Read the Call for Submissions.

If DC’s history informs your work or you have an appreciation for how the city’s past shapes its present and future: apply to present at the DC History Conference! We invite presentations from all community members: artists, educators, local organizers, performers, public history practitioners, researchers, and scholars across the humanities and other fields, as well as students.

What does it mean to be a community conference? Community-based history encourages community member perspectives, gives equal weight to lived experience, values memory, and creates space for dialogue. We challenge the idea that only trained professionals study history and tell us about the past. By balancing lived experience and scholarly study in the program, we learn a more nuanced, equitable, justice-oriented history of our city. 

New this year: On Thursday, April 3, in partnership with Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), a one-day oral history symposium on local, community-oriented oral history takes place at the DC History Center. The conference continues Friday, April 4 – Sunday, April 6 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library with expanded offerings, based on incoming submissions.

Questions about your submission? Email us at conference@dchistory.org.