Held bi-annually since the 1970s, the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference (ACSC) has gained a prominent place within Canada's scholarly landscape. Although grounded in its geographic context, the ACS Conference transcends region, exploring universal themes through a diversity of approaches and across disciplines. In the process it brings together university researchers, public history practitioners, policy-makers, volunteers, and, of course, students.

Regional boundaries, like regional identities, are tantalizingly permeable. Through its conference theme, "'Unpacking' Atlantic Canada," the 18th Atlantic Canada Studies Conference confronts the very notion of region, both internally, in terms of themes and issues that define our past, and externally, by examining the temporal, spatial, metaphorical, and metaphysical boundaries of that fluid entity we call "Atlantic Canada." The broad variety of disciplinary lenses and analytic categories represented in this year's program encourage fresh insights into the nature of Atlantic Canada and its relationship with other regions within and beyond Canada, including those borderlands where, as recent scholarship has so suggestively demonstrated, physical, cultural, and economic boundaries tend to blur. In the process, "region" reaches out to the global and "local" conjures the universal.

The setting is Canada's only island province, at one of Canada's top-ranked small universities. Come join us, won't you?