SERSAS 2024 (Southeast Regional Seminar in African Studies)

Visions of Change: New Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities in African Studies

African Studies Center

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, NC

March 8-9, 2024

Research in Africa and about Africa is constantly expanding, revising, and reimagining our corpus of knowledge about the continent. This year’s SERSAS conference theme solicits that new and ongoing research, demonstrating the creativity of faculty, graduate students, and staff at institutions across the region. We hope to engage with broad questions: What are the directions, potentialities, and limitations of African Studies? How might social scientists be thinking about this moment? How are humanists and scientists responding to African pasts, presents, and futures? How does our collective research amplify African strength and resilience through change, unity, resistance, and opportunity? Across the Southeastern US, Africanists from a wide array of disciplines are contributing to discussions in their fields and beyond, responding to needs and fostering conversations. SERSAS offers a singular opportunity to bring these conversations together.

The 2024 SERSAS theme invites paper and panel proposals that present new research, whether on new issues and recent events (like Covid, coups, and climate) or shedding new light on longstanding topics. We welcome proposals from all disciplines, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, geography, history, literary studies, public policy, music, theater, education, public health, art history, gender studies, sociology, African and foreign languages (in translation), and political science. Proposals should be aimed at a broad but specialized readership, as the conference is proudly multidisciplinary.

Deadline for paper, panel, and roundtable proposals: December 4, 2023

Send to: vrovine@unc.edu

Proposal instructions:

-Paper proposals: Presenter's name, institution, contact email, and paper title

200-250 word proposal, saved as a Word file and attached to your email (do not send links to cloud storage sites)

-Panel proposals: Chair of the panel submits all of the individual paper proposals saved in one Word document, with complete contact/institutional information and abstract for each panelist. Panels should not include more than four participants.

-Roundtable proposals: Chair of the roundtable submits the theme and designates the moderator along with all the participants’ contact/institutional information. Roundtables should not include more than five participants.