The MWCBS at 71: 1954-2025

The Midwest Conference on British Studies (MWCBS) began as a Chicago project. According to Walter Arnstein, whose long association with the MWCBS was celebrated with two panels at the 2013 meeting at DePaul University, the MWCBS had its formative years at the University of Chicago. In the mid-1950s, the University of Chicago had the distinction of serving as the academic home of two British historians, Charles Loch Mowat and Alan Simpson, which then put Chicago above its Midwestern peers, who could cite only one British Studies faculty each. [I here invite and encourage readers to enjoy Arnstein’s reflections on the first 50 years of MWCBS history at History – Midwest Conference on British Studies (MWCBS); a small gap exists between that piece, produced in 2004, and our website’s own documentation of MWCBS events and initiatives, which picks up in 2009.]  

Arnstein recalls the early meetings of the MWCBS being organizationally simple affairs: a single morning session, a luncheon, and a single afternoon session. Presenters were selected by invitation, and the sessions drew a broad audience that included graduate students. By the early 1960s, the MWCBS had developed a rotational pattern, with meetings in Chicago alternating with meetings outside the city, in Urbana-Champaign, Bloomington, Iowa City, and other university settings in the Midwest. Since then, the MWCBS has embraced a greater geography that stretches from Ohio through Kansas and up to Minnesota. Our region and its membership also extend north of the border; the MWCBS has met in Toronto five times (in 1984, 1994, 2001, 2012, and 2024), with two MWCBS presidents from Canadian universities (Warren Johnston from Algoma University, 2013-2014, and Martin Greig from Toronto Metropolitan University, 2023-2024).

A postcard image showing Hull Court at the University of Chicago, Illinois, c. 1930-1945. Image courtesy Boston Public Library's Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection.

The MWCBS has a particularly proud tradition of producing excellent scholars and teachers. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Midwest regional boasted Lacey Baldwin Smith (Northwestern; President, 1971-1972), Arnstein (Illinois; President, 1981-1982), and William Willcox (Michigan), who, with C. Warren Hollister at Santa Barbara, produced the four-volume History of England series that fired the imaginations of generations of students of English history. Later leaders of the MWCBS continued the legacy of producing significant texts that drew on and extended undergraduates’ interest in British Studies. Stanford Lehmberg (Minnesota; President, 1983-1984), Clayton Roberts (Ohio State; President, 1985-1986), T. W. Heyck (Northwestern; President, 1987-1988), Bob Bucholz (Loyola; President, 2001-2002), and Newton Key (Eastern Illinois University; Secretary Treasurer 1994-2000) all contributed popular textbooks on English and/or British history for the undergraduate classroom: Lehmberg and Heyck’s Peoples of the British Isles series, Roberts’s A History of England volumes, and Bucholz and Key’s Early Modern England, 1485-1714 and its accompanying reader (Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates in English History).  In addition, it is quite common for MWCBS members, inheritors of Westminster’s long tradition of competent (if not necessarily compassionate) administration, to be drafted to chair their departments:  while no census of chairs has so far been taken, it is recalled by those who were present that the clientele for after-session drinks at the meeting at Wayne State in 2015 boasted twelve department heads (and a couple of future deans) in the room.

The MWCBS has also invited outstanding scholars to give its plenaries and keynotes, the former now delivered on Friday evenings after the conclusion of the day’s concurrent panels and the latter as a feature of the Saturday business meeting and luncheon. Among the many celebrated scholars who have delivered addresses at the MWCBS are Geoffrey Elton, J. H. Plumb, Garrett Mattingly, Retha Warnicke, Ian Gentles, Ian Archer, and Carole Levin.

The MWCBS has long been the conference home of the region’s early modernists and modernists. The Midwest’s medievalists are well served by two other organizations, the Medieval Academy of the Midwest and the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, and do not join us as often as we might like, although they are always most welcome.    

Conferences in the most recent decades have become considerably more multidisciplinary than the earliest MWCBS meetings. Once dominated by historians, today’s MWCBS boasts a sizeable portion of presenters from British Studies disciplines other than history, with English faculty and students becoming a strong presence in the MWCBS. Program committees now routinely seek one of the two MWCBS speakers from a field beyond history, in honor of the disciplinary diversity of our conference membership.

Another of the more striking changes since the beginning of the MWCBS is the role of graduate students at the conference. Once audience members only, graduate students now make up a significant part of our membership. Indeed, providing a collegial experience for graduate student attendees, for many of whom the MWCBS is their first conference appearance, has become one of the foci of conference planning and programming. As a result, the conference has diversified the forms and functions of its sessions, adding to the more traditional research presentations a series of teaching roundtables and professional development sessions on topics ranging from navigating the challenges of academic publishing to preparing for the job market.

According to archived CFPs, the MWCBS began the formal custom of soliciting funds for a graduate student travel award as part of its registration processes in 2013; by 2018, that award was named for longtime supporter Jim Sack (University of Illinois, Chicago). Graduate research at the MWCBS is celebrated by the Walter L. Arnstein Prize. The Arnstein is awarded annually for the best graduate student paper(s) presented at the conference, as determined by a panel of readers from the Program Committee.

My own affiliation with the MWCBS began in 2011, when I attended the annual meeting in Terre Haute, organized by Jason Kelly (Indiana University, Indianapolis; President, 2011-2012) and Program Committee Chair Lia Paradis (Slippery Rock; President, 2015-2016). The conference was held in one of the more creatively-scheduled MWCBS meeting spaces, the historic Hulman & Co. Building, which then served as home of the Clabber Girl factory, museum, and café. I left the meeting charmed by the warmth of the welcome I had received as a newly-tenured scholar and delighted by ample evidence of a robust community of scholars and students working in British Studies across the Midwest. My email note of appreciation for the intellectual rigor of the panels and the high quality of arrangements landed me an invitation to join the Program Committee; within two years, I was Chair, and my own history with the MWCBS was well underway.

A great deal has changed in the Midwest and in higher education in the intervening years—much of it challenging for the disciplines that make up the fields of British Studies—but the resilience and fellowship of the MWCBS endures. We remain “conferencing people” in the MWCBS, in an age when the regional academic conference seems increasingly in danger of becoming a thing of the past. Despite shrinking travel budgets and the general decline of support for the humanities, the MWCBS continues to be a vibrant space of scholarly collaboration, innovation, and mentorship.

So, when the leaves start to take on their bright fall colors across the Midwest and the late afternoons begin fading into darkness, it feels like MWCBS season—and hopefully will for many years to come. This October finds us heading back to Chicago, an appropriate place to celebrate our regional past and to open our next chapter.

McNabb wishes to thank Bob Bucholz for reading and contributing to a draft of this piece.

---

Jennifer McNabb, a scholar of early modern England, is professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the current president of the Midwest Conference on British Studies, a past president of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association and serves on the American Historical Association Council in the Professional Division. 

---

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the original author/s and do not necessarily represent the views of the North American Conference on British Studies. The NACBS welcomes civil and productive discussion in the comments below. Our blog represents a collegial and conversational forum, and the tone for all comments should align with this environment. Insulting or mean comments will not be tolerated and NACBS reserves the right to delete these remarks and revoke the commenter’s site membership.