The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife’s 2026 gathering, Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come, will be held on June 26–27 at Historic Deerfield.
At this conference the Dublin Seminar will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. While considering our 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 Dublin Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.
The 2026 seminar will feature a keynote address by Holly Jackson, Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation.
Other speakers will address how New Englanders have envisioned new futures during moments of crisis or uncertainty. How did people try to anticipate what the future held or if there was a future at all? How did imagining the future shape the present?
Click here for the latest 2026 conference schedule. Registration will open soon, and links will be posted on this page.
The annual Dublin Seminar is a meeting place where scholars of all kinds—academics, students, museum and library professionals, artisans and craftspeople, educators, preservationists, and committed avocational researchers—join in deep conversation around a focused theme in New England history, pooling their knowledge and exchanging ideas, sources, and methods in a thought-provoking forum.
Programming for the 2026 Seminar will be in partnership with the Communal Studies Association as well as the Edward Bellamy House in Chicopee, Massachusetts, a house museum dedicated to the author of Looking Backward (1888), second only in 19th-century popularity to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Special thanks to our partner and host, Historic Deerfield, and to all our sponsors:
• University of Massachusetts Public History Program
• American Antiquarian Society
• Boston University American Studies Program
• Historic Northampton
• Communal Studies Association
Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife 