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), Potsdam (2024) and Rovaniemi (2025).

The next ISCH conference will be held in Paris on 10-12 September 2026. The theme of the conference is ‘Identities, circulations, migrations – a cultural history’. The deadline for abstracts is 31 January 2026. See the Call for Papers here.

For the past conferences, see here.

Other Conferences

Occasionally, ISCH co-organises conferences with the partner societies and institutions of the ISCH. Currently, ISCH is co-organising a conference with the Institute of Cultural History at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (abbreviated in Slovenian as ZRC SAZU), on ‘Prosopography – Approaches, Texts and Technologies’ on 24–25 September 2026 in Ljubljana. The submission deadline is 15 June 2026. See the Call for Papers here.

Are you interested in hosting an ISCH conference?

The ISCH welcomes proposals of conference venues from 2029 onwards. 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. The information package for ISCH conference organizers can be downloaded from this link.