In this seminar, we will discuss work that considers how marriage and other kinds of unions are controlled by individuals and societies across historical time and place. We are especially interested in looking at how laws, customs, and religious experiences restricted various aspects of marital unions and/or encouraged or liberated non-normative unions. We are also interested in how these unions intersect with other markers of identity and lived experiences. To what extent are unions and marital customs defined by a particular institution and to what extent are they defined by a local community? Who made decisions about a given pairing, and who made decisions affecting the couple after the union? Although the seminar is led by medieval European historians, work on any time period or geographic location is very welcome.

Ruth Mazo Karras is Professor of Medieval History at Trinity College Dublin. She specializes in the history of women, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. She is the author of numerous books, including Unmarriages: Women, Men and Sexual Unions in Medieval Europe, which won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the AHA. Her textbook, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, is now in its fourth edition.

Jennifer D. Thibodeaux is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She specializes in the history of women and gender in the Middle Ages. She is the author of three books, including the award-winning The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066-1300, and the forthcoming trade book, J’Accuse: A medieval crime and the servant girl who changed history (Godine, October 2026).

This seminar invites scholarship on any aspect of the history of same-sex desire and behavior, gender non-conformity, and/or transing gender. While we welcome scholarship on self-identified LGBT people in the more recent past, we especially want to encourage applicants who are working on history of the more distant past for which the labels L, G, B, or T might be less applicable. While we are Americanists, we are also especially welcoming of non-US queer and trans histories and any projects where queerness and transness intersect with race, nation, religion, age, ability, and other categories of analysis.

Jen Manion is Winkley Professor of History at Amherst College. Manion is author of Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (Penn, 2015) which received the Mary Kelley Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge, 2020), which won the British Association of Victorian Studies best book prize. Jen is co-editor with Nick Syrett of The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States (2 vols, forthcoming 2027), co-editor with Jim Downs of Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism (2004), and has published dozens of essays and reviews on U.S. histories of gender and sexuality, including a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine about historic injustices toward LGBTQ+ people.

Nick Syrett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a coeditor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, past president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and a past co-chair of the LGBTQ+ History Association. He is a coeditor of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (NYU Press, 2015, with Corinne T. Field) and the author of four books: The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (UNC Press, 2009); American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (UNC Press, 2016); An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton (Chicago, 2021); and The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (New Press, 2023). With Jen Manion he is currently coediting the two-volume Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, which will be published in 2027.

In this seminar, we will discuss work that takes disability, broadly defined, as its central theme and explores the ways in which it intersects with other markers of identity and lived experiences. We are especially interested in thinking about how disability history can be used to inform other areas of inquiry, such as medical, political, social, and cultural history and STS, as well as activist and educational work in our current moment. Although the co-facilitators are both US historians, we welcome work on any time period or geographic location. Work that draws directly on insights developed through disability and mad studies is especially welcomed.

Michael Rembis is Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history, disability history, mad people’s history, and the history of institutionalization and eugenics. His most recent book, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (OUP 2024), was shortlisted for the 2026 Cheiron Book Prize. He was the lead scholar on the NYCDOE project, Hidden Voices: Americans with Disabilities in United States History (2024). Rembis is a principle investigator on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Communities of Care Project (2023-2029).

Audra Jennings is Department Chair and Professor of History at Western Kentucky University (WKU), where she teaches historical methods, modern United States history, and the history of disability and medicine. She is the author of Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Conversations and writings about the relationships among nationalism, imperialism, transnationalism, and feminisms emerged in the 1980s and consolidated into a continuing and growing interdisciplinary field of study referred to as transnational feminist studies. The transnational historical approach differs from other feminist historiography in that gender inequalities and/or relationships are studied across national boundaries and among women operating in transnational networks that often reflect gendered and racialized relationships of power structured by global economic and political factors such as globalization and the legacies of imperialism.

This workshop seeks a variety of scholarly works-in-progress, including articles, chapters of monographs, biographies and autobiographies, and short documentaries, that cover transnational feminisms and activisms from the nineteenth century through the recent past. Works may be interdisciplinary but must have a historical perspective. Themes and topics may include, but are not limited to, collaborative transnational movements and linkages and global feminist organizations, as well as feminist activisms that focus on liberatory outcomes in rights, law, education, and medicine. Conversely, we also seek critical studies of transnational history that engage with tensions related to stigmatizing differences in religion, class, race and ethnicity, sexuality and reproduction, and health and disability.

