WESTERN SOCIETY FOR FRENCH HISTORY
CALL FOR PAPERS FOR 2010 CONFERENCE

The Thirty-Eighth Annual WSFH conference will be held at the Hilton Lafayette in Lafayette, Louisiana, October 21-23, 2010, and will be hosted by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  The chair of the local arrangements committee is Jordan Kellman (kellman@louisiana.edu).  Lafayette is in the heart of Acadiana, the oldest and last active native francophone community in the United States.  A reception will be held on Friday, October 22 on the Campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and optional outings to the Atchafalaya Basin cypress swamp and local venues with Cajun cuisine and music will be organized.

The program committee will make every effort to combine single papers into coherent panels, but we encourage individuals to organize complete panels composed of two or (preferably) three papers, with a chair and commentator.  We can assist panel organizers to identify chairs and commentators.

Panels may address any topic of interest to our scholarly community, but the program committee especially encourages panels that address issues and topics of significance to French history across a wide chronological span, from medieval to contemporary periods.  We would also welcome panels that treat topics related to France and the Americas, in honor of the rich cultural heritage and history of the conference’s setting, and in the wake of the recent tragedy in Haiti.

The WSFH encourages interdisciplinary scholarship and the participation of advanced graduate students by awarding prizes for outstanding papers presented at the conference in the following areas: 

• the best interdisciplinary paper;
• the best paper presented by a graduate student on French history after 1800;  
• the best paper presented by a graduate student on the history of France and / or connections between France and the wider world before 1800.

Please do not send proposals for papers that have already been presented or that are scheduled for presentation at other conferences, or that have already been published.  All conference participants must be WSFH members in good standing at the time of the conference.

Please send proposals for panels or individual papers as MS-Word attachments to Diane Margolf, WSFH President and chair of the program committee (Diane.Margolf@colostate.edu).  Proposals should include the following items, integrated into one file:  an abstract (no more than 1 page) for each paper; a CV (no more than 1 page) for each presenter, including contact information; and the proposed chair’s and commentator’s name, affiliation, and email address. 

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS:  15 APRIL 2010