Call For 2024 Papers

2024 Biennial Meeting of the Lutheran Historical Conference

October 10-12, 2024

Baltimore, Maryland and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

“Lutherans Uniting and Dividing”

The 2024 LHC Program Committee invites proposals which reflect the themes of Lutherans either uniting for a common cause or Lutherans who felt compelled to divide for a greater good. Paper proposals dealing with any aspect of this theme or with any other aspect of Lutheran history in North America will be considered. We also welcome proposals from archivists and those of adjacent disciplines (e.g., public history or museum studies).

The 2024 LHC meeting (rescheduled from 2021) will return to the East Coast when it will meet at Christ Lutheran Church in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, Maryland. This gathering will also visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the location of the largest battle of the American Civil War, fought in part on the grounds of Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary, now part of United Lutheran Seminary. The day at Gettysburg will be in conjunction with the Lutheran Historical Society of the Mid-Atlantic. This biennial meeting will commemorate several recent anniversaries, including the bicentennial of the General Synod (1820), the seventy-fifth anniversary of Lutheran World Relief (1945), and the eightieth anniversary of the Lutheran Immigration and Refuge Service (1939).

Speakers will be given twenty minutes for their presentations, followed by five to ten minutes of Q & A and discussion.

Paper proposals, including a title and 250-word abstract, along with a brief biographical sketch of the presenter, are due March 4th, 2024. Please send by email attachment to the Program Chair, Jesse David Chariton, at chariton@iastate.edu.

Other members of the 2024 Program Committee:

Kathryn Galchutt: kathryn.galchutt@cui.edu

Mirko Hall: mirko.hall@converse.edu

Joel Thoreson: joel.thoreson@elca.org

Please contact for inquiries.

The Program Committee will inform each submitter about acceptance decisions via email by May 5th. Presenters must be or become members of the LHC in order to present (https://www.luthhistcon.org/membership). Presenters are responsible for covering conference fees and all travel costs and are encouraged to apply for financial support from their home institutions. Students are encouraged to submit paper proposals and to apply to the LHC Board for limited scholarship assistance with travel-related expenses (https://www.luthhistcon.org/people).

Lutheran Historical Conference Biennial Meeting

The Lutheran Historical Conference gathers in a biennial conference, usually in October of the even-numbered years (2012, 2014, 2016, etc), at significant Lutheran institutions around the country. We give and hear historical presentations from our members, and tour around to important historical sites. The call for papers to be given at the conference is circulated to the membership the Spring prior to the biennial meeting.