Departing from tradition, this year’s annual conference has no specific theme, and welcomes proposals, both of complete panels (two or three papers with a chair and/or commentator) and of individual papers, on all topics related to the history and culture of colonial and early national America and the Atlantic world. Submissions are welcome from scholars at all levels, from senior scholars to those at an early stage in postgraduate study, and from those working in literary and cultural studies, historical geography and sociology, and visual studies, as well as from historians.

The following events have been confirmed:
*Keynote address by Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, University of Virginia, and Harmsworth Visiting Professor of History, Oxford
*”Book Club” session with Sarah Knott, Indiana University, on her new monograph, Sensibility and the American Revolution (forthcoming from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture);
*Roundtable discussion on “Gender, Poverty, and Charity in the Colonial and Antebellum South,” centring on Ben Marsh (University of Stirling)’s Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (University of Georgia Press, 2007; winner of the Malcolm and Muriel Barrow Bell Award) and Tim Lockley (University of Warwick)’s Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (University Press of Florida, 2007)
*Dedicated session for postgraduate paper presenters, and luncheon meeting to discuss creation of a network of postgraduates working in early American studies