The program committee for the next Feminism & Classics conference invites submission of abstracts, panels, roundtables, workshops, and innovative formats for structuring intellectual collaboration for presentation on May 7-10, 2026 in Cincinnati, OH and/or on a virtual conference platform. In addition to traditional research papers, the committee is eager to receive proposals related to pedagogy, mentorship, hidden labor, accessibility, creative work, and beyond. We are enthusiastic about participation from K–12 teachers and independent scholars. For those planning for the financial aspects of conference attendance, grant funding from the Loeb Classical Library has been earmarked to provide registration waivers and other subsidies to students, K–12 teachers, contingent faculty, and others requiring financial assistance.

Since this will be a fully hybrid conference, all participants will have the option to attend events in person, online, or in combination; proposals for both in-person and online presentations and events will be accepted. Thoughtful approaches to ensuring that in-person events are fully accessible to online participants are especially encouraged. In order to make online participation feasible for international attendees, we plan to keep time zones in mind for scheduling plenary events (e.g., keynote lectures held at midday local time). 

Conference Theme: COMMUNITIES

The organizing theme for this meeting of Feminism & Classics will be COMMUNITIES. (To see themes from past meetings of the conference, visit this webpage: https://www.wccclassics.org/fem-con) 

Communities formed around human connection and exclusion have long shaped social identities, enforcing or eliding differences in the pursuit of political, intellectual, artistic, or affective goals. Now, when such connections can be made at the speed of a computer click, even across vast distances, we are primed to reflect on the formation, development, and impact of communities in antiquity—how and why did ancient people come together to collaborate over shared goals or commiserate over shared grievances? How did factors like sex, gender, civic status, social and political capital, disenfranchisement, disability, or ethnos influence the formation of communities? What physical spaces housed ancient communities? What material traces did they leave behind? How did those experiencing exclusion from certain communities respond to being denied the benefits or privileges of membership? 

Community studies, as an interdisciplinary branch of sociological and anthropological investigations encompassing a number of frameworks and terminologies familiar to scholars in Classics (e.g., ethnography, social network analysis, liminality; see Blackshaw 2009), has contributed a great deal in recent decades to explorations of antiquity. Scholars in Classics have examined the dynamics of ancient communities based on e.g., political networks (Brock and Hodkinson 2000; Broekaert et al. 2020), religious practices (Collar 2013; Muñiz-Grijalvo and Tejedor, 2023), urban infrastructure (Simelius 2024), and wealth disparities (Carlà-Uhink et al. 2023), often situating the peoples of antiquity within networks that transcend governed entities and elite social ranks (e.g., Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015). 

Communities have a powerful influence on the unity or fragmentation of the people with whom they interact. Shared ideologies regularly generate extreme reactions, from empowerment and compassion to anger and fear. These affective conditions may precipitate actions upon other individuals or communities, resulting in increased division, hierarchical power differentials, and desires for resistance—considerations which have long been foundational to feminist scholarship in the Classics and beyond (see e.g., Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993, Weiss and Friedman 1995, McManus 1997). Aspirations toward equality in communities have long motivated feminist practitioners; importantly, historical failures of feminist movements to recognize intersectional oppressions and to acknowledge the contributions of women of color and trans women have inhibited the formation of accessible communities within both academic disciplines and political movements. The study of communities in antiquity will necessarily escape the temporal bounds of the ancient Mediterranean world, as our discipline is affected by the way that current members of the field interact with one another and by how much is at stake for scholarly identities when they are tied to or separated from institutional affiliations.

With these considerations in mind, we invite submissions to Feminism & Classics IX that reflect on the concept of communities, broadly conceived. In formulating their proposals for this conference, authors are invited to understand “feminism” through an intersectional perspective that embraces queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, and other theoretical approaches as relevant and important to the conference’s mission. Authors are welcome, but not at all required, to engage with theoretical approaches from the field of community studies. Possible topics and approaches to the theme of Communities include (but are by no means limited to):

• How social, political, and economic forces shaped ancient communities (and sub-communities) into hierarchical, oligarchic, aristocratic, democratic, and/or autocratic structures

• How access to education, texts, and convivial gatherings contributed to the construction of elite and exclusive communities of literacy in antiquity; how those denied access to such resources still built or maintained communities engaged with storytelling, narrative, and oral traditions

• Communities of care, whether in the ancient world or in our modern discipline (e.g., fostering mentorship, empathy, accessibility, and growth in academia, especially for junior and contingent teachers and scholars)

• Communities of choice, as aligned with or divergent from communities of birth

• Gendered communities, with consideration of the ways in which communities form or exclude based on social perceptions and constructions of gender

• Community building(s), including both the action of forming communities and the physical spaces that may house those communities

• The spaces and tools of community: how sites, objects, and interactions between them constructed or affected communities

• Communities and social identity, with consideration of in-group/out-group identities, or how/whether individuals fit into certain communities

• Strategies for community-building within and beyond the discipline, including outreach or engagement with the public, collaboration between academia and other spheres, and networks of communal pedagogy

Submission Instructions:

1. Abstracts and proposals should be sent to feminism.classics@gmail.com by September 12, 2025 as anonymized attachments in Word or PDF format. Please remove all personally identifying information from the attached document, including from the file name. 

2. Individual abstracts should be no more than 350 words (excluding bibliography) and should reflect plans for oral delivery of a paper lasting maximum 15 minutes. Please indicate at the top of your abstract whether you intend to deliver the paper in person or online.

3. Proposals (for panels, roundtables, workshops, or other innovative modes of delivery) should be no more than 350 words (excluding bibliography; individual abstracts for proposed panels can each be up to 350 words in addition). 

   Please indicate at the top of the proposal document whether you plan for your event to last 60, 90, or 120 minutes; the number of speakers; and whether each speaker will attend in person or online. Hybrid panels (with some in-person and some online participants) are absolutely acceptable. 

   If you are proposing an innovative mode of delivery, please explain clearly what your plans are and how you will ensure accessibility for online participants.

Works Cited

Blackshaw, Tony. 2009. Key Concepts in Community Studies. SAGE.

Brock, Roger and Stephen Hodkinson (ed.). 2000. Alternatives to Athens: varieties of political organization and community in ancient Greece. Oxford University Press.

Broekaert, Wim, Elena Köstner, and Christian Rollinger (eds.). 2020. The Ties that Bind: Ancient Politics and Network Research. Journal of Historical Network Research 4. Luxembourg. 

Carlà-Uhink, Filippo, Lucia Cecchet, and Carlos Machado (eds.). 2023. Poverty in Ancient Greece and Rome: Realities and Discourses. Routledge. 

Collar, Anna. 2013. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas. Cambridge University Press.

McManus, Barbara. 1997. Classics and Feminism: Gendering the Classics. The Impact of Feminism on the Arts and Sciences. Twayne. 

Muñiz-Grijalvo, Elena and Alberto del Campo Tejedor (ed.). 2023. Processions and the construction of communities in antiquity: history and comparative perspectives. Routledge.

Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin and Amy Richlin. 1993. Feminist Theory and the Classics. Routledge.

Simelius, Samuli. 2024. “Networks of Inequality: Access to Water in Roman Pompeii.” Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 7: 54–74. 

Taylor, Claire and Kostas Vlassopoulos. 2015. Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford University Press. 

Weiss, Penny A., and Marilyn Friedman. 1995. Feminism and Community. Temple University Press.