We invite you to take part in the Culture panels of the 37th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 1-4, 2012, in Vancouver. For more information on the meeting as well as the call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website: www.ssha.org.

The deadline for paper and/or panel submissions is March 1, 2012.

The members of the Social Science History Association share a common interest in interdisciplinary and systematic approaches to historical research, and many of us find the SSHA one of the most stimulating conferences that we attend. The thematic topic of the 2012 annual meeting is "Histories of Capitalism."

While we welcome panels and papers on any topic of interest to scholars of culture and history, we are particularly soliciting papers on the following themes, drawn from member suggestions:

1. Economic culture and the civil sphere
2. Monetarization of non-market arenas (e.g., nature, heritage, public goods)
3. Instrumentalization of culture (e.g., advertising, commodification, business methods applied to various fields)
4. Interpreting the economy (e.g., in journalism)
5. Current economic crisis and reactions to it (e.g., Occupy Wall Street)
6. Shaping of social processes through national and international funding structures

The Culture network will be able to host at least seven panels in 2012 and will also be able to place additional papers through co-sponsorship with other networks (for example, with History/Methods, Politics, Macro-Historical Change, State-Society, Historical Geography, Race, Urban, etc.).

The SSHA requests that submissions be made by means of its web conference management system. Paper title, brief abstract, and contact information should be submitted on the site www.ssha.org, where the general SSHA 2012 call for papers is also available. (If you haven’t used the system previously you will need to create an account, which is a very simple process.) Here is the direct link for submissions: http://conference.ssha.org/

The online system is now accepting submissions. If you have any questions, please contact any of the Culture co-chairs (Stefan Bargheer sbargheer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de; Emily Barman eabarman@bu.edu; or Victoria Johnson vjohnsn@umich.edu).

NOTE: There is an SSHA rule concerning book sessions. For a book session to proceed, the author (or at least one of multiple authors) MUST be present. Proposals for book sessions should only be submitted if there is high confidence that the author will be able to travel to the conference.

SSHA has set up a mechanism for networks to share papers, so even if you have a solo paper, send the idea along. It is possible and useful to identify a paper not only by the Culture network, but also by some other co-sponsoring networks. Co-sponsored panels and papers are encouraged by the SSHA Program Committee as a means of broadening the visibility of the various networks.

Please use the SSHA submission site – http://conference.ssha.org/

Sincerely,

Stefan Bargheer, Emily Barman, and Victoria Johnson