CFP - Society of Architectural Historians 2027 Conference

[Matthew Heins]

There's a CFP for the Society of Architectural Historians Conference, taking place in Chicago in April 2027. As usual, there are lots of fascinating sessions, and it should be a wonderful conference.

Chicago ("Sweet Home Chicago," in the words of the famous blues song) is a great city to visit, and by mid-April all the snow and ice have usually melted :-)

The main conference website is https://sah.org/conferences/chicago-2027/.

The CFP, along with the submittal link, is at https://sah.org/conferences/chicago-2027/call-for-papers-2027-annual-international-conference/. It's also copied below.

For the full descriptions of all the sessions, see the pdf at https://sah.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/SAH-2027-Chicago-Call-for-Papers.pdf.

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Society of Architectural Historians 2027 Annual International Conference
April 14–18 in Chicago, Illinois

Conference Chair: Swati Chattopadhyay, SAH Vice President, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 80th Annual International Conference in Chicago, Illinois, April 14–18, 2027. Please submit an abstract no later than 11:59 p.m. CDT on June 8, 2026, to one of the 54 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks or the Open Sessions for the Chicago conference. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; scholars in related fields; and members of SAH chapters, Affiliate Groups and partner organizations.

Thematic sessions and Graduate Student Lightning Talks (GSLT) are listed below. The session selection committee reviewed the submitted proposals and composed a program that represents a range of time periods and will be illustrative of wide regional distribution. If your research topic is not a good fit for one of the thematic sessions, please submit your abstract to the Open Sessions; Open Sessions are available for those whose research topic does not match any of the thematic sessions. Please note that those submitting papers for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks must be graduate students at the time the talk is being delivered (April 14– 18, 2027). Instructions and deadlines for submitting to thematic sessions, GSLT and Open Sessions are the same.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Confirmed 2027 Session Chairs are not eligible to submit to the Call for Papers
2. Abstracts must be under 300 words.
3. The title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
4. Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
5. Only one abstract per conference by an author or co-author may be submitted.
6. A maximum of three (3) authors per abstract will be accepted.
7. Please attach a two-page CV in PDF format.

Abstracts should define the subject and summarize the argument to be presented in the proposed paper. The content of that paper should be the product of well-documented original research that is primarily analytical and interpretive, rather than descriptive in nature. Papers cannot have been previously published or presented in public except to a small, local audience (under 100 people). All abstracts will be held in confidence during the review and selection process, and only the Session Chair and Conference Chair will have access to them.

All Session Chairs have the prerogative to recommend changes to the abstract to ensure it addresses the session theme, and to suggest editorial revisions to a paper in order to make it satisfy session guidelines. It is the responsibility of the Session Chairs to inform Speakers of those guidelines, as well as of the general expectations for participation in the session and the annual conference. Session Chairs reserve the right to withhold a paper from the program if the author has not complied with those guidelines.

Please Note: Each Speaker and Session Chair is expected to fund their own travel and expenses to Chicago, Illinois. SAH has a limited number of conference fellowships for which Speakers and Session Chairs may apply. However, SAH’s funding is not sufficient to support the expenses of all Speakers and Session Chairs. Speakers and Session Chairs must register and establish membership in SAH for the 2027 conference by September 30, 2026, and are required to pay the non-refundable conference registration fee as a show of their commitment.

List of Paper Sessions

2027 Sessions

• American Architectural Legacies Down Under
• Architectural Books, Libraries, and Circulation in the Americas
• Architectural History and its Images
• Architecture in Service to Nationalism: Design Politics and Preservation of Civic Buildings
• Architecture of “Friendship” in Afro-Asian World Making
• Architectures of the Cooperative Movement
• Archival Reenactment: Performing Architectural Histories
• Archiving Urban-Nature Practices: Visual Methodologies Beyond the Modern Divide
• Beyond the Canon: Archival Histories of Women Architects in Latin America
• Bicentennial Imaginaries: Myth Making and the Built Environment
• Collaboration in Architectural History
• Colonial Incursions into Religious Domains in Muslim Lands
• Constructed Meaning: Histories of Architecture and Technology
• Contesting Citizenship: Architecture Between Democracy and Authoritarianism
• Cooling the Tropical Built Environment: Discomfort, Decolonization, and Decarbonization
• Cultural History of the 2008 Housing Crisis
• Designing the Node: Architectures of 20th-Century Urban Infrastructure
• Designing Water: Landscape, Infrastructure, and Urban Form
• Displacing the Drafting Board: Women, Labor, and the Construction Site
• Drying Landscapes and Postcolonial Nation-Building
• Ecologies of Modernity: Architecture and Environmental Politics in the Middle East
• Eroding Edges: Coastal Architecture and the Politics of Loss
• Evidence of Architecture of the Atlantic World?
• Global Regionalism
• Graduate Student Lightning Talks
• History of Architecture since “End of History”: Neoliberalism and the Postcolonial Imperative
• Imperial Boomerang: Intertwined Histories of Fascism and Colonialism
• Indigenous Agents as Creators of Space Across the Iberian Worlds (1400-1900)
• Indigenous Knowledge, Architecture and Resistance in the Arctic
• Interior Design as Intersection: Expanding Narratives and Historiographies
• Learning from Socialism
• Micro-Global Histories of Architecture and the Built Environment
• Modes of Rebuilding: Reorienting Architecture in Modern China
• On Oil: Transnational Histories of Venezuelan Built Environment and Modernization
• Open Session
• Premodern Paradigms: Buildings as Exemplars from Antiquity – 1750
• Professional Non-Architect Women’s Contribution to Housing Design
• Rethinking Byzantine Urbanism
• Rethinking the Nature in the City
• Secure Cities: Architecture and the Production of Permanent Insecurity
• Speculative Worlds: Architectural History Through Science Fiction
• Updated 04/08/2026
• Surrogate Sites: Architecture, Landscape, and Environmental Substitution Design
• Taking Care: Architectural Dimensions of Maintenance
• The Architecture of Emotion: Trauma, Shame, and the Spatial Life of Memory
• The Architecture of Salt
• The Architectures and Ideologies of Neo-Traditionalism
• The Majority City: Reclaiming Latin America’s Authorship
• The Zone: Architecture in the Margins of Global Finance
• Toward a Particulate History of Architecture
• Traffic: Histories of Motion, Matter, and Connection
• Transnational Dialogues in Adaptive Reuse and Industrial Heritage
• Untold Histories of Cross-border Architecture in Latin America
• What Is Indigenous Architecture? Defining a Field of Study
• What Would Community-Engaged Architectural History Look Like?
• Where Does the Rubble Go? The Afterlives of Architectural Debris
• Zootechnical Architecture