2026 Dublin Seminar: Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to come

Featuring scholarly presentations by Shaker Study Group members Christian Goodwillie, Brece Honeycutt, and Stephen Paterwic, the 2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife gathering, Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come, will be held on June 26–27 at Historic Deerfield.

This conference marks the Dublin Seminar’s 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. While considering our own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Dublin Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.

The 2026 seminar will feature a keynote address by Holly Jackson, Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation.

Other speakers will address how New Englanders have envisioned new futures during moments of crisis or uncertainty. How did people try to anticipate what the future held or if there was a future at all? How did imagining the future shape the present?

Additional information, full conference schedule, and link to register can be found here. Join us!