Southern Plains Arts, Humanities, and Languages Conference 2026

SouthernPlainsConference.com

April 18th 2026

Registration Open!

This Year’s Theme: Echoes From The Archive

An echo is more than just a sound: it’s a metaphor for how memories, voices, and historical events reverberate across time, sometimes clearly, often with distortion.

Archives are more than just a collection of records. The archival process is our individual and collective relationship with the world, mediated by power relations between subjects and their material conditions.

Together, echoes from the archives consider the reverberations of history—not only vocal but also textual, visual, architectural, digital, spatial, and other traces—examining how certain elements return, others are silenced, and still others are distorted in the repetitions that shape our present and future.

Echoes challenge us to reconsider our methods of interaction with archives, warning us against an endless pursuit of deconstruction and emphasizing the value of care and empathy in the pursuit of reconstruction.

Echoes from the archives allow us to notice which intensities reach us, how clearly, how faintly, and which never return at all. If “archives” mark what we preserve, “echoes” remind us how those preserved fragments reveal imperfectly into the present and impinge upon our futures. How, then, can we ensure that we’re listening well to what is said, what is repeated, and what never quite makes it back?

Southern Plains invites scholars, artists, linguists, historians, and educators to consider the multitude of frameworks through which we strive to make meaningful the documents that construct and influence our reality. And to investigate how documents and archives echo across the various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Oklahoma State University’s English Department Graduate Students