Call for proposals opens for flagship British Academy Conferences in 2023, as 2022 programme unveiled

The British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, has launched its call for proposals for British Academy Conferences to be held in 2023.

Funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Wellcome, the scheme presents an exceptional opportunity for UK-based researchers to convene a pivotal event of lasting significance in their field. The deadline for applications is 26 January 2022.

Each year, the scheme supports over 10 conferences, with 16 due to take place in 2022. Five of these form part of a new strand of British Academy/Wellcome Conferences, designed to foster discussion and debate on health and wellbeing-related themes. Alongside these, there will be 11 conferences funded by BEIS, four of which were due to take place in 2020-21 but were delayed due to the disruption caused by COVID-19.

The 2022 conference programme will tackle topics including technology’s influence on the future of work, the ways in which mosquito science and public health interventions intersect with politics, the role for art and culture in peacebuilding in post-conflict societies, and more.

Conferences will take place at the British Academy’s own premises in London, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, and at other venues in the UK or online. Full details about each of the 2022 conferences will be made available on the British Academy’s events homepage when bookings for each event open.

Many of these conferences subsequently lead to volumes in the Proceedings of the British Academy series which is published by the British Academy in partnership with Oxford University Press. In addition, one of the British Academy/Wellcome Conferences will be published as a special issue of the open-access Journal of the British Academy.

Professor Hamish Scott FBA, Vice President (Publishing and Conferences) of the British Academy, said:

“The British Academy Conference Scheme creates a space that makes possible new exchanges and networks across the humanities and social sciences. The British Academy is privileged to be able to stage so many important conferences across the UK thanks to the generous support of BEIS and Wellcome. These conferences frequently represent major milestones in research within fields from the humanities and social sciences that deserve greater recognition from the general public as well as the scholarly community.

“Conferences supported by the British Academy in recent years have led to many new volumes in our Proceedings of the British Academy series. Volumes published this year have explored a huge range of subjects – from experiences of the precipitous rise in homelessness in the UK in the last decade to the transnational histories of modern music and poetry throughout the world. Given its wide scope and positive impact, we encourage applicants to the 2023 conferences scheme to be ambitious in extending their own subjects as well as exploring new fields in an innovative and cross-disciplinary way.”

The 2022 programme of conferences includes:

• The literature and history of Anglo-Dutch relations, medieval to early modern
  6-8 January 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Ad Putter FBA (University of Bristol).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the University of Oxford.

• Building peace through culture: art, memory, landscape, time
  8-9 March 2022
  Lead convenor: Dr Lorna Dillon (University of Cambridge).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the University of Cambridge.

• The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines
  14-15 March 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Andy Whiten FBA (University of St Andrews).
  Funded by BEIS. Organised in partnership with the Royal Society and held at the Royal Society, London.

• Technology and the future of labour: historical and contemporary perspectives
  24-25 March 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Sascha O. Becker (Monash University/University of Warwick).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the British Academy, London.

• Public attitudes to benefits systems and their users: deservingness, stigmatisation and policy design
  31 March - 1 April 2022
  Lead convenor: Dr Tom O’Grady (University College London).
  Funded by Wellcome. Held at the British Academy, London.

• The gift of architecture: spaces of global socialism and their afterlives
  13-14 June 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Łukasz Stanek (University of Manchester).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the University of Manchester.

• Temperatures and temporalities: making climate histories
  16-18 June 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Simon Schaffer FBA (University of Cambridge).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the University of Cambridge.

• Towards “cohesive societies”: economics of identity, norms and narratives
  23-24 June 2022
  Lead convenor: Dr Fabio Tufano (University of Nottingham).
  Funded by Wellcome. Held at the British Academy, London.

• Constructing and contesting veterinary expertise: professionals, publics, and prospects
  5-7 July 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Pru Hobson-West (University of Nottingham).
  Funded by Wellcome. Held online.

• Licchavi heritage at the crossroads: multidisciplinary approaches to history and heritage in Nepal
  5-6 September 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Diwakar Acharya (University of Oxford).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the University of Oxford.

• An aesthetic enquiry of the Anthropocene
  September 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Steven Brown (Nottingham Trent University).
  Funded by Wellcome. Held at the British Academy, London.

• Diaspora remittance flows: restitution, culture and capital - ASAUK Biennial Conference 2022
  23-25 September 2022
  Lead convenor: Professor Ola Uduku (University of Liverpool).
  Funded by BEIS. Held online.

• The mosquito: across communities, politics and literatures
  15-16 September 2022
  Lead convenor: Dr Alice Christensen (University of Reading).
  Funded by Wellcome. Held at the British Academy, London.

• From colony to republic: the social history of law in 19th century Latin America
  21-22 October 2022
  Lead convenor: Dr Timo Schaefer (University of Oxford).
  Funded by BEIS. Held at the University of Oxford.

• Reading ancient societies; 200 years of decipherment
  3-4 November 2022
  Lead Convenor: Professor John Baines FBA (University of Oxford).
  Funded by BEIS. Held in partnership with the British Museum and held at the British Museum, London.