We are looking for individual contributions about the history of elites understood in a wide sense. We also look for participants willing to organize sessions of four to five participants around a particular topic. Each session must include papers from several countries, to achieve a truly international, comparative discussion. Sessions composed around thematic, theoretical or conceptual questions are preferred to geographical or epoch-related sessions, as they favour a comparative point of view. We also appreciate a global angle, as we hope to make participants from different parts of the world to work together on similar problems.

We are particularly keen on introducing new topics to our discussions. These include military elites, clerical elites, elites and gender, elite spirituality, elites and religion, transnational and diaspora elites, elite housing, intellectual and art elites, lost elites and declining elite status, and the reproduction of elites. The network particularly welcomes sessions dealing with theoretical and methodological approaches to the history of elites.

Session organizers can invite individual participants to join their session. Nevertheless, for practical reasons the final organization of sessions and acceptance of papers to the conference rests with the network chairs.

We are also looking for suggestions about new ways of arranging the discussions. In the Ghent 2010 conference we successfully introduced a “workshop” session. A new workshop, concentrating on a particular concept or theory might be a possibility for the Glasgow 2012 conference, but we also encourage the organization of “meet the author” style of session, and other possibilities.