The HNR Community is pleased to share the call for papers for the conference “Perspectives between Digital and Traditional Historiography”, which will be held by the University of Turin in Turin, Italy, on 23–24 November 2026. The deadline for submissions is 25 February 2026.

This conference aims to explore women’s social networks in the long Ancien Régime (15th–early 19th century), examining their forms, functions, and transformations through a dialogue between traditional historiography and digital and computational approaches. The call invites contributions that combine the analysis of case studies with methodological reflections to investigate how women built, used, and interpreted social relationships in different historical and geographical contexts, and how such networks can be reconstructed and studied today.

Over the past twenty years, the so-called network turn has brought terms such as “network,” “social capital,” “sociability,” and “relational” to the center of scholarly and public debate. However, the concept of the network has often been employed in a generic manner, without necessarily producing innovative results. A mere cataloguing of familial or geographical connections is not sufficient to constitute a network study and, indeed, risks yielding partial and limited views of historical phenomena. The heuristic potential of network theory lies instead in its ability to guide a systematic exploration of sources, posing new questions and integrating relational analysis with well-established analytical categories such as “class,” “institution,” “family,” “power,” “sex,” and “gender.”

From the 1970s onward, and even more so with the digital turn, the network approach has experienced significant expansion, fostered by the development of computational tools for network analysis and data visualization. These methodologies make it possible to observe seemingly invisible social dynamics, to highlight the role of marginalized actors, and to reconstruct historical processes according to a horizontal rather than hierarchical logic, capable of connecting different spaces, contexts, and levels of analysis (Granovetter 1973; Ahnert R. and S. 2015). As studies based both on digital tools and on non-computational but systematic reconstructions have shown (Trivellato 2009; Rothschild 2021), the use of the network as a theoretical and heuristic category can yield meaningful results even on “humanly” manageable data scales and on network representations that one might imagine being drawn by hand.

This approach has proved particularly fruitful for the study of gender history, as it allows for the analysis of the relational modes through which power relations between men and women were constructed and negotiated. It sheds light on specific strategies for accessing material and symbolic resources, as well as on the role of the many intermediary figures who facilitated such access. In this way, the study of historical networks emerges as a potentially effective tool for reflecting not only on individual agency, but above all on collective practices of sociability, contributing to the deconstruction of ahistorical and invariant representations of gender relations.

Through the analysis of case studies and a long-term perspective, the conference seeks to investigate whether and how women constructed and exploited complex, and sometimes trans-local, social networks to secure subsistence, defend themselves from violence, preserve their reputation, develop forms of informal power, and cultivate artistic, intellectual, and spiritual experiences. By considering different geographical, social, and cultural contexts, the aim is to observe the specific configurations of these networks: whether they were structured according to hierarchical or egalitarian relationships, and whether forms of collaboration, knowledge transmission, solidarity, and/or competition were active within them. The conference will also seek to determine their spatial distribution and to identify particularly central actors. Finally, by focusing on the origins, functioning, scope, and purposes of social networks—rather than on the individual persons who composed them—the roles played by women within these networks will be highlighted, and the impact of these roles on their opportunities and choices will be assessed.

The conference thus aims to reflect on these issues by creating a platform for discussion among scholars experimenting with the network approach in gender studies, religious history, material culture, political history, and social history. It will also provide an opportunity for dialogue and cross-fertilization between “traditional” historiography and approaches that employ digital or computational tools. On the one hand, the critical skills typical of humanistic inquiry can contribute to theorizing and more consciously evaluating the ways in which data are collected, interpreted, and analyzed through computational tools and visualizations, recognizing concepts such as absence, uncertainty, exclusion, and partiality as constitutive elements of any process of knowledge production and representation. On the other hand, the conference will highlight the potential of digital projects capable of navigating thousands of biographical records and relationships—from individuals to subgroups and up to the network as a whole—generating expanded prosopographies that offer significant insights through analysis across multiple dimensions and scales.

Contributions may address, among others, the following questions:

• what types of relationships (familial, epistolary, friendly, professional, religious, political) structured women’s networks in specific contexts;

• the existence of central nodes or intermediary figures and their role in connecting different spheres (for example, between religious and intellectual networks, or economic and political ones);

• which tools and contexts—letters, travel, courts, salons, convents, knowledge transmission—facilitated the creation and maintenance of networks;

• which kind of relationships or groups—social, religious, political—were defined through women’s networks, and how women negotiated their social position through such networks;

• modes of interaction between men and women within mixed networks;

• variations in networking practices over the long term and among different categories of women (intersectional approach);

• the potential and limits of digital network visualization;

• the heuristic value of network research in relation to archival sources, highlighting the virtuous cycle between research questions, source discovery, network analysis, and the subsequent reinterpretation or expansion of the sources themselves;

• the identification of sources, their conversion into observable data for network analysis, and the reduction of informational complexity into nodes and edges: challenges and solutions.

Keynote speaker: Giovanna Ceserani, Stanford University

Organizers: Alessandra Celati (University of Turin), Teresa Bernardi (Brown University), Eleonora Cappuccilli (University of Oslo).

Practical information
The conference languages will be English and Italian. The conference will take place at the University of Turin, with the support of funds from the Department of Historical Studies’ Project of Excellence. Speakers will be accommodated in university-funded lodging facilities. We envisage the publication of a selection of contributions either in a themed issue of a top-tier (Class A) academic journal or in an edited volume with an international publisher.

Scholars interested in the themes and questions outlined above are invited to submit their paper proposals by 25 February 2026 to the conference organizers:
Alessandra Celati (alessandra.celati@unito.it)
Teresa Bernardi (teresa.bernardi@unipd.it)
Eleonora Cappuccilli (eleonor.cappuccilli2@unibo.it)

Each proposal should include:

• the title of the paper;

• an abstract of no more than 300 words;

• a short biography of no more than 200 words, including name, institutional affiliation, academic position, and main research interests, with particular attention to those relevant to the conference themes.

Applicants will be notified of the selection results by 15 March 2026

For further detail, please refer to the conference website