Call for Proposals: Kenneth E. Naylor Symposium:
“Relating European Roma and African Americans Transatlantically”
April 16-18, 2026
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH USA
Symposium Conveners: Sunnie Rucker-Chang, The Ohio State University and
Adrian-Nicolae Furtuna, Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy and
National Centre of Roma Culture.
“Relating European Roma and African Americans Transatlantically” aims to convene scholars,
artists, and community members engaging in the work of Black Studies and Critical Romani
Studies to discuss the history and afterlives of regimes of oppression enacted on Romani and
Black communities in Europe, particularly in Central and Southeast Europe, and the Americas.
From historical and contemporary resistance to artistic expression, scholarship, and institution
building, this symposium will place scholars in conversation to address the ways European Roma
and Black American communities can work together and share in the process of knowledge
production and community engagement. We aim to raise awareness of common struggles and
parallel processes of acknowledgement, reclamation, and liberation. A gathering of this nature is
as important as it is timely, given relatively similar positions of Black Americans and European
Roma who, as large transnational minority communities, perennially fight for inclusion and
representation in their respective societies. Despite some important advancements and progress,
reactionary political and cultural challenges continue to impede the incorporation and equality of
both communities into their relevant nations.
Symposium conveners are interested in receiving abstracts focusing on the following topics:
important historical moments of exclusion and resistance in Euro-American contexts such as
enslavement and marronage; institutional accountability in slavery; silences and national
forgetting of racial violence; the emergence of stereotypes, autostereotypes, and their
instrumentalization; race, racialization, and difference; relational civil rights projects; the role of
intersectionality in knowledge production; methods of contemporary exclusion such as school
segregation, imprisonment, and ongoing health disparities, among other topics.
To apply for the conference, please send a short CV of no more than 1 page and an abstract up to
250 words to Sunnie Rucker-Chang at rucker-chang.1@osu.edu and Adrian Furtuna at
furtunaadrian@yahoo.com by January 23, 2026.
Limited travel funding is available. Please indicate in your application materials if you
would like to request financial support.
This conference is organized by two scholars known for their interdisciplinary work:
Sunnie Rucker-Chang, an OSU faculty member whose work engages in comparative studies of
African American and European Romani communities in a post-civil rights and post-socialist
context and Adrian-Nicolae Furtuna of the National Centre of Roma Culture in Bucharest and
Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy Mr. Furtuna’s work on recognizing
the importance of Romani enslavement and emancipation to Romanian history and culture is
unparalleled in Romania. As a scholar and community member, he is deeply invested in
recovering the narratives of enslaved Roma and incorporating histories, experiences, and
community stories to address the silences, trauma, and general societal ignorance of Romani
enslavement in the principalities of Wallachia and Moldova, located in contemporary Romania,
throughout the 14th-19th centuries.