Forty-Eighth Annual Susman Conference
Bearing Witness, Challenging Myth:
Imperial Pasts and Fascist Presents
Friday, March 27, 2026
Van Dyck Hall, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
To register for the conference, click here.
Access the conference schedule here.
Please join us after the conference for a keynote lecture delivered by Dr. Joseph Kaplan (Ph.D. Rutgers University, 2024), Visiting Professor of African American History, Berea College. Dr. Kaplan's research focuses on the New York Police Department's intelligence unit and its repression of the Black Left within the city in the 1960s.
Inquiries may be directed to:
Photos from 2025 Susman Conference
(From top left, going clockwise):
-Patrick Jaojoco (Princeton) and Sarah Coffman (Rutgers fourth-year PhD candidate) speak on the panel "Infrastructures of Revolution: Dynamics of Environment and Urban Space"
-Helen Bezuneh (UPenn) presents the paper "'Let Ethiopia march ahead with her beauties': The Making of a Modern Nation at the 1968 Miss Addis Ababa Beauty Contest"
-AJ Boyd (Rutgers fourth-year PhD candidate), Hugh Goffinet (Rutgers first-year PhD student) and Anthony R. Taylor (independent scholar) speak on the panel "Embattled History: Race, Militarism and Memory"
-Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Rutgers PhD 2019, delivers the keynote speech
-K. Stawasz, Ian Miller, Sarah Coffman, Lauren Rorie and Sydney Smith (Rutgers PhD students)
-Rutgers PhD students who organized the Susman Conference: (from left to right, top row) Avigyan Banerjee (second year), Ánh Adams, (second year), Ethan Dunn (second year), Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, Bea Pearson (second year), Cydney Taylor (second year) and Lauren Rorie (second year); (from left to right, bottom row) Kyra March (second year) and K Stawasz (first year)
-Nina Mouawad (Northeastern) presents the paper "The Emergence of Fictional Imaginings in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose in Light of the Historical Amnesia of the Lebanese Civil War"
-Bea Pearson presents the paper "Crippling the American Grammar Book: A Brief History of Resistant Flesh"