Deerfield-Wellesley Symposium, a one-day symposium sponsored by Historic Deerfield, Inc. and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College.

Date: Saturday, March 7, 2026

CFP Deadline: January 9, 2026

Location: Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, MA

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.

We are interested in a broad range of papers that address how material things complicate our sense of what was local and what was global about the region now called New England, including:

• How do objects, from tools to trade goods, reveal patterns of circulation within and beyond this region?
• How can material things challenge our understanding of distance and proximity?
• How did the creation and exchange of objects both useful and decorative shape the creation of particular New England identities?
• How was the trade of objects local and global entwined with concepts of refinement, social class, and exclusion?
• What methods can scholars and Native knowledge keepers offer to better understand items as they moved in and out of Indigenous and settler communities over time?
• How can objects reveal histories of cultural plurality, transculturation, and survivance?
• How does the movement of objects suggest ways that urban makers and markets mutually constituted those objects’ meanings with their rural counterparts?
• Did New Englanders’ gendering of particular objects, and consumption generally, reflect or diverge from related notions held elsewhere?
• How do networks of exchange crystallize into unique hybrid forms?
• How can we find all these narratives in not only form and function, but also the material substance of these objects?
• And how do responses to these questions complicate the very definition of “New England”?

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations. Speakers invited to present will receive overnight accommodation and dinner on Friday, March 6 and lunch on Saturday, March 7. We can also offer some reimbursement of travel expenses, with receipts, and a modest honorarium.

Presenters will be expected to participate fully in the in-person symposium program on site. Please email, as one document, a 250-word proposal and a c.v. not longer than two pages to Erika Gasser at egasser@historic-deerfield.org. Proposals should include the title of the paper and the presenter’s name and title/affiliations, if any. The deadline for submissions is January 9, 2026; the selection committee will respond to submitters in February.