The thirty-eighth annual conference of the GSA will take place September 18-21, 2014, at The Westin Kansas City at Crown Center, 1 East Pershing Road, Kansas City, MO 64108.
This will be our first meeting ever in Kansas City, and our first in the state of Missouri in over a quarter of a century. Renowned for barbecue, steak, jazz, Harry S Truman, Hallmark Cards, the country=s first modern shopping center, and much else besides, Kansas City is a thriving, dynamic city with a vibrant cultural and artistic life.
Our conference will take place close to the Liberty Memorial, dedicated in 1923 in the presence of General John J. Pershing and Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Adjacent to the Liberty Memorial is the extraordinary National World War I Museum, one of the largest collections of its kind in the world. We will be observing the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014, and we hope that our members will take advantage of the opportunity to visit the museum.
The Call for Seminar Proposals can be found on this website. In response to our overwhelmingly successful pilot program of seminars at the October 2013 conference in Denver, we have decided to continue a similar series in 2014. For details, see the Call for Seminar Proposals below. Please note that the deadline for submission of seminar topics is December 15, 2013. They must be submitted as .pdf documents to the members of the Seminar Program Committee. Applications for participation in seminars will open on January 6, 2014. Again, see below for details.
The "traditional" Call for Papers also can be found on this website. Please note that the deadline for submitting "traditional" paper, session, or roundtable proposals he deadline for ALL submissions will be February 17, 2014.
Submissions for "traditional" papers, sessions, or roundtables will be accepted online after January 5, 2014. (Again, please note the earlier deadline for seminar proposals.) Only online submissions will be accepted. Paper proposals or proposals submitted by e-mail will not be accepted. Although the GSA encourages all types of submissions, including individual papers, members and non-member participants are urged, where practicable, to submit complete session proposals, including the names of proposed moderators and commentators. The latter is extremely important if sessions are to be complete. The GSA also encourages the submission of thematic series that might include UP TO six related sessions, and it also vigorously supports interdisciplinary sessions, including sessions that are organized in conjunction with our interdisciplinary Networks.
Although the Program Committee will certainly not reject four-paper session proposals, submitters are reminded that four-paper sessions tend to inhibit commentary and discussion. On the whole, three-paper sessions are vastly preferable. Please note that, in a session with three papers, individual presenters should speak no more than twenty minutes. In four-paper sessions, it is expected that individual presenters will speak for no more than fifteen minutes. In each case, the commentary should not exceed ten minutes in order to enable as much audience discussion as possible.
As in the past, all submissions of "traditional" papers, sessions, and roundtables will take place online at www.thegsa.org. Please do note that all presenters, including moderators, commentators, seminar participants, and roundtable participants, must be members of the German Studies Association at the time of submission. For information on membership, please visit our Member Services section.