Deerfield-Wellesley Symposium 2026, “The Local and the Global in New England”

IMAGE: Punch bowl, China, 1788-1789. Ceramic: hard paste porcelain, overglaze polychrome enamels, gilding. Gift of Henry N. Flynt and Helen Geier Flynt, HD 2772.

Deerfield-Wellesley Symposium 2026, “The Local and the Global in New England”

A free, one-day symposium sponsored by Historic Deerfield, Inc. and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College, presented both virtually via Zoom and in-person in the Deerfield Community Center at Historic Deerfield.

New England has always been a place characterized by movement, exchange, and connectivity. People, animals, objects, and ideas traversed the land and waterways long before European colonization, which in turn transformed trade, technology, migration, and warfare in the region.

This one-day symposium aims to gather scholars and researchers who explore the nature of local, regional, and global networks in New England from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. By bringing together a diverse range of scholars from multiple disciplines, we hope to elucidate how objects—from fine and decorative arts, to buildings, to everyday pieces of material culture—linked New England localities to far-flung makers and markets.

The Deerfield/Wellesley Symposium is an annual, day-long symposium exploring a variety of topics in American art and history. The symposium is sponsored by Historic Deerfield, Inc. and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College. The conference, which alternates locations each year between Deerfield and Wellesley, is free and open to the public. The symposium is funded in part by an endowment from the Barra Foundation.

This is a hybrid event. The symposium will be hosted at Historic Deerfield and simultaneously accessible via Zoom.

Registration coming soon.