Call for Participants: “Heredity” Weekend Symposium

Conveners: Jodi Byrd (University of Chicago), Kimberly Anne Coles (University of Maryland), Greta LaFleur (Yale University), Sharon P. Holland (UNC, Chapel Hill)

Ideas of heredity are as much about the present and future as about the past. They are an imaginative structure of chronological time, kinship, custody, and rights. But settler colonial ideologies of heredity and kinship in the Americas are unique, and uniquely linear in their formations. They mobilize a different history, tying Europe to the Americas, and the medieval and early modern periods to the present. They tie blood – and its letting – to land enclosure and property transfer; notions of heredity are thus one means by which blood and belonging are articulated as capital. Heredity and its presumed possession legitimated belonging, exclusion, rights, and claims to identity, from early modern Europe through modern settler colonialism in the Americas. This symposium will put scholars working on a range of fields, regions, and historical periods into conversation in order to explore questions surrounding the political, social, and demographic lives of heredity over the longue durée. Heredity—as a tactic of biopower, including racialization—will be the thematic focus of the seminar, which will encourage scholars working on a diverse array of regions and periods to build broader historical, theoretical, and regional specificity to their research on these issues.

This symposium will feed directly into a special issue of American Quarterly.

Keynote Speakers: Brooke Bauer (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Daniel Heath Justice (University of British Colombia), Jennifer Morgan (NYU), and Kevin E. Quashie (Brown University).

Application Instructions and Contact

Apply by November 2, 2026. Grants-in-aid available to Folger Consortium affiliates.

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