HCRGSA Conference 2026

Organized by the University of Alberta’s History, Classics, and Religion Graduate Conference Committee

Theme: Memory and Narrative: Navigating Connection & Contention
Application Deadline: December 12, 2025
Conference Date: March 5-8, 2026
Location: Edmonton, AB
Application Link: Click Here for Google Form
Questions, Applications & More Info: hcrgsaconference@gmail.com

Conference Details: Our theme this year reflects the relationship between memory and narrative, a topic that scholars across various disciplines have explored. The temporal dimension of narrative, by its nature, involves memory: one must remember a story or convert a memory into words in order to communicate it. Narratives by their nature reveal and occlude certain aspects of the past depending on the narrator. Memory is a throughline for both individual people and social groups: it can bind people together, as in a community or a family, and create a sense of belonging and connectedness. When special stories are told and retold, they create memories which can be powerful, moving, and deeply impactful. But memory can also be dangerous when it is narrativized to create barriers and divisions between people. Narratives can encode prejudices, biases, and – at their most extreme – hatreds. What we remember, and the stories we tell, are just as important as what we forget or the stories we choose to hide. Our conference looks to explore the ways in which narrative and memory are linked. In an interdisciplinary fashion, our conference seeks to facilitate conversation across temporal, geographic, and socio-cultural contexts of academic study.