Visual Cultures of the Greater Gulf

Across Southeast Texas and the greater Gulf, visual culture—an interdisciplinary area of inquiry that considers the role of visual experience in everyday life—provides a lens for understanding layered expressions of regional and national identity. This symposium will explore approaches to “Visual Cultures of the Greater Gulf,” including but not limited to architecture, art history, history, film and television, design, digital media, material culture, memorials, photography, and public art. Encompassing geographies from the Yucatán peninsula to the Florida Keys, visual cultures play crucial roles in positioning our regions as representative of larger national and global contexts while simultaneously forming unique localities grounded in place and community.

The Center for History and Culture will convene an interdisciplinary symposium on at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas, on April 5 and 6, 2027, to consider the many “Visual Cultures of the Greater Gulf” and publish this work in a themed issue of The Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record. 

Dr. Alison Fields of the University of Oklahoma will serve as Symposium Chair. In addition to assisting the Center with selecting Fellows and participating in the workshops, she will give a keynote talk. Fields’s most recent book, Lone Star (2026), addresses John Sayles’s 1996 western film about the Texas/Mexico borderlands. She has also published multiple works on the topics of atomic culture and public memory and is co-developing a manuscript about contemporary memorialization. Dr. Fields is the Director of the OU School of Visual Arts.

The Center invites paper proposals from established and emerging scholars, practitioners, preservationists, and curators who actively seek intersections between visual culture and art history, communications, cultural studies, folklore, history, media studies, and other fields. The Center and The Record welcome topics with a Southeast Texas focus but encourage all projects that conceive the greater Gulf in regional, national, and global contexts.

To apply, submit a 300-word proposal for a single paper and a brief c.v. (2 pages maximum) by October 30, 2026. Symposium Fellows will commit to submitting drafts for pre-circulation by March 5, 2027, and participate in the events and workshops in person on April 5-6, 2027. They will workshop their essays with the other Fellows and prepare posters that provide an overview of their projects at a public reception. After the symposium, Fellows will revise their papers and submit final drafts of about 8,000 to 10,000 words (notes included) by July 1, 2027, for peer review and potential publication in The Record. The Center will provide lodging, meals, and $1000 (processed upon receipt of the pre-circulated draft). Each author will receive contributors’ copies of The Record.

Send proposals as email attachments and direct your inquiries about the symposium, the Center, or The Record to: Jimmy L. Bryan Jr., Director, The Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast; Editor, The Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record; Professor of History, Lamar University (jlbryan@lamar.edu).