The Annual Conference

The International Society for Cultural History hosts every year an academic conference for everyone interested in cultural history. Participants have to be members of the ISCH.

The idea for the society was first discussed in 2007 at the Varieties of Cultural History Conference in Aberdeen, Scotland. The Inaugural Conference was then in 2008 in Ghent, Belgium. Since then, the ISCH gathered in Brisbane, Australia (2009), Turku, Finland (2010), Oslo, Norway (2011), Lunéville, France (2012), Istanbul, Turkey (2013), Johannesburg, South Africa (2014), Bucharest, Romania (2015), Trieste, Italy (2016), Umeå, Sweden (2017), New York City, USA (2018), and in Tallinn, Estonia (2019). The conference planned for Mainz in 2020 was postponed and then went online in limited scale in summer 2021. After a two-year pause, the ISCH held a conferences in presence as well as online in Verona (2022), Singapore (2023) and Potsdam (2024).

The 2025 conference will be held in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 16.-19. June. Call for Panels is open until 15 November. Call for individual papers will open later.

For the past conferences, see here.

The next ISCH conference will be held in Rovaniemi (Finland), on 16.–19. June 2025, with the theme ‘Human/Nature – Entanglements in Cultural History’. Call for Panels is open until 15 November (click here). Call for individual papers will open later.

Are you interested in hosting an ISCH conference?

The ISCH always welcomes proposals of conference venues for the coming years. The annual ISCH conferences are multi-day events that attract 100-200 cultural historians from all over the world. The date and the topic of the ISCH conferences are freely negotiable with the ISCH committee, and the theme of any conference can be adapted to the research interests of the organizer. If you and your institution might be interested in this opportunity in the next few years, feel free to express your interest to the ISCH secretary at isch@culthist.net at any time.