourage graduate students and those new to LCH to consider reaching out to the Graduate Coordinators if they’re struggling to identify potential co-panelists. Please contact them well before the submission deadline, to allow time for follow-up.

Submission Deadline

• Submission Deadline: January 31, 2025
• Dates of Conference: June 17-18, 2025

Contact Information

Please email [email protected] with any queries.

Click here to submit a proposal.

Click here to view the official conference website.

Law, Culture, and Humanities Graduate Student Workshop, Georgetown University, June 16, 2025

The annual Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Graduate Student Workshop will be held on Monday, June 16, 2025 (the day before the annual meeting begins).

The workshop is designed for graduate students who are undertaking research that cuts across law, cultural studies, literature, philosophy, legal studies, anthropology, political science, and history, among others. The workshop is designed to afford graduate students the opportunity to experience the LCH community in a smaller venue with more sustained contact with one another and some faculty. The workshop also provides graduate students with an opportunity to discuss their research projects in a small group setting in anticipation of such things as job talks and publication.

Applications to the workshop should consist of a current curriculum vitae (2-3 page maximum), an abstract of a current project not exceeding 700 words that explicitly addresses how it relates to law, culture and the humanities, as well as a short (5 page maximum) text relating to that project. This “text” could be a case, literary work, a time-line, a photo, a sound or video file, or some other relevant text. The text you choose should be something that helps you reflect on the subject of your work and your methods of analysis. Please use your judgment and best guess in deciding how audio, visual, or audio-visual materials “translate” into pages of text.

While it is possible to participate in both the workshop and the LCH annual conference, the two events are separate and require separate applications. Should workshop participants wish to present at the conference as well, they will need to submit a proposal here (in addition to their workshop application). Should workshop participants wish to attend the conference but not present a paper, they will need to register (once registration for the conference becomes available).

Applicants whose workshop proposals are accepted will receive some support towards an extra night’s accommodation from LCH as well as some support (varying, depending on distance traveled) towards the cost of transportation to the conference site. While those who participated in a previous workshop may re-apply and participate again, should space and/or funds be limited, we will prioritize new participants. Please email your applications to [email protected] by January 31, 2025.

Click here to view the official workshop website.