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From Historic Deerfield:

Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come

2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife

Online and in-person, Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 26–27 June 2026

In-person registration closes June 22 at noon. Virtual registration will stay open through the event. All registrants receive access to recordings of the event for one month.

In 2026, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. As this year’s seminar looks forward to its own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.

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Ruthy Rogers (1778–1812), Needlework Picture, Marblehead, Massachusetts, ca. 1789, silk on linen, 27 × 23 cm (New York: American Folk Art Museum, gift of Ralph Esmerian, 2005.8.53).

10.00  Optional Morning Activity
Tours at Bellamy House and remarks from the Director, Chicopee Falls, MA (Pre-registration is required: $12 per person)

12.00  Registration opens at Historic Deerfield

1.20  Virtual sign-in opens for online attendees

1.30  Welcome — Marla Miller (Distinguished Professor of History, UMass Amherst, and President, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife)

1.45  Panel 1 | Planned Communities
Moderator: Christian Goodwillie (Director and Curator of Special Collections, Hamilton College, Burke Library)
• Carl Guarneri (Professor Emeritus of History, Saint Mary’s College of California, and Research Scholar, Colgate University) — Brook Farm: Boston ‘Combined Households’, and the Utopian Origins of Urban Communal Housing, 1846–1851
• CJ Martin (Visiting Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross) — Black Millerites
• Diana Lempel (Scholar/Practitioner of Folk History) — The Blessing of the Attic: Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Society and Family Memory Keeping

3.15  Break with refreshments

3.30  Tribute to Founders

3:45  Futurecasting: A Roundtable on the Past, Present, and Future of New England Studies
Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Public History Program and Historic Northampton
Moderator: J. Ritchie Garrison (Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Delaware)
• Emelie Gevalt (Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, American Folk Art Museum)
• Thomas Guiler (Director of Museum Affairs, Oneida Community Mansion House)
• Philippe Halbert (Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)

5.00  Reception
Sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Boston University Program in American Studies
Join us for a celebratory reception marking the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Seminar. Enjoy heavy hors d’oeuvres and assorted beverages in the company of the Dublin Seminar membership and your colleagues for this festive occasion. (Pre-registration is $25)

7.00  Keynote Address
• Holly Jackson (Chair of American Studies and Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston) — The Ends of the World in Antebellum New England

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8.30  Deerfield Community Center opens. In-person attendees may pick up name badges and information packets.

8:50  Virtual sign-in for online attendees

9.00  Panel 2 | Imagined Futures in Literature
Moderator: Barbara Matthews (Independent Historical Consultant)
• Megan Pickett (The Winchendon School) — ‘Where to Go Next’: Utopian Immediacy in Total Loss Farm
• Ella Koston (PhD student at Boston University’s American Studies Program) — Afrofuturist Vision: Pauline Hopkins

10.30  Break

10.45  Panel 3 | Imagined Futures in Material Culture
Moderator: Erika Gasser (Director of Academic Programs, Historic Deerfield)
• Elizabeth Eager (Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University) — Futurity Imagined through Women’s Needlework
• Victoria Kenyon (Curatorial Track doctoral candidate, Art History, University of Delaware) — Magical Flowers: Fortune-Telling Objects from New England
• Brece Honeycutt (Independent Scholar/Multimedia Artist) — Building Harmony / Constructing Color

12.15  Lunch (buffet provided at the Deerfield Inn)

1.45  Panel 4 | Limits of Progressivism: Sexual Politics
Moderator: Erica Lome (Curator of Collections, Historic New England)
• Hunter Moskowitz (Researcher at American Ancestors, Boston) — Factory as Utopia: Imaginations of Sexuality in Early Lowell
• Catherine Terelak (Interpreter at Historic New England’s Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House) — An Intentional Community: Gloucester’s Dabsville
• Stephen Paterwic (Trustee of the Shaker Library and Museum, Sabbathday Lake, Maine) — Shakers and the Second Gathering

3.15  Break

3.30  Panel 5 | Forecasting Future Ecologies
Moderator: Nan Wolverton (Vice President for Academic and Public Programs, American Antiquarian Society)
• Meghan Freeman (Fellowship and Internship Program Director, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) — Bird Day, Now and Forever: Mabel Osgood Wright and the Future of New England Bird-Life
• Li-hsin Hsu (Professor of English, National Chengchi University, Taiwan) — Silk Culture, Utopian Experiment, and Anthropocene Imagination in Mid-19th-Century New England
• Dan McKanan (Emerson Senior Lecturer, Harvard Divinity School) — Imagining the Future Forest

5.00  Closing Remarks — John Davis (President, Historic Deerfield, Inc)