Professor Ralph Bauer Hosts Society of Early Americanists 2023 Biennial Conference at University of Maryland

The conference brought more than 300 scholars of the early Americas to campus and showcased the growth and diversification of the field.

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Ralph Bauer hosted the 13th Biennial Conference of the Society of Early Americanists at the University of Maryland from June 8 to June 11, 2023. The conference brought more than 300 scholars of the early Americas to campus to attend and participate in panels, workshops and keynote presentations.

The conference did “a brilliant job of threading some very important conversations throughout the program,” said co-director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies Karen Nelson, who helped organize conference logistics.

Apart from featuring regular panels and keynotes, the program also included several “panel streams,” which were groups of 3 to 4 panels addressing the same theme. By bringing in scholars from fields such as Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, Caribbean studies and African American studies, these panel streams were important in showcasing the evolution of the field of early American studies, said Bauer, who is the current president of the Society of Early Americanists.

While the panel streams continued a trend from earlier conferences, this year’s biennial was the first to feature a panel stream dedicated to colonial Latin America. In addition, one of the panel streams, the “History of the Book in the Early Americas,” led to the first hands-on workshops in the history of the conference through a collaboration with BookLab, the Department of English’s makerspace.

Early American studies “used to be a field that was thought of as the study of colonial New England, especially Puritans and so forth, the Atlantic Seaboard and eastern North America, but it’s really changed in focus quite a bit now,” Bauer said. “I think that the field has grown and expanded and diversified in ways that were reflected in the conference this time.”