Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (founded in 1976) is pleased to announce the subject of its 2026 gathering, Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come, to be held June 26–27, 2026.

In June 2026, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. As this year’s seminar looks forward to its own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.

The 2026 seminar will feature a keynote address by Holly Jackson, Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and author of American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation. Programming for the Seminar will be in partnership with the Communal Studies Association as well as the Chicopee, Massachusetts, house museum dedicated to Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1888), second only in 19th-century popularity to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

We seek proposals for papers that address how New Englanders have envisioned new futures during moments of crisis or uncertainty. How did people try to anticipate what the future held or if there was a future at all? How did imagining the future shape the present?

Some possible topics might include:

• Imagined futures as depicted in folk arts, literature, commercial and fine arts, material culture, and other forms of expression
• 19th-century Millennialism such as Millerites, 2nd Great Awakening, etc.
• Utopian and Planned Communities such as Shakers, Dorrelites, Brook Farm, Fruitlands, Renaissance Community; Round Hill School, etc.
• Afrofuturisms
• Technological visions of the future such as Franklin stove, Rumford roaster, microwave, and other transformations of home life
• Landscape/environmental such as Frederick Law Olmsted, City Beautiful Movement, urban renewal, etc.
• Worlds of tomorrow, world’s fairs, and the future as spectacle
• Fortunetelling and prognostication
• Forecasting (weather events, but also matters of conservation and environmental stewardship as they have been approached across New England)

The annual Dublin Seminar is a meeting place where scholars of all kinds—academics, students, museum and library professionals, artisans and craftspeople, educators, preservationists, and committed avocational researchers—join in deep conversation around a focused theme in New England history, pooling their knowledge and exchanging ideas, sources, and methods in a thought-provoking forum.

The Seminar encourages papers grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and original research, particularly material and visual culture, manuscripts, government and business records, the public press, oral histories, and public history practice or advocacy. All papers presented should be available for publication in the Seminar’s Proceedings if invited.

The Seminar will convene in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on June 26–27. This will be a hybrid program, with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees (with recordings available to registrants for one month after the Seminar). Speakers will present onsite at Historic Deerfield, Inc.

Dublin Seminar presenters are invited to publish in the Seminar’s Proceedings and are expected to submit their papers (approximately 7,000 words) for consideration to the Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar by September 1, 2026. The scholarship proposed for presentation should be unpublished and available for inclusion in this volume to be published about twenty months after the conference.

To submit a proposal, please send (as a single email attachment, in MS Word or as a PDF, labeled LASTNAME.DubSem2026) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and the archival, material, or visual sources on which it is grounded, followed by a one-page vita or biography. Email your proposal to dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org.

Deadline: Noon EST, Monday, January 26, 2026

For questions, please contact Nan Wolverton at nwolverton@mwa.org or Christian Goodwillie at cgoodwil@hamilton.edu.