The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress invites proposals to a symposium titled, “From Lived Experience to Public Memory: Commemorating, Documenting, and Archiving Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” on March 12 and 13, 2026, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Scholars, artists, documentarians, archivists, and community-based practitioners working at the intersection of COVID-19 and cultural heritage are welcomed to submit proposals.
March 2026 will be six years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. As COVID continues to transition from an everyday reality into public memory, it is important to examine, reflect upon, and critique the ways that cultural and community-based experiences of COVID-19 have been documented, commemorated, and archived in the United States and beyond. This work will support efforts to understand, learn from, and come to terms with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, potentially, to prepare for future pandemics. The American Folklife Center is hosting this two-day symposium as part of the COVID-19 American History Project—a Congressionally mandated initiative of the American Folklife Center to document Americans’ stories of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Themes for proposals may include, but are not limited to:
- Archival documentation of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Community-based documentation and the COVID-19 pandemic
- Public memory/commemoration and the COVID-19 pandemic
- Oral history/ethnography and the COVID-19 pandemic
- Cultural practices related to music, material culture, and other expressive forms and the COVID-19 pandemic
- Ethical/theoretical considerations for documenting public health crises/sites of trauma
- Relationship(s) between COVID-19 documentation and other moments of disaster/crisis
Conference organizers welcome proposals for 20-minute paper presentations (with 10-minute Q&A sessions), 90-minute panels, and/or creative works to be performed.
All proposals should include the following information:
- Name of presenter(s), institutional affiliation(s), and email address(es)
- Type of presentation (individual paper, panel, or creative work)
- Description of presentation (maximum of 350 words)
- List of themes relevant to presentation (i.e. community-based responses to COVID-19, musical practices and COVID-19)
- Paragraph-long biography of presenter(s)
- List of any special equipment necessary for presentation
All proposals should be submitted as a single PDF file to [email protected]. Write “Proposal to 2026 COVID-19 Symposium” in the subject line of your email submission.
The deadline for submissions is June 16, 2025, at 11:59 PM EST. Applicants will be notified in August 2025 about decisions regarding their proposals.
For more information and updates on the symposium, visit: https://guides.loc.gov/covid-19-folklife/symposium. For questions, write to [email protected].