Call for Submissions

The Program Committee for the 65th Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America invites submissions for individual papers or sessions on any aspect of Renaissance studies or the era 1300–1700. The Committee especially welcomes submissions that cross disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that are discipline-specific. Sessions sponsored by our Associate Organizations and Discipline Representatives will make up approximately half of the program. The rest will consist of sessions and individual papers proposed by RSA members and selected by the Program Committee.

New for RSA 2019 Toronto: Twenty seminar-style sessions will be held on topics previously proposed by RSA members and selected by the Seminars Committee. Individuals may submit a paper proposal for consideration for one of these seminars. These papers will be pre-circulated among seminar participants and auditors before the conference. If your submission is not selected by the seminar organizers, it will be added to the general submissions pool for review by the full Program Committee. Seminar abstracts can be viewed on this page as well as from within the submissions site.

On the first evening of the Toronto conference (Sunday, 17 March 2019) there will be a time set aside, from 6:00–7:00 p.m., for one-hour workshops. RSA members are welcome to propose topics for workshops which they might lead, preferably as a team of scholars. The Program Committee will vet these proposals along with the other panel proposals. A workshop might address a pedagogical problem, or feature a career-oriented discussion, or present a series of mini-talks focusing on a primary source.

Because the RSA Annual Meeting is a large conference, with as many as fifty sessions meeting concurrently, we have developed guidelines over the years to facilitate the work of the Program Committee and help ensure that there will be an audience for every session. Please note that proposing a session or paper indicates your commitment to attend the conference. The Committee will not be able to accept every submission. Good papers will have to be turned away. To take a slot and then later withdraw is discourteous to colleagues who would have liked to present a paper. Once the rooms are scheduled and the a/v equipment ordered, no substitutions are possible.

Organizers may propose a series of linked sessions, up to a limit of five. However, the Program Committee prefers that series be limited to three, to facilitate scheduling them in a row. Sessions organized in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to no more than two per honoree.

The RSA does not guarantee that a full series of linked panels will be automatically accepted into the conference program. The Program Committee reserves the right to make choices among linked panels. If there is a special reason why all members of a series of linked panels must be present at the conference (e.g., this is a working group, with grant funding involved), the organizers are welcome to indicate this in their proposal, but the final selection of panels will still be at the discretion of the Program Committee.

Proposals for roundtables are also welcome, but the Committee asks that roundtables be stand-alone sessions in terms of their content. Roundtables that involve merely recapping the content of a series of sessions take up valuable space in the program that could be used to present other research and are not likely to be accepted.

All submissions to the RSA Annual Meeting must consist of new material that has not been published or presented in alternative venues or formats.