Winter Symposium
The 2026 HOTCUS Winter Symposium, The American Nation in the Twentieth Century: The Declaration of Independence at 250, will be held at the University of Liverpool on 27 February 2026.
We invite individual paper and panel contributions that consider how Americans have drawn upon the Declaration of Independence to articulate new understandings of belonging, sovereignty, and democracy, and how these debates have shaped the historical imagination in or about the twentieth-century United States.
Submission requirements: 250-word abstract and a one-page CV in a single document. Panels should be collated and include a brief overview as well as the individual abstracts and CVs. Submissions should be sent to events.hotcus@gmail.com by Wednesday 10 December 2025.
Previous Winter Symposiums
2025: The United States and World War II: Impacts and Legacies at Home and Abroad (University of Gloucestershire, 21 February 2024)
2024: The uses and abuses of ‘neoliberalism’ in modern US history (University College London, 16 February 2024)
2023: 1963: A Watershed Year? (Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 24 February 2023)
2022: The Manhattan Project Turns 80: Reflections on the Nuclear Age (Liverpool John Moores University, 12 March 2022)
2020: Food, Health, and Welfare in U.S. History (Keele University, 22 February 2020)
2019: “Nuclear States”: Science, Technology, and American Society in the Atomic Age (University of Lincoln, 16 February 2019)
2018: The State of the State: What is American Political History Now? (University of Nottingham, 17 February 2018)
2017: War and Conflict in Twentieth-Century American Society and Culture (Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library, 18 February 2017)
2016: “Ordinary People”: Grassroots Organizing and Protest Movements in Twentieth Century America (University of Dundee, 13 February 2016)
2015: Memory and History in the Twentieth-Century United States (Canterbury Christ Church University, 21 February 2015)
2014: Dixie’s Great War: The American South and World War I (Portsmouth University, 28 February 2014)
2013: Religion and Politics in the United States (King’s College London, 22 February 2013)
2012: Punishment in the American Century (University of Southampton, 3 February 2012)
2011: Immigration and the Federal Government (University of Sunderland, 25 February 2011)
2010: American Music and Popular Culture (University of Reading, 4 March 2010)
2009: Beyond Otherness: The Politics of Sexuality in the Twentieth Century United States (University of Sheffield, 27 February 2009)