DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FRIDAY 24th OCTOBER
BASEES 2026 Annual Conference, University of Birmingham, 10-12 April 2026
The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) invites proposals for panels, roundtables, and papers for its 2026 annual conference. BASEES 2026 is being hosted in-person from the 10-12 April at the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. The conference will also welcome remote attendees. The 2024 conference in Cambridge welcomed 700 delegates from over 45 countries around the world.
The deadline for paper and panel/roundtable proposals is Friday, 24 October 2025. BASEES welcomes paper, panel, and roundtable proposals with an area-specific focus as well as positioned within disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks. These disciplines and areas include, but are not limited to: Politics; History; Sociology; Geography; Film and Media; Languages and Linguistics; Literatures and Cultures; Anthropology; Economics; Baltic Studies; Polish Studies; Ukrainian Studies. We particularly encourage proposals that help push forward efforts to decentre and decolonise the study of the region.
The conference especially welcomes the participation of postgraduate research students and early career scholars.
The conference organisers also welcome proposals for thematic colloquiums that can be held as part of the conference. If you would like to propose a colloquium, please email the conference organiser at academic.organisers@basees.org
To aid in the review process and scheduling, we will group papers into streams. When submitting your paper, panel, or roundtable proposals, please assign it to the stream that best fits the disciplinary or regional focus of your submission.
Individual Paper:
We will consider proposals for individual papers that are not associated with a panel. They will be reviewed by the relevant stream organiser. If you are not part of an organised panel, do not attach your abstract to a panel. The Organising Committee will create panels on coherent themes from the individual paper submissions.
Abstracts to be included in an organised panel should also be submitted through this process. The author of each abstract should submit their abstract after the panel has been created and assign it to the appropriate panel.
Panel:
A panel involves the presentation of prepared papers on a related topic, followed by a structured discussion of those papers and Q&A. A panel proposal should have a Chair, a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 4 papers. It can have a discussant, but this is not obligatory. The chair may also serve as a discussant or a paper presenter.
After the panel has been created, the individual paper presenters should submit their own abstract for inclusion in the panel.
Roundtable:
Roundtables involve the structured discussion of a topic/theme, without the presentation of papers. A roundtable proposal should have a Chair and a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 5 roundtable speakers. Roundtable speakers will not present a “paper”, i.e. there will be no paper titles in the programme. The chair may also serve as a roundtable speaker, if necessary.
If you have not used the system before, you will first be asked to create an account with your password. You can then come back to the system and change your abstract at any time up to the deadline for abstract submissions, which is midnight (UTC) 24 October 2025.
Abstracts should not be more than 3000 characters. Abstracts can be typed directly into the submission system, but if you copy and paste to submit your abstract from, for example, MS Word, ensure that you remove all formatting instructions.
Each participant can give a maximum of two presentations, but only one full paper, i.e. participating in one panel and/or in one roundtable. Participants can act as Chair in more than two panels/roundtables.
Remote attendance:
We are welcoming remote paper presentations. If you wish to attend remotely, please indicate so when submitting your proposal. However, we cannot accept fully remote panels. The Chair of a panel, who can also be one of the presenters, must attend the conference in- person to lead the session and facilitate the discussion. We are operating a limited hybrid model. Delegates registering for remote attendance will be able to present their paper via Zoom and listen into all paper/panels. Full hybrid, i.e. using multidirectional camera and microphone equipment, will only be available in a limited number of rooms.
To aid in the review process and scheduling, we will group papers into streams. When submitting your paper, panel, or roundtable proposals, please assign it to the stream that best fits the disciplinary or regional focus of your submission.
