Synchronizing History, with its interdisciplinary and international historiographical approach, is now in its third edition. The meetings in Palermo (2024) and Rio de Janeiro (2025) enabled the participating scholarly community to examine and reflect on the circulation of ideas between Europe and the Americas as a multidirectional exchange, albeit under profoundly unequal conditions across societies on both continents. Despite unfolding against a backdrop of invasion, cultural destruction, violence, the slave trade and slavery, and colonial extractivism, these dynamics nevertheless generated encounters and interactions that transformed both individuals and collective actors across these connected worlds.
The key challenge—one that remains urgent—is to deepen the study of these exchanges in the early modern and modern periods from a genuinely intercultural, global perspective. For this reason, the third meeting of our project broadens its scope to encompass Early Globalization more fully, including its revolutionary and imperial reconfigurations. It adopts a periodization that extends from the late Middle Ages to the transition to the contemporary era. By welcoming scholars working on world interactions across these centuries, the Milan conference will build on the outcomes of the first two meetings and expand the network of researchers pursuing historical inquiry through both entangled and comparative approaches, and across micro- and macro-level contexts.
The methodological toolkits developed in cultural history, global history, and histoire croisée—often in dialogue with microhistorical approaches, whether explicitly or implicitly—are valuable resources for reconstructing the polyphonic experiences of Early Globalization in both their subjective and structural dimensions. At the same time, their engagement with postcolonial and decolonial studies is still insufficiently explored in many areas and remains challenging. Against this backdrop, and without rejecting the global role of early modern and modern Europe, this call for papers invites participants to take a closer look at the temporalities, spaces, and scales of Europe–world relations across the Americas, Asia, and Africa from the fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (c. 1450–1850). The aim is to encourage a critical reconsideration of the category of “Western history,” whose disputed legacies continue to shape academic debates, public cultures, and transnational social and cultural formations today.
This call for papers welcomes contributions from scholars working in political, institutional, religious, and cultural history, including gender history and the history of translation. We particularly invite papers on the circulation of ideas and texts; on translation practices connecting Europe with the Americas, Asia, and Africa; on the cultural history of customs, dress, travel, and mobility. Proposals in art history, visual history, and the history of cartography are also encouraged, as these fields are essential for understanding how representations and knowledge were produced, compared, and disseminated on a global scale. More generally, we welcome papers addressing wide-ranging institutional, socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental dynamics, as well as the temporal frameworks within which they unfolded.
The Synchronizing History Scientific Committee aims to continue fostering a space for interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue on issues that, while grounded in the past, offer robust tools for overcoming methodological rigidities and cultural barriers to scholarly exchange among international and transnational academic communities. This call for papers also emphasizes a public engagement dimension. It seeks to promote a balanced and polyphonic approach to the world’s past that can support academic research, university teaching, and public-facing scholarship in an era increasingly marked by the tendentious instrumentalization of history in public arenas and the infosphere to sustain national and international political competition—at a time when inequalities are widening and climatic conditions are deteriorating.
Main thematic areas
- Measuring time: synchronies and asynchronies; chronologies and periodization(s).
- Imaginaries and visual cultures of Early Globalization in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa: images, cartography, artistic artefacts, clothing.
- Circulations of ideas and texts across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa.
- Governance and hybridizations of political models.
- Religions in interaction.
- Economic interconnections.
- Environmental histories.
- Reconsidering “Western history”: critical approaches, categories, and historians’ intellectual biographies.
Submitting a proposal
We welcome both individual papers as well as panel proposals:
- Individual proposals should be ca 300 words long;
- Thematic panels could involve 3-4 papers each, with a description of the panel (ca 200 words), panelists and their paper’s proposal (ca 300 words).
All proposals should be accompanied by short bios (ca 100 words) of the presenters.
A limited number of grants to cover travel and accommodation expenses will be available for early career researchers.
Please, send the proposals to: SH3.Milan2026@gmail.com
Conference website: https://synchronizinghistory2026.altervista.org
Deadlines
10 February 2026: Opening of proposals
30 April 2026: Closing of proposals
31 May 2026: Acceptance of individual papers and panels proposals
30 June 2026: Registration
31 July 2026: Full Programme
The Conference will take place on the 9-11 September 2026
at the University of Milan – Università degli Studi di Milano.
The language of the Conference is English.
Participation fee is 160 euro (including coffee breaks, lunches buffet and Thursday plenary dinner).
Certificate of attendance will be released.
Scientific Committee
Luigi Alonzi (Università di Palermo);
Antonio Álvarez Ossorio (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid);
Evelyne Azevedo (State University of Rio de Janeiro);
Maria Matilde Benzoni (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, Cambridge);
Giulia Calvi (European University Institute);
Giorgio Caravale (Università degli Studi Roma Tre);
Michela Catto (Università di Torino);
Valentina Favarò (Università di Palermo);
Maria Luz González Mézquita (National University of Mar del Plata);
Morihisa Ishiguro (University of Kanazawa);
Hephzibah Israel (University of Edinburgh);
Helge Jordheim (University of Oslo);
Eithan Kleinberg (Wesleyan University);
Stefano Levati (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Alexandra Lianeri (University of Thessaloniki) ;
Marina Massimi (Universidade de São Paulo);
Manfredi Merluzzi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre);
Franco Motta (Università di Torino);
Maria Lúcia Pallares Burke (Centre of Latín American Studies, Cambridge);
Sabina Pavone (Università di Napoli L’Orientale);
Blythe Alice Raviola (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Gaetano Sabatini (Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma).
Scientific Directors
Maria Matilde Benzoni
(Università degli Studi di Milano – Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni)
and
Blythe Alice Raviola
(Università degli Studi di Milano – Dipartimento di Studi storici “Federico Chabod”).
Organizing Committee
Luigi Alonzi (Università di Palermo);
Maria Matilde Benzoni (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Michela Catto (Università di Torino);
Manfredi Merluzzi (Università di Roma Tre);
Blythe Alice Raviola (Università degli Studi di Milano).
Organizing Secretary
Enrico Beviglia Canè (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Michele Brusadelli (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Daniele Colonnetti (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Napoli);
Amanda Maffei (Università degli Studi di Milano);
Gianluca Magro (Università degli Studi di Milano).