Call for Papers

Wars with Words: Conflict, Voice, and Legacy

Call for Papers — Association of Ancient Historians Annual Meeting

The Association of Ancient Historians invites paper proposals for its annual meeting, hosted from April 1-3 on the campus of Loyola University Chicago. This year’s theme is "Wars with Words: Conflict, Voice, and Legacy." From the rhetoric of the battlefield to the silences of the archive, from law codes to lesson plans, words have always been instruments of both conflict and continuity in the ancient world, and in how we study it today.

This year’s theme invites scholars to consider how words—spoken, written, inscribed, taught, withheld, or contradicted by the material record—shaped ancient societies and continue to shape our understanding of them. We welcome papers addressing any aspect of the ancient world, broadly construed across geography and chronology, that engage with one or more of the conference’s central threads:

•   Conflict: war, violence, rhetoric, debate, and the discourse of power

•   Voice: whose words survive, whose are lost, and how we recover or interpret them

•   Legacy: how ancient words, ideas, and events continue to inform (or distort) modern thought, policy, and pedagogy

This year’s program will be organized around six featured panels, described below. Prospective presenters are encouraged to submit to the panel that best fits their work; general submissions are also welcome and will be slotted into additional sessions as needed. Prospective presenters should plan to give papers of 15-20 minutes. We invite abstracts of no more than 500 words, to be submitted to aahmeeting2027@gmail.com by December 11th, 2026. All sessions are plenary and in-person. Presenters must be current members of the AAH; if you are not already a member, please register here. 

Panel 1: Conflict and Combat: Ancient Warfare Reconsidered

*co-sponsored by the Society for Ancient Military History*

War in the ancient world was fought with more than swords and spears. This panel invites papers on the practice, experience, and representation of ancient warfare, including strategy and tactics, the lived experience of soldiers and civilians, military institutions, and the rhetoric of war: declarations, propaganda, war oratory, and the narratives historians and commanders constructed around conflict. We welcome comparative and cross-cultural approaches, as well as papers examining how ancient warfare has been received, remembered, or mythologized.

Panel 2: Recovering Voices: Women and Gender in the Ancient World

This panel examines the lives, roles, and representations of women in antiquity, and the methodological challenges of recovering perspectives often filtered through, or silenced by, male-authored sources. Papers might address women’s political, religious, economic, or domestic roles; gender as a category of historical analysis; feminist historiography and source criticism; or case studies that bring underrepresented voices into clearer focus.

Panel 3: The Past as Precedent: Ancient History and Modern Decision-Making

How do policymakers, military strategists, business leaders, and ordinary citizens invoke (and sometimes misuse) the ancient past to justify present-day choices? This panel welcomes papers on the reception and application of ancient history in modern decision-making, the historiography of “lessons from history,” case studies of ancient precedents cited in modern debates, and critical reflections on the risks and rewards of applied history.

Panel 4: Teaching the Ancient World: Pedagogy for a New Generation

This panel focuses on the practice of teaching ancient history today, at any level. Topics might include curriculum design, digital and multimedia tools, strategies for engaging diverse student populations, translating and adapting primary sources for the classroom, addressing controversial or sensitive topics (such as slavery, violence, or gender) in teaching, and assessment of what “ancient history” should mean in a modern syllabus.

Panel 5: The Letter of the Law: Legal Cultures of the Ancient World

Few words carried more force in antiquity than those of the law. This panel invites papers on ancient legal systems, codes, courts, and dispute resolution; the rhetoric of legal argument and advocacy; the relationship between law and power; and comparative approaches across different ancient legal cultures. Papers considering how ancient law continues to influence modern legal thought or institutions are also welcome.

Panel 6: Beyond the Text: Epigraphy and the Limits of the Written Word

*co-sponsored by the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy*

This panel invites papers on epigraphic evidence from any period or region of the ancient world, including the production and reception of inscriptions; epigraphic habit and its rise or decline; methodological challenges of reading, dating, and interpreting damaged, erased, or fragmentary inscriptions; and the ways epigraphic evidence confirms, complicates, or contradicts literary and historiographical narratives. We particularly welcome papers that explicitly engage with the tension (or dialogue) between inscribed and literary evidence.

General submissions outside these themes are also welcome and will be considered for additional sessions.