Barbara Molony, Professor of Japanese History at Santa Clara University and Trustee of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, is also the past co-President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, past co-President of the CCWH, and past President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA. She specializes in women’s rights, transnational feminisms, and East Asian gender constructions and representations. She has published numerous articles and chapters on these topics and co-authored or co-edited Engendering Transnational Transgressions; Women’s Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism; Gender in Modern East Asia; and several other works. She is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Modern East Asian Gender History (forthcoming Jan 2027)

Febe Pamonag is a professor of history at Western Illinois University and Trustee of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. She is also the president of the Western Association of Women Historians. Her research interests include women’s social movements and transnational feminisms, history of food and disease, and imperial medicine and public health. She has published articles on these topics in several journals, including the Pacific Historical Review, U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, and Gender & History. Her book, Island of Pain, Island of Hope: A Social History of Leprosy in U.S.-Occupied Philippines, is forthcoming in December 2026 from the University of Illinois Press. Her work on Culion has been funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and an NEH Summer Stipend. Her current project examines the experiences of Allied women who were interned in the Philippines during World War II.

This seminar will focus on the place of material culture in the making of gender and sexuality. Work that addresses all moments in the lifecycle of things — design, production, distribution/transmission, representation, consumption and destruction — are welcome. Submissions are encouraged from all regions and periods as are those that emphasize the agency of people and of things.

Leora Auslander is the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History at the University of Chicago, where she is also the Founding Director, Affiliated Faculty, and member of the Board of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies and a member of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (2008) and Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (1996). She has also coedited a number of volumes: Objets et Fabrication du genre. Autumn 2014 issue of Clio: Femmes, Histoire, Genre (with Rebecca Rogers and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel); Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (2018, with Tara Zahra); and Domestic Diasporic: Jewish Experiences of Home (2026, with Federica Francesconi and Joshua Teplitsky). With Tom Holt she is currently editing Trans-Atlantic Crossings: Everyday Race in the 20th-Century Atlantic World.

Thavolia Glymph is Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Law, and Faculty Research Scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute at Duke University. She is co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 and the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, and articles and essays on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Glymph is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society; past president of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association; and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

This seminar, loosely titled, “Labor and Gender in Contested Terrains,” invites scholars from different disciplines invested in women and gendered histories across time, period, and place to think deeper about matters of labor, gender, and place. From labor union- centered approaches, to labor in a transnational context, to labors in places long ignored as relevant to labor markets (i.e. household, street vendors, caregivers, etc.), women have been central to the world of labor. Scholars, past and present, have approached the topic of labor/s from different vantage points with different sets of research questions employing multiple theoretical and conceptual lenses. While this seminar takes a broad approach to this theme, it seeks to foster an intellectual connection/environment among participants centering women’s labor/s, its gendered dimensions, and its central role in historical processes, particularly when examining contested, dynamic, fluid, and ever-changing places and spaces (whether worksites, households, communities, etc.). We welcome projects examining various forms of labor activism, labor relations, labor during moments of crisis, labor and migration—we especially invite scholars to view women’s lived experiences—past and present—from a gender and/or sexuality theoretical lens. Projects can cover any historical period and/or region, including projects examining gender and labor issues from a transnational approach (broadly defined), border regions/borderlands in any part of the world, and/or sites with communities that have experienced violence, cycles of migration, public health crises, histories of contestation, negotiation, and /or accommodation.

