A major international conference, held at venues across the world on a regular basis, is at the heart of the Society’s activities. ISIH conferences gather scholars interested in different aspects of intellectual history from antiquity to the present.
Every conference has a specific theme, but conference themes are devised in such a way as to accommodate papers on a wide range of subjects. Most of the organisers of our conferences have worked to focus on topics from different perspectives.

Past conferences
- 2022 Histories of Knowledge (Venice)
- 2021 Coerced Labour in the Early Modern World (online)
- 2020 Change and Exchange (Florence)
- 2019 Revolutions & Evolutions in Intellectual History (Brisbane)
- 2018 Borders, Boundaries, Limits (St Andrews)
- 2017 The Rethinking of Religious Belief in the Making of Modernity (Bulgaria)
- 2016 Rethinking Europe in Intellectual History (Toronto)
- 2014 Intellectual Hinterlands (Toronto)
- 2013 The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective (Princeton)
- 2011 Passionate Minds: Knowledge and the Emotions in Intellectual History (Bucharest)
- 2009 Translatio Studiorum: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Bearers of Intellectual History (Verona)
- 2007 Models of Intellectual History (London)
- 2005 Rethinking Secularization (California)
- 2004 Uses and Abuses of Reason (Helsinki)
- 2003 Alterity and the Experience of Limits (Istanbul)
- 2002 The Origins of Modernity: European Thought, 1543-1789 (Sydney)
- 2001 Quarrels, Polemics, and Controversies (Cambridge)
- 2000 Turning Points (Chicago)
- 1998 The History of Endings/The Endings of Stories (Berlin)
- 1997 Questions of Tradition: An Interdisciplinary Symposium (New Jersey)
