Precirculated paper sessions are one of the ways the AHA attempts to increase audience participation and discussion at the Annual Meeting. These sessions are organized around presentations (papers, PowerPoint, text from online) and made available online for audience members to access and read before the Annual Meeting.

Some of this year’s precirculated paper sessions include:

• Session 90, “Sacred History” and Ancient Near Eastern Antiquity. Before attending the session read Seth Richardson’s introduction, Guillermo Algaze’s paper Why Mesopotamia?  (read by Jason Ur), Andréas Stauder’s look at The Beginning of (Sacred) History in Egypt , and Alhena Gadotti’s examination of The Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle: A Case-Study in Mesopotamian Sacred History.
• Session 147, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, Part 4: Plural and Contested Memories of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa. Check out papers prepared by Joel Noret, Memories of Slavery in Southern Benin: Between Public Commemorations and Lineage Intimacy, and Mathieu Claveyrolas, With or Without Roots: The Compared and Conflictual Memories of Slavery and Indentured Labor in the Mauritian Public Space.
• Session 159, Early Modernity, Empire, and Cultural Difference: Insights from Sri Lanka. Participants for this session present a position paper available online.
• Session 185, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, Part 5: Public Memory of Slavery in Britain and France. Renaud Hourcade has written a paper for this session on Commemorating a Guilty Past: The Politics of Memory in the French Former Slave Trade Cities.
• Session 224, Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, Part 6: Slavery and Public Narratives: Comparative Perspectives in Africa and the United States. Read papers by Zahida Sherman, Distant Cousins: African Americans and Ambiguity in Ghanaian Newspapers during the Nkrumah Years, and Margot Minardi, Making Slavery Visible (Again): The Nineteenth-Century Roots of a Revisionist Recovery in New England.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.