Dr. Sonia Hernández is the George T. & Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She specializes in the intersections of gender and labor in the U.S. – Mexico Borderlands. She has published in Spanish and English; her book, Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2014) received the Sara A. Whaley Book Prize (NWSA), the Liz Carpenter Award (TSHA), The Jim Parish Award (Webb County Heritage Foundation) and was a Weber-Clements (SMU-Clement’s Center) prize finalist. Her book, For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938 (University of Illinois Press, 2021) earned the Taft Labor History Book Prize (LAWCHA & Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations). She has published in the Journal of American History, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History, among other places. Her work has been funded by the Texas Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation. Hernández’s current book project reexamines the 1901 near lynching of the migrant cowboy Gregorio Cortez from a transnational, gender, and cross-class perspective. She is past co-chair of the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco, past president of the Alliance for Texas History, a current BERKS trustee, and is co-founder of the non-profit public history project Refusing to Forget which works to recover the history of anti-Mexican violence along the US-Mexico borderlands and responses to it as a way to raise the profile of a struggle for justice that continues to influence social relationships today.

In this seminar, we will discuss works that consider the many ways that ideas and experiences of gender and family intersected with empires across time and space. The issues that participants might focus on include: How did imperial projects influence expectations and experiences of gender and family in the metropole and across the empire? How did women and families enact those expectations and/or how did their lived experiences as imperial subjects redefine or force reassessments of those expectations? How was difference (race, religion, ethnicity) implicated in the imperial engagement with families? How does a focus on gender and/or family provoke a reconsideration of the field’s understanding of empire? Work on these or related issues in any imperial context is welcome.

Allyson M. Poska is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Mary Washington and the author of five books, including Maternal Judgments: Women, Children, and Smallpox Vaccination in Spain and its Empire (Forthcoming New Mexico, 2026); Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire (New Mexico, 2016), winner of the 2017 best book prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women; Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford, 2005), winner of the 2006 Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. She was coeditor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal from 2018 to 2024. She is currently the president of the Board of Trustees of the Journal of Women’s History.

Reproductive Justice (RJ) was coined by women of color activists in the early 1990s in the run up to the 1994 United Nations Cairo Conference on Population and Development. Since then, women of color activists like Loretta Ross and many others in the organization SisterSong have employed the term to expand demands for traditional reproductive rights like abortion and birth control to include the right to bear wanted children in healthy and thriving communities. Researchers of reproductive history and politics have also used the ideas associated with the RJ movement to frame their study of women’s experiences of reproductive control, pregnancy, and childbearing, as well as to consider human rights movements, unequal access to healthcare, and how racism negatively impacts health outcomes. Scholars from across the disciplines, including those working on transnational studies, are invited to participate in this seminar which will consider how a Reproductive Justice framework can help us to reflect on women’s and feminist activism, gender activism, healthcare rights/justice, antiracism, and/or social justice work across historical contexts and locations. Projects can cover any historical period and/or region.

Jennifer Nelson is a historian and a professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Redlands in California. Her dissertation became her first book, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (NYU Press 2003). Her second book, More Than Medicine: A History of the Women’s Health Movement (NYU Press 2016), extended her research on the feminist and women’s health movements in the United States. She also co-edited with Barbara Molony a volume on transnational feminism, Women’s Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism: Transnational Histories. Nelson has published articles in a variety of women’s history, medical history, and women’s studies journals about reproductive justice, women’s health, and social justice movements. She is currently researching the movements for and against legal abortion in Mexico. Her article, “Feminism, Human Rights, and Abortion Debates in Mexico,” appeared in the Journal of Women’s History in summer 2022. Her article with Steve Wuhs, “Human Rights and the Right to Life: Strategic Secularism in Mexico’s Partido Acción Nacional, 1990-2008,” was recently published in Gender & History.

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa, with a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on communication, culture, feminism, and reproductive politics. In addition to articles and book chapters, she has published two full-length books. She is the author of Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (University of Illinois Press, 2019), which explores how Americans’ conceptions of national security affect perceptions of motherhood, pregnancy, birth control, abortion, and reproductive justice. In 2020, the National Communication Association named it the winner of the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric/Public Address, and it was a finalist for the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. Fixmer-Oraiz also co-authored with Julia T. Wood the 13th edition of the widely used textbook Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. She served as second author with Wood for the 12th edition, and the two collaborated on a teaching guide for the book. Fixmer-Oraiz presents her research often at international, national, and regional conferences and has been invited to lecture at universities and colleges across the nation. In 2019, she served as visiting lecturer for the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Research at Bielefeld University in Germany. She serves on the editorial boards of Quarterly Journal of Speech, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs.