Until 8 February 2026, you can submit proposals for the seventh Student Conference organised by the History PhD Students of the University of Pavia. The conference is addressed to early-career researchers — PhD candidates, postgraduate students, and junior scholars — working on thesis or research projects in Archaeology, and in Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern and Contemporary History. The Student Conference aims to foster dialogue among scholars from different backgrounds within a stimulating and enriching environment in which to discuss their research.
In a historical moment marked by political upheavals, social crises, environmental catastrophes, wars, and new forms of collective mobilization, reflecting on the conscious choices — and the conscious non-choices — that precede moments of historical rupture becomes a useful and necessary tool for understanding the deep connection between decision and transformation.
The 2026 Student Conference seeks to shift the focus away from the final event to investigate the acts that immediately precede it and to ask whether it is possible to explore, with historical awareness, the suspended moment before rupture: the moment before the last straw. The expression ‘before the last straw’ (understood here as a historiographical category) may designate individual events or circumscribed situations — often marginal or undervalued — that anticipate a historical rupture and prefigure its unfolding. They do not constitute its direct cause, but its threshold or prelude: the point at which continuity begins to bend, even though emerging tensions have not yet fully expressed their potential effects.
Historical narrative has often highlighted the ‘last straw’ that triggered epochal changes. Iconic examples include Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo, the storming of the Bastille, or Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon — episodes that historiographical tradition has frequently taken as symbolic culminating points that crystallize prior tensions and ignite change.
To read the Call for Papers in Italian and in English click here!