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Call for Pre-formed Panel Submissions
CBAA National Conference, June 10–12, 2027
Baylor University
Waco, Texas
BOOK AS CATALYST: From Object to Impact
An artist’s book is more than its pages and binding. It can start a conversation, provoke a question, or set events in motion. CBAA’s 2027 conference theme, Book as Catalyst: From Object to Impact, explores how book art reaches beyond the page; moving into dialogue, community, research, and exchange among different people and different ways of knowing.
We invite presenters to think beyond what a book is and consider what a book does. Books can open new exchanges, activate spaces, fuel collaboration and dialogue, expose and expand ideas, or offer a call to action.
We welcome proposals for papers, discussions, pre-formed panels, roundtables, facilitated conversations, and demonstrations that explore how book art functions as a catalyst. We are interested in what your work activates, who it brings into conversation, and how its materials, structure, process, or circulation create impact beyond the object itself.
In addition, the conference will include a juried CBAA members exhibition, members showcase, and vendor fair.
Possible topics include:
- Community Engagement and Collective Making: Book projects that gather people, encourage participation, share authorship, respond to community needs, or build relationships that extend beyond a single event.
- Research as Material Practice: Making as a method of inquiry, including what structure, material choice, touch, time, repetition, or the experience of viewers and makers can reveal that text or analysis alone may not.
- Learning in Many Forms: Book arts as a tool for teaching, mentorship, discovery, access, and knowledge-sharing in classrooms, studios, libraries, museums, community spaces, and beyond.
- Activating Archives, Collections, and Memory: Creative engagement with archives, collections, histories, institutional memory, gaps, silences, and questions surrounding whose knowledge is preserved, interpreted, or made accessible.
- Expanded Forms, Collaboration, and Impact: Book art in conversation with performance, installation, sound, film, technology, public space, interdisciplinary collaboration, and social, cultural, political, or environmental work.
- Shop/Lab Talks: Best practices for lab and studio management for both traditional and digital equipment
We welcome teachers, students, artists, librarians, conservators, art historians, writers, studio managers, and anyone interested in the field to offer unique perspectives and pose additional questions and approaches related to the conference theme.
Pre-formed Panel proposals:
Include a panel title at the top of the page. Each pre-formed panel will be assigned a moderator. You may use one of the following formats: 4 presenters each giving 15-minute talks or 5 presenters each giving 10-minute talks. The proposal should take the form of a 200–250-word overview plus individual 200–250-word abstracts from each of the participants.
Submission Platform:
Submittable Link HERE.
Submission Notes:
- Membership is not required to submit a proposal. If accepted, all presenters must become current CBAA members by February 1, 2027, the deadline to confirm participation. To become a new member, or to renew your membership, please visit https://www.collegebookart.org/page-363225
- In an effort to promote original scholarship in the field of academic book art, abstracts submitted to CBAA should not be concurrently submitted for consideration to another conference.
- Please limit abstracts to no more than 250 words; longer abstracts will not be considered.
- Bios, synopses and abstracts must be submitted as Word docs.
- This is a blind jurying process; please do not include your name or the names of any other potential participants on any of the uploaded files. Use the title of your talk as your file name. You should enter a short bio in the biography section of the submission form.
- A CBAA member may make more than one submission but only one submission will be accepted per member.
Submission Requirements:
You will be asked to submit the following information when prompted by the online submission manager for each entry separately:
- Member’s address
- Member’s phone number
- Job title, institution, city and state of institution
- 50-word bio (this can include the member’s name and will be included in the printed program if accepted)
- Title of proposal
- 50-word synopsis (to be printed in the conference program if accepted)
- 250-word abstract (no names)
Submission Deadlines:
Abstracts MUST be received no later than November 30, 2026. Submissions received after this date will not be considered for acceptance.
November 30, 2026: Deadline for submission of proposals
January 15, 2027: Notification of acceptance or rejection of proposals
February 1, 2027: Deadline for confirmation of acceptance by presenters
Contact:
For questions about the submission process in any category please email:
Erin McAdams
CBAA Vice President for Programming
emcadams@collegebookart.org
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