Spring 2026 Events

The Global and the Local: Power, Accommodation, and Resistance

Fri, Mar 13, 2026; 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. EDT

Cabral Center at the O’Bryant African American Institute, 40 Leon Street Boston, MA 02115 (Map to O’Bryant Institute and Cabral Center here)

The Northeastern History Graduate Student Association invites submissions for a conference exploring the connection between local and the global. Successful submissions will engage with the granular—individual lives, singular events, particular places, or overlooked sources—while moving outward to address larger structures and processes of power, accommodation, and resistance, broadly defined. Further macro-level processes that we are interested in include empire, migration, capitalism, the environment, gender, law, and culture.

The conference’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Elisabeth Leake, an award-winning historian and the Lee E. Dirks Professor in Diplomatic History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her latest book, The Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (2022), was the winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Robert H. Ferrell Prize. It uses local, regional, and international histories to tell an innovative, global story of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979-89.

Examples that engage the conference’s central focus on power, accommodation, and resistance include (but are not limited to):

• Migration stories that challenge national or transnational frameworks
• Microhistories of political resistance, collaboration, or cultural exchange
• Studies of archives, objects, and material traces that unsettle the binary between the local and the global
• Legal disputes and cases that open windows into broader global structures
• Environmental microhistories with a global perspective
• Transformations in the notion of gender in response to globalized media and cultural flows
• Microhistories of borderlands, contact zones, and peripheries that showcase cross-cultural encounters and asymmetrical power relations
• Networks of individuals, ideas, and/or movements that shed light on the global nature of local histories.

We welcome submissions from historians and scholars in related disciplines—including anthropology, sociology, literary studies, geography, and others—who engage with microhistorical approaches to address global questions. We also welcome research from public history and the digital humanities, as well as other interdisciplinary perspectives and experimental methods.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief bio (100–150 words) by January 5th, 2026 to this Google Form. Accepted participants will be notified by January 26th, 2026, and will be required to submit full papers by February 23rd, 2026. The conference will take place at Northeastern University’s Boston campus on March 13, 2026. For further questions please contact the Northeastern HGSA at [email protected].