June 11 - June 13, 2027
Annual Conference of the Historians of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS) at the Akademie für Politische Bildung, Tutzing | Conveners: Raphael Rössel (GHI Washington) and Jana Dunz-Keck (GHI Washington)
Call for Papers
In the 2020s, the United States has witnessed cases of violence against politicians, activists and political institutions with a seemingly ever rising frequency. At the same time, political scientist Robert Pape has described the United States as entering an “era of violent populism”—a period in which political leaders increasingly harness and perform violence as a central mode of asserting power. Yet violence in politics and violence against politicians is hardly new for a country that lost four presidents and dozens of federal officials to assassinations. Violence has shaped the American experience and U.S. social dynamics, for instance, as an integral part of slavery, the displacement of indigenous people, domestic terrorism, lynching and prevalent (mass) shootings—to list only a few examples. Likewise, violence runs through the cultural imagination of the nation—from frontier mythology to Westerns, from heroic war narratives to the glorification of retribution in political discourse.
In light of ongoing debates about political, but also racial, gender-based and other forms of violence in the United States, the 2027 GAAS Historians’ Meeting invites papers that revisit the extensive scholarship on violence in the U.S. and interrogate the historical roots and evolving expressions of violence across American life. This also means that we intend to analyze which types of behavior were classed and perceived as “violent” and as legitimate or illegitimate during which specific historical moments. As historians, we aim to debate trajectories of violence within U.S. society and, while doing so, also revisit the separation of violence during war and during peacetime. Analytically, we aim to debate if and how more recent concepts like Rob Nixon’s slow violence, coined with reference to the effects of environmental degradation and climate change, can invigorate how historians think about violence.
At the same time, we welcome contributions from various disciplines and fields such as political science, sociology, literary and cultural studies, art history, and anthropology to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue around the theme. We are particularly interested in discussing methodological questions that sit at the intersection of various disciplines. In what ways have media technologies shaped the perception, but also the witnessing, documentation, and circulation of violence? What is the relationship between entertainment, spectacle, and the normalization of violence in American culture?
For this year’s annual meeting of the GAAS’s historians, we invite papers that critically engage with social and political histories of violence in U.S. history. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Histories of Violence in Politics (e.g., rhetorical references to violence in political discourse, violence in the political process, violence against politicians)
- Histories of Wartime Violence (specifically in its relation to violence during peacetime)
- Histories of Environmental Change and Violence
- The relation of violence to social hierarchies, e.g., as it pertains to gender, race, dis/ability, and other categories
- Histories of Everyday Violence (e.g., domestic violence/intimate partner violence, violent initiations, violence in care facilities)
Please send an abstract for your paper (500 words max.) and a short bio (150 words max.) as one PDF file to the conference organizers by October 31, 2026 using the submission portal. You will be notified by December 1, 2026.