Annual Meeting

Association for Documentary Editing Annual Meeting

October 8-10, 2026

Joint Meeting with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage

The Association for Documentary Editing is pleased to announce that we will hold our next conference in partnership with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (commonly known as “Recovery” or the “Recovery Program”) in Houston, October 8-10, 2026. The theme of this joint conference will be “ Record Keepers of Nation: Diverse Foundational Figures and Documents in the US.” The call for proposals, to be published in October 2025, will invite papers on a broad range of topics that relate to documentary editing and recovery work more generally, in the context of both the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the current political climate, in which notions of belonging and national identity are highly contested.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, the ADE will host two hands-on workshops focused on documentary editing and a session dedicated to the work being carried out by the Association’s Semiquincentennial Committee. On Friday, Oct. 9, the Recovery Program will host a lunch for all conference attendees, and the ADE will do the same on Saturday, Oct. 10. Conference sessions over the three days will bring together presentations by scholars affiliated with the Recovery Program and the ADE. While events will be mainly in-person, we plan to offer some opportunities for virtual participation. In keeping with a Recovery conference tradition, and in order to maximize interaction between members of the ADE and Recovery communities, proposals will be accepted only for individual papers, not pre-arranged panels.

This joint conference will allow the ADE to expand its reach by sharing its work with the vibrant, creative community that surrounds the Recovery Program, and also to reflect on the role of documentary editors in the larger context of the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage material.

ADE members who have questions, concerns, or suggestions related to the 2026 conference are encouraged to contact president-elect Clayton McCarl, clayton.mccarl@unf.edu.

The annual ADE business meeting will be held online in June, separately from the October conference, and may be accompanied by a limited number of special sessions.

Call for Proposals

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Joint Conference

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) is an international program at the University of Houston to locate, preserve and disseminate Hispanic culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1980.

The program has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of books, pamphlets, manuscripts and ephemera produced by Latinos. The holdings available at the program include thousands of original books, manuscripts, archival items and ephemera, a microfilm collection of approximately 1,500 historical newspapers, hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized items, a vast collection of photographs, an extensive authority list and personal papers. In addition, the program has published or reprinted more than 45 historical books, two anthologies and twelve volumes of research articles. The program organizes a biennial international conference and has some five thousand affiliated scholars, librarians and archivists. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage is the premier center for research on Latino documentary history in the United States.

Witnessing 250 Years of American History

The ADE has created the Semiquincentennial Committee (“SemiCom”) to coordinate its commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding. SemiCom will organize sessions to be held virtually in the summer of 2026. Presenters will discuss documents that they have edited or recovered and that help illuminate the broad sweep of US history. Documents may relate to any place or time that is (or has been) part of (or impacted by) the United States. Those interested in participating should contact Michael Cohen (mdcohen@american.edu) or Katherine Sibley (sibley@sju.edu) by December 31, 2025.

The documents presented will become the core of a digital gallery. Part of the Association’s website, it will highlight the breadth of documents to which people are opening access and the range of editorial strategies they employ. It will enable readers, within and outside the editorial and recovery communities, to browse diverse documents in one place and to learn about individual projects. After the initial launch, editors, including presenters at the October 2026 conference, will be invited to add their own documents to the site.

Awards & Acknowledgements

Every year, the ADE recognizes contributions to the work of documentary editing and recovery through various awards and acknowledgments. Please consider nominating a colleague and view the award descriptions and past recipients.

For each annual conference, the ADE also offers a number of travel vouchers for graduate and undergraduate students to help off-set the costs of attending the conference. Please keep an eye on announcements closer to the start of the conference for information on how to apply.