Deadline for proposals: December 5, 2025

Next year, the AASLH and NCPH joint conference will bring together more than 1,000 history practitioners, scholars, and students to share ideas, strengthen professional networks, and confront the challenges and opportunities shaping our field. The 2026 joint conference theme, “The Work of Revolution,” marks the field’s recognition of the 250th anniversary as a time to reflect on the past 50 years of public history practice and, more importantly, imagine the future of history work.

As you think about submitting a proposal for next year’s conference, I hope you’ll consider drawing on new insights that will soon be forthcoming from AASLH’s National Survey of History Practitioners (NSHP). I hope the findings will be used widely to support wide-ranging conversations about the nature of public history work, the challenges public history practitioners face, and how we might take action to create a stronger, more inclusive, more sustainable field.
(Here is a preview of the findings, released on November 19, 2025.)

Fielded in spring 2025, NSHP gathered data from more than 3,700 history practitioners across the United States, asking a range of questions about who works in public history, how they are paid, and how they feel about their work. With this rich dataset, AASLH will be producing a series of reports and programs about issues and challenges in the public history workforce in early 2026. While analysis and planning is ongoing, the results from this survey will investigate themes such as:

  • Demographic representation: How well does the public history workforce reflect the demographics of the United States and the communities we serve?
  • Pay and equity: How do salaries and benefits vary by demographic markers (like race, gender, and age), role, and experience?
  • Workplace culture and satisfaction: How do practitioners feel about their work? Who is considering leaving the field and why?

Although the survey results won’t be available before the CFP deadline, the questions and themes of the survey can still inform proposals—and the full report will be available in early 2026, allowing ample time to incorporate these insights into your thinking. These findings will provide a foundation for discussing critically important questions about the future of the field. Working groups—a group of practitioners collaborating to try to answer important questions about the field—offer a particularly opportune way to address the questions this new data will raise with the necessary depth. The workforce survey findings will be able to support topics related to pay and pay equity, burnout, talent pipelines, diversity and inclusion, and more.

As we prepare to publish the full findings in early 2026, I hope you’ll consider how the survey’s insights might inform your proposal.

Proposals are due December 5, 2025. For full details, visit aaslh.submittable.com/submit/333312/2026-aaslh-ncph-joint-conference-call-for-proposals.