2026 Pasadena

Hi everyone! We are two PhD students (Ava at Columbia, Katie at NYU) hoping to present a panel presentation at the 2026 NACBS conference in Pasadena. Though working on different areas, our research interests overlap around the institutionalization of reform movements and social work between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

I’m hoping to present a paper on Adelaide Procter (1826-1864), examining her role within the Langham Place Circle and her work on behalf of unhoused women at the Providence Row Night Refuge as a window into the broader mid-Victorian shift from women's philanthropy towards institutionalized social work. Katie plans to present a paper on Eilidh MacDougall (1882-1959), examining the shift from voluntary initiatives to rationalized social work and police involvement in sexual offenses against children through the lens of her career. 

We would love to bring in anyone else who is interested in overlapping topics. If you have a…

We are putting together a panel on cities and empire (exploring questions of governance and methodology). One of us is working on 18th century Madras; another looks at the postwar discussions about the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. The exact orientation of the panel will naturally depend on our third panelist.

Thanks!

Daniel Ussishkin (ussishkin@wisc.edu)

I am working on a history of greed and the social/moral boundaries used to contain it. I am currently focused on the factory acts as a way of containing greed in the early industrial period. The panel could either move into labor history, textile production, social policy, or the role of greed in in the emergent political economy.

Thanks,

Penny (ismay@bc.edu)

I would like to put together a panel that focuses on cultural innovations or practices of sociability that emerged or transformed in the mid 17th century. My own paper will examine how the exercise of new, short-lived liberties in the 1640s and 1650s enabled the resolution of old conceptual tensions regarding sociable religious practices, with far-reaching implications for civil society. Papers on early modern sociability or novel cultural practices (contextually situated) would fit nicely.  If interested, please contact me at jim.honeyford@umanitoba.ca by 20 April 2026.